I figure.. even if I’m totally consumed by other things.. I ought to try and at least get up a post a week or so.. so here goes

These posts might be getting repetitive on this point.. but allow me to describe for you the first track.. as it stands

Lyrics

It’s based on some lyrics I tweeted.. I don’t have them handy.. but I’ll probably post them in good time.. kind of surreal / dada-distic, so to speak.. a strange style of writing.. pretty out there.. extraordinarally deep.. though there depth lys in a place that makes them difficult to understand.. seems almost like gibberish in places.. 

If I were to try and put it in a sound bit.. its as if it’s blaming our current economic problem as an effect of extroversion in the modern situation..  but I’m not sure if that’s what it’s really doing.

Vocal Performance

The performance is to be realized via VirSyn’s Cantor.. which is a vocal synthesizer.  I’ve really only fiddled with Cantor thus far.. so I’m not entirely sure about.. well if I’m going to be able to get an acceptable performance out of it.. not sure how it’ll end up working.. not sure if the work flow I’m attempting is realistic.. so this remains the big question mark.

The way I’m working it is to write out a synth line.. that’s the vocal line.. a kind of stand in.. and to take that performance data.. and put it into Cantor.. and basically fine tune it from there.

The frequency space of Cantor, versus the synth that’s doing the mock up.. will be different.. so.. a part of the process will be trying to make Cantor intelligible with all the other stuff going on in the mix..  well its actually slightly more complex then even this.. Basically.. we have a tun of instruments.. that I’ve brought down into a few groups.. the plan is the put EQ and Compression on the different groups individually.. via Liquid Mix 16.. also put something on the master buss.. and kinda automate the EQs as needed.. 

I also expect that.. once the performance data gets brought into Cantor.. I might start messing around with it.. and possibly there’ll be stuff like backing vocals.. and who knows what.

The Music

The music is pretty insane actually.. I’d say it’s sorta Indra’s Net-esk.. only more so.. taken to a whole new level. 

What goes into it

So far the production features about 30 instruments.. and about 8 auxiliary effects.. We’re talking 2 instances of Digital Performer’s convolution reverb.. 2 delay orientated Guitar Rig Patches, one EVerb from Digital Performer.. 2 reverbs from Kore 2… and I’m not sure what else.. 

To appreciate the insanity of this.. For each instrument.. besides simply telling it what notes to play when, and how hard to play those notes.. you have the automation of Pan position, volume, 8 auxiliary sends.. very often pitch bend and modulation.. and some of the instruments have other performance parameters that I might play with over the course of a track. So.. that’s what..  12 times 30? So that’s 360 parameters you’re programing.. never mind the notes.. So the production is very time consuming.. And though I’ve put in a lot of labor.. it’s currently only about two thirds of the way through… and only a little more then 3 minutes long.

Results thus far

As I was saying before.. It reminds me quite a bit of my Indra’s Net stuff.. only more so. The things I felt critical of in Indra’s Net.. well.. it overcomes those problems and limitations.. There’s more instruments, more effects.. more advanced software, way more powerful computer.. What all this means to the music is… well I’m not really sure.. but I think it’s something kind of big.

While we’re at it, I might as well share with you one of the question marks it presents me with…  Because the amount of instruments, and what not, are so much higher.. things are way more complex. Structurally, my music is not big on repetition…  at least not in a conventional sense..  One of the reasons repetition is important to.. say pop music, is it assists the digestion of the music… it is, after all, “the hook.” When my music was a few order of magnitude less complex then the current project.. I think the simplicity made it easier to digest.. So one of the things I worry about is.. well.. how difficult it might be to appreciate / digest / whatever… So… that’s like a design consideration question.

If we just listen to the music and try and appreciate what it is..  

Well its like a first step into a new world. I think it might be some of the best stuff I’ve ever done. It is full of amazing moments.. flying between a kind of symphonic like aggression kind of LSD trip.. to adventures in ambient space.. where we feel the contraction of space its self.. beneath our feet.. Along the way we travel through so many different sonic spaces and environments.. experience so many different sonic phenomenon.. From classical to all out electronica..  I just think its amazing.

On Lyrics and Music

Now.. beyond all that.. the music is actually a kind of score to the lyrics.. so the music moves through space in such a way that.. it in some way comments on the lyrics.. There’s a line “to creep the reaper out” and we feel the darkening of the space around us…. 

It seems, in a certain way, that both my lyrics and my music are like “adventures in run on sentences.”  It’s all stream of consciousness stuff..  we can go anywhere at anytime.. for any reason.. but..

The spirit of the lyrics is playfully subversive.. seeking to express truths that.. are somehow how in our collective shadow.. My lyrics are very often dark.. living in the abyss.. some of there darkness has to do with there.. transcendence of conventional.. limitations.. which is it’s self an expression of freedom.. all be it free to give satan a bare hug, or something.. freedom  to be monstrous… 

The music is another matter.. A music that is programmed.. note by note… where we’re probably programing something like.. well how many parameters per note? A lot…  That’s a slow a methodical process… It’s not really free as the breeze in quite the same way the lyrics are.. It’s more “free to exert influence over the momentum of the flux in question.” 

So the free as a bird lyrics becomes the central axis point of the whole production.. It’s like a stream of consciousness construction that’s.. somehow taken to this very extreme point of being realized.. via a slow and methodical process? The slow and methodical process is stream of consciousness to.. just that it’s a stream that takes place for days.. as a pose to a couple of tweets on twitter.. 

Going Deeper Into It.

It may sound like I’m just throwing a lot of random inane facts at you… that’s because I’m fumbling in the dark to try and express something I’ve yet to articulate… ok.. read onward for the break through.. or stop here.

We have streams of consciousness that happen at different time scales, what does that mean? Look at your self..  at some point.. and try to become mindful of all the thoughts as they stream past your consciousness.. We could be talking about.. “lets smell this flower” to “I think I shall now turn my head to find out what that dog is barking about.” 

You can look at it in such a way so as to see many thoughts as being made up of smaller thoughts.. and.. if you could imagine your thoughts as grains.. that made this kind of gass.. that filled a space.. you could say “show me all the grains that correspond to this theme” and you would start to see patterns in how various smaller thoughts where components of multiple larger thoughts.. 

I have a kind of pscyho-philosophy that has explored the dynamics underlying how all this works.. Why we think of what when.. what drives our attention.. and how this related to our concepts of reality and life, and what not.. And as it turns out.. this psycho-philosophical blah blah blah.. underlies my thoughts on aesthetics.. and is a major part of my the conceptual framework I use in making my art and music.. 

