Editors note [ brother new Ape V was like “yo, when we gonna get a new blog post from ya” and seeing as I had this one in draft form.. figured I’d finish it up and post it.. this is really a kind of subject point of view on the subject of remixing but.. with any luck, you can dig it ] 

So Evan’s suggested I get into remixing.. which on the surface sounded like.. well something interesting to try out.. it’s not something I’ve really done before.. so I haven’t been too sure that I’d be any good at it.. or.. how much work it would take to get good at it.. as a part of this.. he suggested I take a look at entering this contest to remix Empire State Human….

First Impressions

I started by listening to the Melancholic Afro track.. featuring Wofgang Flur.. a part of the original Kraftwork group.. and started to try and figure out what I was supposed to do.. that is “what is remixing anyway”.. what’s it all about.. and where could I take this music.

The early ideas where not so much the ideas of someone doing remixing.. as they were those of a mix engineer.. and when I download the original session material..  I somewhat freaked when I realize all the effects they used had been printed on the tracks  provided for the remix. 

When a mix engineer builds up a mix.. he or she uses a whole lot of effects.. mostly EQ and compression.. reverb, delays.. that kinda thing.. in such a way to make the tracks fit together in a certain sorta way.. into a mix.. if the effects are printed.. meaning  you get audio tracks.. with the effects in the recordings.. you loose a lot of flexibility in terms of how to mix them… cause there’s no getting those effects off the tracks.

First directions 

My initial reaction was… “well, I have some audio to midi conversion abilities in my software” which translates into software analyzing the recordings.. and creating MIDI performance data.. that can then be performed by various digital instruments.. thus allowing you to use your own sounds, more or less as if played by the band.. Besides this it also allows me to rearrange the melodic and harmonic material.

It turns out.. my project studio at this point, in terms of electronic music production tools, is very strong.. by professional industry standards. The areas where I feel the need to invest more in tend to be mix engineering and recording.. 

The result of all this is.. I probably have the tools to create a kind of new version of the track.. that is perhaps more to my aesthetic sensibilities.. and probably realize it on a very high level.

But then a strange thing happened

Direction shifts into Ableton Live

I’ve been haunting the local guitar center.. doing gear research and picking up a few things.. and generally shooting the shit with the sales staff. In one of those conversations one of the guys suggested that Ableton Live was a very good tool to do remixing with.. and of course I own Ableton Live.. 

Ableton is a loop sequencer with.. somewhat immature MIDI, recording, and mixing tools.. Because of the way I usually work.. I don’t really use Ableton that much.. and don’t really feel like I have a great mastery of it..  I, along with many other musicians, feel that Live has a kind of.. different paradigm for how you work with it.. and thinking in that paradigm doesn’t feel totally natural.. at least not yet.

But of course lots of people LOVE Live.. is it just that they are more the type who works with pattern sequencing as a pose to linear sequencing? I wonder this.. and yet, though I’ve always been more the one to go the linear sequencing route.. so much of my music is actually about patterns…

Jumping in

So I started out by loading the Melancholic Afro session into Live.. taking the tracks and creating loops out of them…

The process of creating Loops is.. interesting. You could create a loop that’s just like a normal repeating riff..  or you can create loops.. where based on where the start and end points of your loop is.. basically creates something very different then the original music.. like creating a glitch in it or something.. So, for instance.. I quickly created a drum part from what was originally fairly synth pop-e, and turned it into something more Slayer-esk.

Loop Envelops 

Ableton is very powerful in how you can work with loops.. even if I do crave more power… in that you can use “looping envelopes.” A looping envelop.. well an envelop is.. it controls a parameter.. So.. pan, volume, pitch, effect send, any element of how an effect unit is processing sound.. the envelop can control and automate.. and a looping envelop simply loops that parameter automation.

Also worth noting is that the envelop loop lengths do not have to conform to audio loop length.. and that you can have many envelop loops going.. that are all of different lengths.. which allows you to work with a kind of polymetric textural evolution.. that’s, say, awesome for ambient music.. and has a lot of creative compositional applications.. 

How things look from where I’m standing now

I have a kind of vision, along with a road map for getting there, for what sorta remix artist I might like to be.. and some sense of what I’m probably capable of.. and so it is that I see remixing Empire State Human’s Melancholic Afro as a one step in the process of getting there… lets see if I can kind of describe this a little bit.

All the software tools at my disposal have there own individual strengths and weaknesses.. and so you want to work in such a way as to maximize there strengths and minimize there weaknesses.. which ultimately brings us to the subject of workflow.. and workflow is currently the real challenge for me…

Working on a remix in Live.. I start out making loops.. loops that will allow me to reconstruct the music as it was.. but also loops that are like experiments.. explorations.. “lets try this.” And for each track.. of the original sessions.. we’ll have a whole number of loops. 

The next step is to arrange the loops.. this is really the compositional part.. It starts out by fiddling around playing different loops together.. and playing with possible orders for how we could move around from loop to loop.

It strikes me that there are some interesting things that could be done during this process.. We can take our loops.. or sections of loops.. or other material.. and convert them into REX loops.. perhaps for use in Reason or Kontakt.. sections could be treated as samples in Kontakt.. and different parts could be bent around in different ways to make sense in our evolving arrangement mix.. and of course things like audio to midi conversion.. or different pitch shifting technologies.. could be used to further manipulate things into a new form.

Next Day Some Time

All of this is basically “manipulation vocabulary” or tools of facilitating that.. the process of arranging is basically composing.. this in combination with mixing..

The way I plan to move forward on this project is to finish creating loops.. play with loops, arrange loops, mix loops..

