[editors note: This was written a few days ago.. Matt sorta touches on some of what he’s explore for his new “super duper” heavy metal.. which is a kind of crazy combination of heavy metal and electronic music.. the electronic music element being mainly about music production techniques rather then genera.. mostly all this as it relates to guitar playing, and aesthetics more generally] 

I just got in, a little while ago, from Guitar Center. I went there to pick up picks, found it was a big sale day.. so I bought a audio cable to. I also came dangerously close to buying an electronic drum kit.

On Electronic Drums. 

Super duper long term readers will no doubt know.. that I’ve been thinking about buying an electronic drum kit for about 3 or 4 years. The reasons are as follows:

1. They are generally cheaper then acoustic kits
2. They produce MIDI, I can sequence them into my electronic music’s work flow
3. Electronic drum kits are probably pretty good for heavy metal production styles
4. They don’t make to much noise, so neighbors won’t hate me
5. It would allow me to create a situation where folks could come over and jam
6. learning to “think like a drummer” is pretty important for what I’m doing
7. Hey, it’s a pretty cool thing
8. Did I mention I have a fairly substantial drum sample library? Battery, Kontakt, Reason, Ableton Live.. all come with such things.. plus the LMR4 from Steinberg.. and the Waldorf Attack drum synth..

So.. Guitar Center had $100 off a super cheap-o electronic drum kit. The sales guy was actually someone I felt pretty good about.. asked questions.. and it came around to the feeling that I would need to buy a special double bass piece to go with the kit.. and the whole think would be… oh, around $700. This would be a little more then what I’d planned to spend, should I get a kit.. but maybe it would be worth it? 

I had him go searching for the kit.. the box.. and it was found that there were no boxes in the store, the only option was the display unit, and I just wasn’t willing to buy the display unit without further discount so…  I returned home without the drum kit, and feeling a little relieved that I hadn’t parted with the money.

Onto the Guitar Madness

It’s been a while since I picked up my guitar.. or at least it feels like that. I still don’t have Melodyne working in DP.. accept that it will load up inside of Kore, so I figured that was good enough for government work in the Bush administration.. so decided to pull out the guitar.. which of course is why I went to Guitar Center in the first place. 

It was time to restring my guitar… which I haven’t done in.. well probably a couple of years! So it’s interesting to hear what my guitar is supposed to sound like.. 

So I started to monkey around with Guitar Rig 3.. which I still haven’t done all that much with… just to kind of see what I had.. 

What blew my mind was.. even though I’m rusty as hell.. my hands are super duper uber fast. Yes boys and girls, I was meant to be a metal god!

On the negative side, though I wasn’t playing with melodyne as I was playing around, it was clear that my metal guitar playing isn’t really monophonic… which means those non-monophonic parts might not translate to terribly well. It was striking me to take notice of just how much of my guitar playing wasn’t monophonically orientated.

Ok.. so here’s the deal.. Monophonic basically means playing one note at a time. Metal is generally ether one note at a time or a “power chord.” A power chord is as good as monophonic… your two or 3 note move together.. and generally speaking the intervals stay the same wether it’s minor or major as there’s no 3rd in a power chord.. it’s just route 5th…  The 3rd, of course, is the note that tells you if a chord is major or minor.

Here’s the think about my playing..  It’s all about blurring the root, 3rd, or 5th..  This is done in such a way so as the make my playing “extra dark.” My playing is perhaps “slightly darker then Black Sabbath.” In any event.. these moments of blurring are often polyphonic moments… and this blurring of the root, 3rd, and 5th is pretty much a corner stone of my style.

I spent a little time going over the usual suspect sorta riffs.. riffs I have lying around that I haven’t really gotten around to using for anything yet. When you figure there’s very little guitar playing in my music generally… these are most of the riffs I’ve come up with over the last.. 15 or so years. 

So, early reflections on what I could mainly do?

I think its time to really think about song writing on the guitar: This is actually a lot of work. Though in recent posts I have characterized my notion of working with guitar and this sorta software as allowing me to be a more lazy guitar player.. the process of actually writing the music.. if you do it organically, without relying on the computer for at least your main riffs.. its still a lot of work.