The idea that we’d be, essentially.. scoring streams of consciousness.. with streams of consciousness.. in a rather operatic way.. The idea that its sorta all on a lark.. that we then become committed to.. if for no other reason then to.. see what might happen.. that in a sense the whole production is nothing but a little experiment to see where all these thoughts lead…

Well that’s my problem with trying to articulate something.. how do you articulate an intuition? 

Well I guess that’s all I’ll write about on that track for now…  lol, but wait.. there’s more.. there’s also a Reason project in the works

The Reason Project

I was starting to feel a little burned out on the huge sound project.. so I thought I’d go take a stroll through Reason..  This project had me starting out via programming a couple Thor patches.. 

I don’t think of myself as terribly talented in the field of sound synthesis.. but.. sound synthesis is.. well I’ll end up with something.. and that something will probably give me something unique to try and go explore as a part of the larger production.

This project also had me loading up REX files..  Ages ago I blogged about how I had invested in ReCycle.. and used cheese open source voice synths to realize some lyrics.. and how I’d processed the hell out of those lyrics.. and then chopped them up into REX files.  Well.. I decided to take one line from that project.

This gets into another whole set of ideas I was playing with.. at the current stage… The idea is that we could eventually put together a track that would be.. that whole song.. with all the lyrics to it.. but for now we have one sentence.. going into this new project.. or one sentence.. cut up.. distorted.. processed.. rendered FUBAR.. played for it’s textures.. not even meant to be recognized as the sentence it is..

Here the vocals become.. a strange texture explored.. we emphasize a few words.. out of context.. as it turns out.. the word we are emphasizing in this project is the word “context.”

In any event.. there will be more to be talked about latter.. I’m over tired here.. what I will say is there’s some very interesting things coming into play with how I’m starting to play with lyrics and how they relate to the structure of the music I’m making….  leave it at that…

NaSoAlMo: What it is and why we like it

This month, or November actually, I plan on participating in NaSoAlMo, other wise known as National Solo Album Month.. This is a thing where various musician / sound artistic types.. decided to participate in a challenge to create a solo album in a months time..  Basically.. it’s an excuse to get serious.. for a month.

Last year, as long times followers would know, I created ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures.. for NaSoAlMo….  This, I must tell you, was one hell of an adventure. There’s nothing like working your ass off on something, if you want to grow by leaps and bounds… and at the end of last years National Solo Album Month’s thing..  I felt like I had made a giant jump in my music production / etc skills..  And so now, we embark on the next adventure…

On the Stategery and tactics of taking on such a challenge

Generally speaking.. if I’m working in my conventional ways.. and didn’t have a lot of other stuff to contend myself with.. was very focused.. I could maybe spit out about a track a week.. which might be around.. oh lets say an average of about 6 minutes a pop…. which comes out to what, like 24 minutes of music? Well.. the challenge is to make an album of at least 29:09 minutes.. so that’s not quite going to cut it.. and seeing as I have other things to deal with in life.. and seeing as last year I only found out about this about half way through the month… one must develop alternative strategies and tactics.. which is perhaps another interesting thing to deal with… 

So, lets take a look at last years strategies.. and this years strategies.

ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures Production Strategy 

I found out, as I said before, about this challenge, about half way through the month.. but had already begun work on a few tracks.. so figured I could still make a go of it.. If I tried something radicle.

My radical process started with.. working with different types of sound generating type programs.. where you improvise via tweaking various parameters and record the results. This instantly creates a whole lot of music.. but then you have the question of “is this interesting music?” So the next challenge is “how do we make this interesting music?” This became the jumping off point for an experimental sonic adventure. For the most part, this involved the following approaches:

1. Lets Process the crap out of these audio files.
2. Lets mix stuff together different versions of processed audio into a kind of composite audio file.
3. Lets slice up the audio file into discreet loops n stuff
4. Lets sequence the loops
5. Lets integrate this with our usual way of working 

 Well, that’s the broad outline anyway.. 

Tools Used

1. Ableton Live
2. Arturia Storm
3. Native Instruments Komplete (mostly Reaktor)
4. A Wimpy G4 Mac
5. Reason
6. A guitar
7. A Zoom H4 field recorder 

Ok, so that’s the basic broad brush stroke outline of it.. You can read more of my writings related to this project here…  That would be the full list.. The writings where I wrote during the production are as follows: Off In Reaktor Land, Red Rum Re Drumed, and finally Gonzo adventures in music production.

Should you like to hear the album in it’s entirety, you can find it on over here at mattsearles.com/music. 

At the time I created it.. I wasn’t real sure of it.. but since then I’ve gotten a lot of good reviews from people.. and now figure.. well, it’s probably a pretty good album.

The New Production Adventure

Tools likely to be used:

1. The Bad Ass 8 Core Mac Pro
2. This here new MacBook (2GHz Due)
3. Komplete 5
4. Kore
5. Ableton Live
6. Reason
7. ReCycle
8. A Tascam 16 channel Mixer as a MIDI controller
9. An M-Audio DJ like MIDI controller
10. A Guitar
11. A Slide Bass
12. Digital Performer
13. Liquid Mix 16
14. Couple of budget Condenser Microphones
15. Zoom H4

In addition to all that madness..  I’m looking to add VirSyns Cantor Vocal Synth and… VirSyns “Take Five FX bundle” which includes Bark, Matrix, Reflect, TDesign, and VTape. Indulge me as I talk about these a little, won’t you?

1. Bark is a pretty interesting looking  27 band filter / EQ and compressor
2. VTape is a set of analog tape emulation plugs that emulate tape based saturation, delay, and flange. I’m very much in need of a tape delay type effect.. and very much wanting some sort of analog tape emulation warmth.. 
3. Reflect is an Algorithmic Convolution Reverb. Even in the current version of Digital Performer, I’m not feeling like my reverb bases are covered quite enough.. and I expect Reflect to really help out along these lines.. and the integration of Algorithmic and Convolution technologies into a single reverb unit is a quite attractive thing.
4. TDesign is a Transient former.. I don’t know too much about this sorta effect.. but it does give you control over your dynamics / transience.. and there are quite a few production folks out there whom are very into such things
5. Matrix is a Vocoder, and according to a recent issue of Sound On Sound, a very impressive Vocoder.

 So… as you can no doubt see.. We’re talking about a massive upgrade from last year’s project.. studio wise anyway, so, what of the plan off attack?