This post is starting to wander around a bit.. so how about I talk about what I think is special in how what I’m doing.

I wonder what I should post about today?

I just woke up from the unconscious slip I mentioned only recently..I had this thought that was like “wtf, it’s my blog, I can do whatever with it” just recently.. Was this the voice an anti-social media anarchy? Is there perhaps  something new brewing in my unconscious.. taking form, ready to spring on this virtual page? Is this a tactic in search of breaking through to something new? I feel like Robin asking a campy Batman these questions…

In any event.. I must flee this scene.. venture to the bathroom, the library, and guitar center. But I’ll leave you with this:

I’m getting ready to slip into unconsciousness.. and feeling sorta in awe of how long it’s been since I’ve posted.. and all the 100s of drafts I’ve rejected inside of that time frame.. mixed with all the things I feel inspired to write about… So I figure I gotta post something.. and whatever it is, its got to be short.. so..

I’m thinking about electronic music a little bit.

Electronic music, to mind at this moment, is like the most incredible genera of music around.. I suppose this is in large part because it doesn’t really refer to a genera, but more a way of making music.. and if you’re familiar with how music is being made today.. I think it’s reasonable to say that at least 90% of everything made today is made on a computer.. and thus is electronic music.. even if we don’t generally view it as such.

But what I really dig is the seriousness of the genera.. or that there are areas of electronic music that are so serious.. be it from a compositional perspective.. philosophical sorta aesthetic perspective… and then.. you have club music, rave music.. dance music so to speak.. and then it goes so far as the music that underlies Rap.. or you think of the stuff going on in Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson…

History of Electro Acoustic Music 101 

The history of electronic music can probably be told in a variety of ways.. but basically you have these major universities.. and only a few of them.. back in the early early days.. that were able to afford these computers that would take up whole rooms.. big rooms at that.. that were the only places with the power to make it happen.. and so only a very few were able to get access to these things.. and so the early stuff has this rather serious classical sorta influence..

Eventually.. out comes these analog synths from folks like Moog.. made popular by Wendy Carlos and the like… and eventually made cheap enough that regular musicians could afford…

Now.. all these years latter.. there’s a hell of a lot of tools for electronic music that you can down load for free.. and then we have the commercial software..

Seriously Serious Avant Guard fun 

I’m getting ready to enter a phase where in I’ll call myself a serious electronic sound artist.. seems like a good way of putting it. Not that I ever wasn’t.. but now there’s a kind of new focus to it.

One of the areas I’m naturally attracted to is.. a kind of world of seriously serious seriousness.. of.. avant guard delights. Historically this is music Frank Zappa might call “ugly,” …ugly not being a negative term here. I think of the 60s revolutionary spirit.. the rethinking of basic values.. and the effect that some stuff became very difficult listening.. and something good for the more snobby among us.. to listen to and think we is better then them…  

Matt’s mitigation of the ugly 

LOL, of course I am better then them.. where’s my Thursten Howl voice? But um.. I’ve never meant to make music that was in anyway unapproachable. The issue of approachability is a design consideration.. But.. I’m also interested in exploring sorta far out ideas… 

I guess.. and I don’t know.. it’s hard to tell at this point.. but it seems like there’s certain compositional ideas.. ways of thinking.. a kind of.. set of things.. which kind of characterize my music at this point.. and then.. there’s a set of things that I’m exploring with the idea of adding new dimensions to it. So.. basically I have a set of strands.. all at varying levels of maturation.. that I basically weave together.

At the moment I started to write this post.. I’ve been contemplating the development of a whole lot of new strands… some of these strands I’ve been contemplating for the last.. almost 20 years.

The construction of these strands.. some of them anyway.. seems rather daunting.. steep learning curves required to get anywhere near my vision..  Should I speak of these? Well.. it would take a whole post to explore but a part of this but…

Algorithmic Composition

What we are talking about here.. basically, is writing programs that create compositions… Indeed create performances. Or perhaps we aren’t writing the program.. perhaps we are just setting up conditions..

My first thoughts on this matter… I was probably about 15 years old.. having just taken up guitar.. and was a bit of metal head.. Early on I had become interested in making music that was.. strange.. out there.. experimental… in part as a kind of philosophical reaction to the music I’d heard before.. it was a revolutionary spirit..

Let’s say we wanted to use an algorithmic approach to making heavy metal music.. how might we go about it? 

Theory Geek-O-Ree 

My view had been.. lets start with a scale.. create a randomly generated synthetic scale.. 8 tones.. where we could use a regular diatonic framework.. warped into our synthetic scale. From where we could have a probabilistic framework..  

Perhaps it would start by thinking about chord progressions for a riff.. or something like that.. divide time up into..  a few parts.. say what chord it is.. and that would be like the center around which the various instruments would play.. generally play one of the 3 notes that would make up that triad.. or perhaps playing the 7th, or perhaps playing a 3rd below the route..

We could.. at any given time divide up the chord.. saying this or that instrument would play around this or that note of the chord.. so you’re talking about a kind of harmonized modalism…

The Aesthetics of which are? 

In a certain way.. the kind of ideas I had were like a quantified version of how I actually make music… how I think about composition.. accept that my compositional framework… it’s like a way of thinking… and eventually.. in my process.. I leave my thinking behind.. go on this or that tangent.. and whatever.

I don’t actually have much of a music theory background.. what little I have is.. extrapolated, questions.. I eventually came to think of it as.. like being the product of an out dated cosmology… and so set out to build a new one… and I suppose that’s what my music actually is about. It’s really a kind of revelation of an intuition.

A few latter:

Think I better post this.. if for no other reason then to say I’ve posted something recently at least!