Hours latter:

Well I’m going to interrupt the train of thought…

Guitar Rig 3’s Possibilities

I’ve been spending a lot of time playing around with Guitar Rig 3.. which is an interesting program. Guitar Rig models various amps, and effects, and what not.. It’s basically “everything you need for your guitar,” and bass guitar to for that matter. You can just go line in to your computer… and you’re good to go. Some will argue there are better ways to go, but it suits me well enough.

What makes it interesting, however.. or interesting to me today.. is that as of version 2 Guitar Rig has had elements of synthesizer architectures built into it. This amounts to various “modulation devices.” A “modulation device” is something that “modulates” “something.” Modulating something means that it controls that something… which will make more sense once I explain the modulation devices…

You have various modulation devices.. A basic one is an “LFO,” or low frequency oscillator. You could think of the second hand on a clock as an LFO, it’s frequency of oscillation is one cycle per minute. When the second hand is at 12, it could be generating a number like.. say 100, and when its at 6 o’clock.. lets say that’s zero.. as the second hand moves… the the number changes.. So, if you used your second hand to modulation a distortion effect.. when the second hand is at the 12 it’s really distorted, and when it gets to 6, its clean.. no distortion.

Now.. and I’m not even sure off the top of my head if Guitar Rig does this.. but you can have different “wave forms” of oscillators.. one way to conceptualize this is imagine of instead of a clock being a circle.. it was a triangle.. so the the numbers coming out of our clock don’t change evenly with respect to time.. sometimes it goes faster, sometimes slower.. repeating this in a constant pattern at a constant rate. Do you follow this? Well it doesn’t really matter… I just want to give you a basic idea of this.

Now there are other types of modulators.. modulators that respond to how hard you hit your strings.. or respond in relationship from when you hit the note.. or any number of other things.. and all modulators can be used to control anything in Guitar Rig 3.

So why is this interesting? 

I’m not totally new to mucking around with these modulators, or Guitar Rig for that matter. What is new is the notion that my guitar parts, the audio of them, can be sequences, as can the over all mix, as can the parameters of Guitar Rig… and now even the audio being fed into Guitar Rig. This is a situation where the whole is more then the sum of the parts… 

What I’m looking at now is the possibility that I could be making electronic music that doesn’t sound like electronic music.. I’m looking at electronic music that sounds like.. a real guitar player. I am, of course, a real guitar player.. but the situation, at least as far as I can tell, is I’m entering a situation where the only real limitations are my imagination.

I don’t know where I’m going, this is all an exploration of the unknown… I’m sure there’s lots of bands out there who are benefiting from these kinds of tools.. but I’ll bet not too much of them are using these kinds of technologies in a way that’s about exploring new possibilities.. it’s more about managing costs of production in a market place where the funds band have for working in the studio are drying up thanks to the implications of P2P, among other things. It’s about creating an idealized version of what bands have been doing forever.

I don’t believe in the idealized visions.. Ideals.. they are so often about “removing imperfections” as if the imperfections where not perfect. All things are perfect in there own way, the question of perfection is more, at least in my introverted prejudice’s point of view, more about relationships of things then things onto them selves… or its an ecology between these things. 

What I’m interested in doing is like turning heavy metal into a fine art.. It’s a heavy metal that doesn’t live inside the old heavy metal box… This isn’t really some sort of elitism, and I don’t believe it carries the same sorta baggage that prog rock did..  It’s more like every piece of the puzzle gets more attention then it traditionally would.. and by doing this we can transcend the old forms.

For a long time I’ve been thinking about cliches.. The funny thing about cliches is that they carry inside them certain truths, certain meanings.. that somehow, the one who’s employing the cliche, has lost touch with. In any form of art, what you need to do is push beyond the preconceived notions everyone has.. or that’s what you need to do if you’re going to do anything worth while. You can do this via a cliche as long as you’re doing something with the cliche that’s worth while.

 

 

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Guitar, Komplete & Kore, Music Production, musical composition, philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.