Plan of Attack

I have lots of music ideas, and I’m pretty sure this project isn’t going to be able to explore them all.. but, we’ll certainly see how far we can make it.

• The first thing I want to do is.. See if I can’t jam out some stuff using Kore to control various Reaktor beatboxes, sequenced instruments, and sound generators..  This will effectively create one box full of building blocks.
• Next I want to experiment with a somewhat traditional-ish approach to sequencing.. where you play around on a keyboard, quantize stuff, and put together stuff that way..
• I want to use ReCycle to create REX files out of some of the results.. to use as building blocks that way.
• A rather central thing I want to explore is.. vocals. These vocals will probably be ether.. me speaking into microphones and vocoding the hell out of it.. / Melodying the hell of it.. or Cantor stuff.. somehow creatively mixed into the music.
• I’m actually thinking of the possibility that this album project could feature some sort of a narrative / lyrical whatever.. that might sit at the center of the album.. which would be a really huge jump for me to take.
• I see a part in the process where I jam away on guitar and bass to construct.. well… something or other.
• I imagine a part of the process where I have all kinds of content loaded up into Ableton Live.. and use the MIDI controllers / Mixers to kinda improvise out something…

 Of course, in the end, all this stuff must me integrated into one giant process… so, wish me luck…

[editors notes: this was written a few days back, at an earlier stage in the production.. since then things have changed pretty dramatically.. but the ideas contained here are still front and center.. as far as the music production / musical composition’s core organizational principles are concerned… The other note to note.. is this is but part 1..  stay tuned for the second half] 

Ok.. the last post I actually posted was what we call in the social media biz “supper duper” long… which is strategically a no-no.. but I felt that I needed it for a kind of aesthetic / philosophical / theoretical back drop for todays post.. which…. though I didn’t get around to saying all I’d have liked to in said post.. we are going to try and move our focus onto the actual work before me.. and the processes involved.

As I started to say in the last post.. I started off with a voice synthesizer.. a free one.. plugged lyrics into that.. it renders out to an MP3 (not totally ideal), from there I take the MP3 into Ableton Live and start running it through all manner of effects.. I do this individual for each line of lyrics.. rendering out a few variations for each line..

It’s at this point where the project goes on the back burner.. my attention devoted to other matters.. until I go out and buy ReCycle.. where I cut up the processed audio files into REX2 loops for use in Reason… which brings us to where I am today.

You can sequence a REX2 file… play any of the slices in the loop, at any time, in whatever order.. also the REX player in Reason, known as Dr:rex, is a bit of an instrument.. it has pitch bend, a modulation wheel.. you can automate any of its controls.. we have filters, oscillators, and modulators.

For this project, which is my first project along these lines.. I start off fairly simple.. I sit in the sequencer, sequencing the loop slices…

REX sequencing

Imagine.. if you will.. we have an audio file with various slices. In our sequencer we say what slice to play, and how loud to play that slice.. as well as when to play that slice. The slices.. if played in order.. for the right lengths.. would play the original audio file as it was.. assuming your project is set to the same tempo.. But in programming a sequence, we don’t actually have to play the slices in order or anything.

The effect is to “cut up” the audio file.. which.. in practice.. creates some pretty strange glitch-e kinda of effects.. sounds like digital equipment going nuts… sometimes you’re sure there’s something wrong with it, and you want to smack the computer.

This cut up / glitch-ification of the audio introduces a range of ambiguity.. we are abstracting from a source.. this having to with the meta cognitive experience of experience I talked about in that recent post.. Mind you our starting point is a voice synthesizer which sounds a bit like a speak and spell.. or I should say it has all the rich expressiveness of a speak and spell.. which is to say its not expressive at all.. it is digitized.. so.. whatever the lyrics are.. they are now abstracted into this digitized place.

Thematic Material

There is, of course, a link between the digital / mechanical and the pathological.. what’s the relationship of the machine to the humanity? What is the symbolic meaning of Darth Vader being more machine then human? Hitler… he would have told you that “he was the state,” the state of course is the machine.. such is the symbolism we are playing with.

The lyrics have to do with the transcendent.. and the limits of our concepts of reality.. through which we interact with reality.. and the implications of this.. God.. if you look at how he behaved relative to Job, or for that matter in the old testament more generally.. would seem to be “a bit of a monster” or.. to put it another way.. human morality and God’s morality are not quite the same thing.. we could talk about awe in relationship to God in this sense.. and the relationship between man and machine.. perhaps the pathological with the.. kind of conventional human morality.. has certain parallels.. which has some implication on how we might relate to the lyrics.

All of this has to do with with the mind bending aspect of the lyrics.. has to do with.. “the dark side of the transcendent,” to put it a certain way.. but also we are dealing with the old “through death comes life” shtick.

Ambiguity and the Cognitive

In the blog entry to which this is a kind of sequel.. I shared a cut up film written by William Burroughs.. We are of course entering into the world of cut ups.. and we are talking about mysticism’s relationship to challenges in cognitive processes.. or I talked a bit about this in said post… So lets talk about this a little.

We have the range of the easy to understand to the.. incomprehensible.. the overly easy is boring.. the overly hard to understand is frustrating.. and so it is that we dance between the extremes..

So.. how do we do this? For starters.. if I were to speak to you a sentence.. but allowed 5 minutes to pass between each word.. would you, at the end of it, know what the hell I was saying? Probably not.. particularly if there was music all around, drawing our attention this way and that.

This idea.. and I don’t even know if it is still up at this point.. is a driving idea of the lyrics in the music linked to from this post. It’ll be up in a podcast soon enough.. In any event.. lets talk about the lyrics in this “MTFS revisited” track.

We are taking one line from the lyrics to the song I’m currently working on… and that was the basis for the lyrics in the MTFS revisited track. Your ability to recognize what is being said in the lyrics is played with in a number of ways.

Firstly.. we hear the lyrics more or less straight.. slightly manipulated, close to the start of the track.. there’s only one problem.. there’s a lot of frequency masking going on.. so the lyrics are not easily recognized at this point.. we most likely only recognize fragments of the lyrics.. if that.. if we even recognize the lyrics at all. (There was one person who commented that she didn’t even notice the singing till she had heard the track a few times!)

The whole way through the track.. it is never made clear what the lyrics are saying.. its always obscured.. or we are always only getting fragments.. until the very end.. when the lyrics show up like a period.

Now.. if you know the lyrics, and you listen, you know what is being said even when the lyrics are being obscured in one way or another.. and at this point the lyrics provide a kind of subtext / meaning to the music.

Ok.. so back to the current project

There is this idea that.. well what would happen to the MTFS Revisited.. if you heard the project I’m working on now? Another words.. if you got the rest of the song of which that is a line from? How would it change the meaning of that track.. and for that matter, how might that track change the meaning of this track?

As I play around with this question.. I think “hmm, perhaps I should make a whole album based of this idea.” Which leads us into the question of lyrics in a slightly different way.

The Issue of the Vocal / Lyric Performance Spectrum

A little earlier I spoke about what it means to have lyrics realized by a software synthesizer with all the expressive powers of a speak and spell.. Those limitations have some implications on the meaning.. and my cut up project with it, along with all the processing.. is at least in part a compensation for those limitations..

Well.. there are other options that I.. alluded to in the recent post.. about how it would cost me a few grand to get the tools necessary to fully explore this spectrum.. which is why the full project may spend some time on the back burner.. but lets explore the tools anyway:

Tools

• Cantor: This is a real, full fledged “vocal synthesizer” which is to say its made to allow you to produce vocals via a synthesizer.. It’s even capable of going so far as to “sound realistic.” Imagine that….. Its selling for around $300 these days.. less for an older version.
• Antares AVOX: This is your basic “vocal tool box;” a set of tools made expressly for processing vocals.. you can do your gender bending.. you can change.. basically… well.. make it sound as if it were someone else singing.. Its some very cool and very powerful tools.. we’re talking $500.
• Audio Ease All In One Bundle: For our purposes we are talking about SpeakerPhone.. SpeakerPhone is a kind of.. lets call it a sound design tool.. which is primarily focused on emulating different types of speakers.. everything from telephones to.. well speak and spell esk devices.. to guitar cabinets.. and onward.. via the magic that is dynamic convolution technology… the full bundle, of which SpeakerPhone is a part.. runs in at a cool $1200.

Out side of the above mentioned gear… there’s things like “good quality microphones” and what not. I’m thinking both studio microphones and field microphones..

And um, what Exactly is all this about?

Strangely.. the way my current process is working.. the lyrics are rendered in a rather ambient form.. They are a strange element of an electronic sound art thing.. It’s hard to really explain this without hearing it.. The way the voice synth’s lines are both processed and then chopped up.. and sequenced.. make it so that the very act of.. “it” trying to speak a line.. is sorta fascinating to listen to.. To the point that.. we loose track of what’s actually being said.. It’s as if the vocals where some kind of “sound effect” or special thing sorta put there..

So.. this is an effect of how I’ve explored this crazy cut up ish process at this point.. the point is that.. you could very easily have “real singing” going on.. at the same time in a track.. without the two elements interfering with one another. I suppose to fully explain this we need to jump back to…

Ambiguity and the Cognative

In cutting stuff up.. one of the things I’m playing with is.. how do we process the words? We process the words differently then how we process pure sound.. how can cutting things up be expressive? What are the possibilities of working with lyrics in this way?

Methods of am-big-u-fying.

• Temporal orientation.. particularly spacing.. if we are speaking linearly. How long are the gaps between stuff?
• Temporal orientation.. order / sequencing: How things are placed in time relative to one another.. who we move through the slices..
• “The Mix:” In our virtual mix.. how front and center is an element.. how far away is it?

Latter: (lets get back to basic process already)

Performances, programing, and arranging

So far the process has a couple of steps.. Once you’ve loaded your REX file into Dr:REX.. you’re going to create little sequences out of it. This is your chance to “sculpt a vocal performance” in a rather glitch-ified way. The other sorta sequence I’ll make is a kind of rhythmic textural arrangement of the slices. I may, in the process, make variations of these….. I then arrange the sequences in relationship to one another on the time line…

So far, this is all I do.. I mean I do this for each clip.. till I get through all the clips.. I don’t even bother automating pitch bends, modulations, tuning, or whatever.. I do, however, listen to the stuff and think about what I might do in the next stage of things..

Next Steps

The next step is still something of an unknown to me… This is an exploratory adventure, and what I plan to do next is nothing more then ideas / presumptions.. Once we actually dig into it.. then we’ll really know.

The considerations

One of the problems I have is that the vocals happen inside a very limited frequency range.. and we really want to be careful about how other instrumentation will impact your ability to hear what’s being said. This kind of a thing is also an issue relative to the interest in the rhythmic textural arrangements.

The actual lyrics, and there meaning, is.. well its very deep.. and how the lyrics can presented / performed / arranged or executed, is going to effect how you take them in. Currently.. the way stuff is arranged is very much on the… well it makes it so we sorta experience one line at a time and loose the continuity of between the lines. So one assumes that we need variations in the performance and arrangement.. so that this way of making things more ambiguous will.. at some point in the production.. come into focus… so that the meanings of the lyrics have there proper impact.

To these ends.. I have a number of thoughts and ideas.. which is part of what makes it interesting to me. If, as I’ve suggested before.. the notion is to make a whole album out of these lyrics.. or that these lyrics would become the core of the album.. if we think of the album as one giant composition.. then it could be that we have different variations at different times over the course of the album.

This idea then.. could mean that the album is essentially a kind of instrumental album.. with ambient vocal textures.. to put it a certain way. This, as an idea, seems very interesting to me.. and makes sense, I think, as a possible first step in bringing lyrics to my music.

If you relate the idea of this.. to what I was getting to before.. about a “Vocal Lyric Spectrum,” its possible that you could have other elements that could provide “alternative organizing principles” for the album.. or that you could hear the album in different ways.. or from different perspectives. Not having all the tools I’d like.. a certain amount of this larger project is forced to be on the back burner.. at least for now..

so, back to the next steps

One of the interesting compositional challenges is the cut up issue of how we read the lyrics, so to speak.. I assume that one of the next steps is to start actually mixing the vocal performance. This will amount to putting effects on them.. and automating there arrangement in space.. It also might be altering parts pitches so that they work inside of an over all composition..

Hmm… I’m not even sure if this is my first post on the subject.. but a while ago I started talking about the project of bringing lyrics to my music. 

I’ve been writing lyrics, at least, since I was in high school.. but have never done too much to bring them into my music.. or at least never felt terribly successful about it. At the moment.. it seems the tools I need to properly bring lyrics to my work is in the neighborhood of a few grand.. depending on how you want to slice it.. no puns intended.

One solution came out of an issue of electronic musician monthly.. which involved using a free open source voice synthesizer.. so I used it.. threw into it some lyrics.. rendered out the audio files.. processed the hell out of them.. started playing with them in Ableton Live.. and eventually just sorta left it on the back burner for a while. But then last weekend I bought a copy of ReCycle.. and started playing with them inside of a ReCycle / Reason kind of context.. 

My first little go at this is talked about here and here. The first “here” having, at least for a short time, a bit of audio that shows this first experiment. In that project I was playing with one of the lines to the songs I wrote as of that much older post.. some of the renderings out of the processed voice synth.

This brings us to the issue of musical linguistic adventures. 

Musical Linguistic Adventures 

Sometime ago I read a book of… well lectures given by Leonard Bernstein at Harvard.. which was…. largely on the subject of linguistics in music. There’s a series of ideas.. I believe Noam Chomsky is the guy responsible.. about an organic basis of language.. that its hard wired in our brains.. You see this in.. the names of “mommy” or “daddy,” that there’s melodic parallels in the words across languages.. as well as for water.. and it seems that childhood taunt songs.. and all the rest of it.. are pretty universal.. And on some level.. when we hear music, we do hear it the same..  Here’s a bit of Bernstein from those lectures:

Ok, so how about we now venture forth into an interview with Noam Chomsky, talking about lingusitics?

Danger Will Robinson, this one could be getting long… 

I want to break in here and bring up a couple of things..

1. There’s been huge break throughs in brain imagining since the time of this interview.. so now many of these investigations are a lot more feasible… so such things are, no doubt, being explored now.
2. The nature of the nature versus nurture thing.. a modern understanding of the subject is that its not really nature versus nurture but nurture via nature.. which is to say that our genetic make up defines to what degree nurture influences our development.
3. This issue with Kant.. the limitations of language.. did you catch Bernstein sorta talking about music speaking the unspeakable? I’ll try and get more deeply into this latter as.. this is really the heart of what I want this entry to be getting to.. and has everything to do with my aims.. but.. well.. I wont say much more about it other then to try and hold this in your mind as we venture further into this interview:

Ok, a few things I want to get to here…

1. I could defend Freud psychoanalysis here.. but it’s a little too complicated.. in that it would take us away from our main thread.. of what’s already looking like a long blog entry.. I will, towards the end.. talk about this stuff in Jungian terms.. which will go along way in answering this.. however I will go so far as to say that in the history of psychology.. there’s a trend where in people are very good about talking about there own stuff.. and not so good in there criticism of others in the field.
2. My impression is that Heidegger does a pretty good job of dismantling the sorta metaphysical presumptions that are at the foundations of cognitive psychology. Heidegger’s interest in language, I think, makes him of special interest to this subject.. but.. we’ll skip on over that for now.
3. I think the Kant stuff is pretty central in Jung’s psychology.. in a certain way.

So I had a rough time finding part 5.. but here we go.. 

Ok… so now we’ve gone a bit deeper into Chomsky and linguistics.. and the larger implications..

So to curve back into music.. and a kind of linguistic basis of it.. what I’m trying to point out is.. language.. verbal language.. has a musicality… timber, pitch.. repetition.. all the principles of musical composition are present in verbal language.. and so there’s a connection here.. 

Ok.. so how about a fun little user generated video.. playing with the Bernstein lectures? 

Sorta highlights the musicality of language, doesn’t it?

Ok, onto the psychedelic:

Linguistics, Neuroscience, Jungian Psychology, and the Psychedelics

I think it makes sense to start out here with a little Tom Wolfe.. In part because he wrote the Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test, in part because his notion of “New Journalism” in part influences how I think about new media, and in part because he’s dealing with many of the subjects we are on in this entry… 

There are two other parts to this interview.. which we can’t embed here.. can be found on the National Review website here, and then here. For the full take on this stuff you really want to view these videos.. 

There are huge areas in which I disagree with Tom Wolfe.. as it relates to this topic, but for our purposes lets jump into something I can’t find any videos on… which is his views on psychedelics, which he borrows from modern brain research.

As nearly as I can tell.. the theory works something like this.. under the influence of psychedelic drugs.. the brain is unable to attribute causality in the usual way.. and having a nature of always trying to attribute causal connections.. starts making them where..  from an empirical point of view.. there are no such connections to be made…

Err.. let me put this in plainer english.. psychedelics causes you to attribute cause and effects relationships to things where there are no such relationships.. from a factual point of view. Going this far, I do not disagree.. but Wolfe goes so far as to say “this proves you don’t get enlightenment from psychedelics,” in the “ultimatereality” sense.. that this mythology has grown up around psychedelics is.. really attribute able to this principles.. and to the brain’s functioning working on a very slow kind of less functional sorta way, while under the influence of psychedelics.

Well everything we’ve been talking about thus far leads up to my argument as to why Tom Wolfe is wrong… to say nothing of some of the psychologies / schools of thought he’s regarding in such high esteem.

How Psychedelic enlightenment works

Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious could be, kinda sorta, boiled down to… “its an expression of instinct.” Religion is an expression of instinct.. its more complex then that.. but its good enough for now..  And let us not forget here.. that in talking about linguistics.. from Chomsky to Wolfe.. we are talking about mental faculties.. not blank slates.. We are.. in fact, talking about instincts, are we not? Instincts by another name?

All right.. so if we are attributing cause and effect relationships to things that do not factually have cause and effect relationships to them.. on what bases are we making them? Well.. on the basis of the structure of the faculty / instinct…..  We are moving from objective truth to subjective truth.. from object to subject.. from the external material world to the internal psychological world.. and so the truths we discover are true in a “psychological sense.” In essence.. what I’m arguing is that psychedelics bring about a “meta cognitive experience.”

So.. if mystical / religious / ultimate reality.. is an expression of instinct.. and a meta cognitive experience is one that’s essential an experience of cognition its self…  that it brings us into contact with “the experience of experience,” to put it a certain way..  and if we understand that.. subjective truth is a kind of truth.. and that we are now moving beyond the Kantian limitations.. well, now we are in the world of what Jung calls “the transcendent instinct.”

It speaking about.. that which is unnameable… that which is beyond our Kantian categories..  we are in fact talking about God.. for God, by definition, is a symbol of the mystery which holds up the world of the known.. it is the ultimate context of the world of the known.. which, as it turns out.. is the subject of both my most recent release.. and the music I’m working on now.

Aesthetic Implications

So in essence what we are saying.. if we complicate the attribution of causal relationships.. we will create something like a mystical experience? So with this.. lets move onto a short film.. that explores the concept of the cut up.. something we find in the work of William Burroughs.. where we see our linguistic faculties making these connections.. in the world of film grammar.. as well as on the literary level.

We of course see these kinds of ideas in dada and surrealism.. so how about a little film made with Marcel Duchamp.. Man Ray adding something here.. and of course a John Cage Score (what could be more perfect?)

How this relates on a process level to my work

On a kind of core foundational level to my thinking and process is this idea of aesthetic experience is a cognitive event.. having something to do with how we perceive and process experience. In earlier stages of my artistic and musical development my work was very often a kind of critique of this process.. It was very much dealing with the problems of Immanuel Kant and the transcendent.. and very similar, in someways, to what Chomsky is talking about..

In any event.. my work was in someway about this process.. and played with the process.. if we are now saying that mystical experience has something to with the challenges to cognition.. you can see how this could be central to my work.

Some of it is as simple as how you recognize patterns.. classic IQ test stuff, right? If you work in web usability you’ll no doubt recognize an early problem with game theory as a tool for understanding human behavior.. which is to say we don’t operate from a rational perspective so much as we muddle around with incomplete information..

What I say in relationship to patterns is that…  you have two distinct things going on “the pattern its self” and “the pattern recognition.” In any pattern, lets call them patterns of cause and effect.. there are infinite possible ways of understanding the pattern.. of seeing patterns in it: if you see a series of numbers, and are asked “what’s the next number going to be” your job is to understand organizing principles of the pattern before you.. and you will start out with the most simplistic possibilities.. going out to more complex ones.. what I’m saying is that.. in the deep end of complexity..  you have that infinite possibility, that we never see, because of how we approach the problem…. kind of how we are wired.

So.. if our process is impaired.. we are going to go into the deep end of that complexity.. or to put it another way.. that’s what mystical experience is…

Without digging much further into this stuff.. I would just say there’s a range in my work.. of simple to complex patterns.. to even chance and chaos.. and effort to make a continuity between the extremes.. I mean its interesting that if you look at serial atonalism… It can seem as if we need a mathematical PHD in order to appreciate the organization.. and somehow the results are very similar to that of John Cage.. who’s music is the product of chance.. 

Here’s a clip of Leonard Bernstein talking, among other things.. about the beauty of ambiguity in music.. where we see chromaticism (which is basically what serial atonalism is all about) inside of a diatonic framework… He talks about music theory which.. if you’re not already aquatinted with.. might likely be a little above your head.. but basically we are talking about organizational principles in music.. which has to do with harmony and counter point.. which is pitch relationships.. which have to do with the physics of sound.. and perhaps psycho acoustics fits in here somewhere as well.

Ok, now I wanted to dig in deeper into the process of what I’m doing right now in my sound work.. the project I’m on right now.. but it seems that the underlying theory and ideas.. have taken up all our space.. so I’ll have to get to that next time.. what I want to leave on is.. a little more on how this stuff relates to the philosophy of religion..

Philosophy of religion and other connections 

In the history of Christian theology there is this kind of.. well an idea that is perhaps not as well known as it should be.. which is to say the Bible is God’s second book… the creation his first. If we look at the philosophy of science at, around, perhaps before.. the American Civil war.. there is this idea that creation.. or the universe we live in.. is custom made to our minds.. sciences exploration of the universe is in fact an exploration of God.. There is also these ideas of natural and.. I want to say divine.. revelation.. The law we find Moses bringing down, the commandments, is said to be imprinted on the inside of our skin.. or to put it another way.. it is expressed in our biology.. which of course accords well with Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious… and these ideas of there being faculties, as Chomsky is saying.. that are built right into our biology. If we look to eastern philosophy and religion.. God is often thought of in a rather unipersonal sorta way.. God is a kind of personification of the forces of the universe.. and.. if we look at the various strands of Buddhism and Zen.. where the inward mystery of our beings is explored in great depth.. how we “really are,” which is something different then who we usually identify our selves with as.. is in fact… the universe.. as the mystic saying goes “I and the maker are one.”I wont go any deeper into this here..,.. but I hope you can see how this is interesting to contemplate in light of the ideas presented in this post. 

As I speak to you I’m in the middle of the production.. well, lets get to talking about it.

The first thing I want to note is that It’s very awesome working with 2 24″ HD monitors… though I dare say I still find myself wishing I had more space!!!..  but that said it does feel pretty incredible to have this much space going on. For music production it really means you’re able to.. manage more at once.. which has big ramifications.. which I seem to be putting to the test in this project.

So I think I kind of gave the clues to where I’d likely be going in a recent blog post.. that I’m trying to integrate a kind of free jamming process into my electronic music process.. 

Latter:

I suppose the best way I can describe the experience of it is.. well there’s a lot of dimensions to it really.

It’s an adventure

I don’t really understand certain things about our world.. one of the things I have the hardest time with is “sucky artists.” I particularly hate “sucky artists” whom are more successful then I am.. from a commercial perspective. My definition of sucky is “he” (or she) “whom doesn’t do anything interesting.” You know the type? Takes a safe and well trotted path? If all I was interested in was… making sure I made the rent.. you know what? I wouldn’t be a freaking artist! I mean.. ok, its more complicated then all this.. but I simply mean the artist who’s work is derivative.. which translates into 90% of everything Hollywood produces.. and most of the stuff I hear on the radio.

From the perspective of an artist.. or speaking as one.. the well trotted path is just freaking boring.. you know? I wanna go out there and do something new, something exciting.. that’s just who I am, that’s just how I’m wired.. and its tuff to imagine it being any other way. All of which is not to say that I don’t have my lazy days.. just.. I don’t know.

So I guess what I’m trying to do creatively is take this freaking crazy mad ass jump..

Ok, lets back off from this and look at the economic dimension of my plot at this junction in our story.

If all goes well.. which is a very low bar in many respects.. I could maintain my unemployed, working on my own kinda thing, sorta status.. for a long long time. Things might not go that well.. but this is at least the out look as of this moment.

So what this means with respect to my art is.. I don’t have to make bank tomorrow, which means I can aim high. There is a shorter term outlook where in I have to make bank.. but that’s another story for another time.. we’re talking big picture here. And to all this I should maybe add that I can do all this provided I do my best to live on the cheap.. 

Ok.. so.. 

My studio is turning into a freaking monster of a studio. The sound work I’m now engaged in is.. so many orders of magnitude beyond anything I’ve had to work with before… and I’m still really just in the early days of exploring the possibilities of it. 

After my recent shopping spree, I’ve landed in a place where I’m now semi inclined not to spend too much more money.. Which is odd seeing as I was planing on spending a couple grand more, prior to the spree. I may still buy one more piece of software, and I might eventually get all the stuff I had planned on.. but I’m feeling like.. well its just not real pressing at this moment.

One of the surprisingly big deals is ReCycle

ReCycle, on the surface, doesn’t really sound all that exciting… but it does have the effect of radically shifting how I think about working with Reason..

Here’s what you do: You load an audio file into ReCycle and you slice it up.. you then take that sliced up file, which is now a loop.. and you load it into Reason. Now.. with the REX player.. you can play the individual slices.. and sorta do interesting things with that loop.

Why is this exciting?

One of my issues was “how do I work with vocals.” This is a bit of a problem if you can’t actually sing. At this point I can change the pitches of the vocals.. and do other funky things.. process them.. but.. if they are a basic audio file.. you can fracture them.. play them glitched up.. Fubared.. and something about the creative process of it.. the work flow.. the whatever.. makes it kinda incredible.

A few latter:

At my current stage of thinking.. well.. instrumentals are kind of abstract… what are they about? Popularity wise.. instrumentals tend not to be as popular as songs with actual lyrics in them. You know, singing and all that? So bringing lyrics / singing / etc.. to my music.. is on the to do list.. and I’m now in early stages of exploring what I can do along these lines.

Using ReCycle and Rex files.. its a bit like Picasso’s cubism..  where we are taking an image and fracturing it. We then have control of the fractures.. we can think of the fractures compositionally.. What goes on inside of a fracture can be treated as a texture / timber.. its more about orchestration then counterpoint.. 

This also leads us into certain historical threads in music.. since the dawn of equal temperament.. our music has gone in a direction of being about pitches.. and the relationship of pitches.. as a pose to being about the timber. The dawning of electronic music has had the effect of increasing the importance of the timber.. So my use of ReCycle now brings my work into this somewhat lost thread.

Later still:

I’ve dug a little deeper into this project… It’s an experiment, so it doesn’t really matter.. or, I’m sorta willing to just kind of take it where ever.. and um, there’s interesting things emerging.. so lets back out of the subject of ReCycle here…

Earlier in this production it was all about mixing.. and the mixing was no easy task… perhaps made more complex by my spirit. It involved a lot of automation of levels, EQ, and effect sends..  trying to wrestle with things enough so they might not be too muddy.. I’m not sure that this was ever exactly achieved.. eventually the notion came that this automation had to be thought of as.. not just about making certain elements clear.. but also as a compositional thing.. so that we could have contrasts / evolutions between various sections… a sense that we were moving through space.. 

A day or two latter

Well for a limited time you can hear the fruits of this project in a recent post…  my last post actually. After that you won’t be able to get the individual track for a while..  act now, and all that. I do plan on posting it as a part of a podcast in the next week or so.. so it’ll be there to hear.. and on that note, let me post this entry.

Troubles 

I’m in software hell, or so it seems. Perhaps computer hell would be a better way of putting it? I mean.. just the amount of issues I’ve had since I bought this computer.. between Apple doing a shitty job of getting this computer to me in a reasonable time frame.. issues with, I suppose, guitar center and native instruments.. with both Komplete and Kore… Issues with Adobe.. and now onto the issues with Melodyne.

So I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in this blog yet, but I ran out and bought Celemony’s Melodyne Studio. My hope is this could revolutionize the way I work, but that still remains to be seen…  cause I’ve had a hell of a time getting the software to run on my machine properly.

First it wouldn’t install.. tech support got back to me pretty quickly.. and we got it installed.. only with a number of snags.

1. ReWire isn’t working.. which is fairly crucial to me. 
2. Now both Ableton Live and Reason aren’t working.. again pretty crucial.
3. Molodyne will not run as a plug-in.. which is pretty crucial to me…. haven’t tried to get it in ReWire mode yet.

Then tech support started to slack off a bit, I suppose you could say.. and I was only getting about one email a day… and then yesterday I didn’t hear anything from them.. so I emailed today, wondering what was up.. and explaining that this problem had sorta stopped my work, and all that.. and they tell me it is definitely not a known problem…. and gave me some instructions on how to.. I guess uninstall and then reinstall the software, and hopefully clear up whatever the issue is.

I haven’t bothered to go through the hassle of trying to follow those instructions yet.. only just got in the door a little while ago after all… Think I might jump in the shower, get something to eat, and see what happens. Mean while it’s about 12:15 am…

Some first impressions of the new possibilities 

I will give you something of my first impressions.. first impressions based off playing with some of the tutorials: I think melodyne could absolutely revolutionize the way I work.. and could be what I’ve been looking for for years…. I’m very excited about it, but we’ll have to see if can live up to that kind of excitement and expectation.

Still, even with the questions marks hanging over the situation.. dreams do flow. If, with the help of a little software, I can kinda sorta sing… that seems like an amazing possibility. I could write songs about anything! It’s not even that I have a lot of confidence in my song writing ability.. it’s more like.. well maybe confidence in my imagination.. I feel like I could do some freaking amazing stuff.

You add to that that you’re supposed to be able to sequence audio like I can sequence midi / program performances for electronic instruments? Dude, I could make metal like no one has ever heard before!!!

The combination of these two things has me dreaming in ways I’ve never really dreamed before. It has me feeling like a sound artist in a way I haven’t felt before.

And if dreams can become reality?  Well… lets just say I have a lot more confidence in the possibility of making a living from my work then I had a month or two ago.

So, how does this change our plot?

Next night:

Back to the tech woes 

It’s about 1:20 AM, I followed the tech supports advice.. and now Melodyn is installed, and Reason and Live are working.. The only snag is DP is not recognizing the Audio Units plug-in.

Let me see if I can sorta explain this a little bit: Melodyne studio has a plug-in called “Melodyne Bridge.” What you do is put the plug-in on the first insert effects slot of the channel you’re working on, and it streams the audio out of your DAW and into Melodyne Studio.. or something like this? Maybe it just puts it in Melodyne studio? In any event, if you want to do the serious audio sequencing of your stuff.. you do that in Melodyne Studio… and you do that via Melodyne Bridge.

Melodyne Studio will also allow you to work with Melodyn via ReWire, but as near as I can tell this means that whatever audio you’re working with has to start out in Melodyne. For the project I’m working in now.. I have audio in Live that I’d like to, one way or another, be able to mess with in Melodyne. This would be the crazy processed vocal tracks… It might be nice to control there pitches.. to whatever extent I could.. [editors note: the “crazy processed vocals” references a post I have yet to post.]

They are so processed that it is likely that Melodyne won’t work well with them.. Melodyne like’s signals that are as dry as possible, which is why you put the plug-in in the first insert slot of the channel who’s audio you want to work with.

Seeing as I haven’t actually worked with Melodyn yet.. not in these kinds of contexts.. I’ve only done a few tutorials and skimmed through the manual, I don’t know how all this works in practice… So what I’m saying here is not as reliable as it could be. 

The fear I have is… one of work flow. Ideally I’d like to be able to see what’s going on with what in an integrated fashion..  So if I’m sequencing audio.. I’d like to see those pitches in the same place that I see my MIDI notes, and as far as I can see, this is an impossibility. The best solution I can think of is to finally go ahead and take a look at getting a second monitor. I’ll likely do this sunday after the Boston Media Makers meeting.

The Second Monitor

I’m looking at Dells.. Dell offers 2 24″ HD monitors.. one is a bit more econo class then the other.. Origionally my plan was to go all econo class.. though I ended up running out and bying an acer, which is sorta super econo class. This isn’t really a problem.. I mean I still love the monitor and it’s amazing to me that you could get a 24″ HD monitor for so cheap.. but..

I really want my second monitor to be capable of playing movies from some sort of a Blue Ray type DVD drive.. or perhaps from cable.. and the higher end Dell has a much higher contrast ratio and.. well if you’re serious about color, which as a visual artist you can’t help but be, you really need the better monitor. Another feature I like of it is the built in card reader plus the USB hub. If that weren’t enough it’s rotatable.. so it can be a horizontal wide screen sorta thing.. or a vertical tall sorta thing. This latter option would be absolutely awesome for working with Reason.. among other things.

How’d the tech support leave ya? 

So, how do my technical challenges, and experiences with there tech support, reflect on Celemony? 

I think the problem came down to some sorta corruption on the installer DVD.. which is why, as the tech support guy said “this is anything but a known problem.” While it would be possible for the tech support experience to be better.. having to wait around to hear back.. and then having to email back to hear back.. and all that.. I have to say that.. I don’t feel that it was that bad.

How many times do you feel like it’s not really a human interaction with the tech person you’re dealing with? How many tech support people will treat you like a moron?  If anything they might have assumed I was more sophisticated then I am.. He told me I had to repair disk permission as a part of the process.. but didn’t explain that you do that through Apple’s hard disk utility.. I sorta knew that, but I wouldn’t necessarily imagine the average user would.

I think it was a stump the experts sorta situation… and that these kinds of things happen.. well that’s just the way things are.. so it doesn’t bother me too much. So over all it was a positive sorta thing.. my first interaction with company.. or I certainly don’t feel pissy about it.

So if the software works great.. yeah, I’ll be recommending it a good deal.. 

Back to how all this effects our Plot:

I dream of a creative process…  a process that is very different from my current process: My current process is very much a slave to technical considerations..  I see the possibility, at least, of leaving those shackles behind. I could sit down, write out some lyrics, see what I think..  sit down on my guitar, riff away.. come up with something here, something there.. and just sorta put it together in the computer.

Conventionally, if I want to put guitar playing into my music.. just a simple riff, it’ll take me about a day, between the conception and getting the performance up to par.. When you’re dealing with integrating guitar based music into an electronic context.. the beat of the electronic stuff is robot on perfect, which is different from how real humans play… this robot on perfect then highlights the imperfection of your playing, calling you to a higher standard. This isn’t always ideal.. there’s value in human imperfection..

In any event.. when I work on the electronic music side of things, I tend to work very very fast.. my compositional process is one of reacting to what I’m producing.. so if the process has to get slowed down to the point that it takes a day just to put in one guitar part… that kinda throws a monkey wrench into the process.. it disturbs your perception of your musics ecology.. 

If, on the other hand, I could sit down at my guitar, come up with a riff, record it, fix it, and go.. the process will not be disturbed.. If my guitar playing is more like.. a basis for something.. that I can then transmute into something else again… we’re really talking about limitless possibilities.. I mean the music I make will not be limited by the limitations of my musicianship.. which is really why I got into electronic music in the first place.

Video’s to End on

This is mildly off topic, but fits into the larger conversation, and I thought it was real interesting to take a look at.. from the 1980s

How about that.. a compact disk or “cd” using laser beams? Pretty sci fi ha?

[ editors note: I believe this blog entry was started yesterday, but I was to tired to finish it last night, so here it is now ] 

I’m still sick mind you, which roughly translates into barely capable of doing much of anything, but.. sitting at a computer isn’t always one of those things you can’t quite do.. I suppose it depends on the cognitive demands it places on you.. actually.. its about 6 30 PM, as I write, and I’m feeling about ready to just collapse… so maybe I’m pushing it a little by writing this.

So… I wont go into all of it.. but I got Digital Performer going on this computer.. The first challenge was just getting it to work right. You would think this would be pretty straight forward.. but it proved its self more difficult then that.

I’ve been using DP for a number of years now, though never as my primary DAW, and I must confess that it still represents something of challenge to me.. Though I feel up to the challenge, it’s pretty clear that I’m in the early stages of meeting that challenge. If the size of the manuel is any indication of the level of complexity we are dealing with, the Digital Performer manuel comes out to well over 1000 pages. Fortunately ones doesn’t have to read quite all of that to get up and running. 

The complexity level is made worse by the fact that I have the full Komplete bundle to worry about.. and for the moment, without the benefit of Kore. I’m feeling, as I scratch Komplete 5’s surface, the need Kore addresses… which is to say.. how do you manage / navigate your way through the thousands (is it 7,500?) of instruments and sounds you now have on call?

At the moment I’m lucky if I can figure out how to load the instrument up into DP, let alone edit it’s MIDI sequence.. I’ve set up some mixer routing stuff.. which DP is a little more sophisticated then the versions of Cubase I’ve used in the past.. though I understand the latest version of Cubase has moved some steps forward on this front.

Basically.. in approaching these kinds of projects you ask questions like.. well first you select your sound pallets.. which is to say what instruments you want to use (which has something to do with what sounds might go well together), and possibly which effects.. and go about a little mixing, and a little sequencing, and in a short space of time.. it starts writing its self. But.. when you’re in a position where you have thousands of new sounds to choose from.. and you’re not entirely sure what’s up with the effects you have to choose from.. it’s a little harder to move forward…

As much as I’ve read great things about DP’s effects, new effects that have some since last I used it, I must confess that I’m feeling a little underwhelmed..  now mind you I say this as someone who hasn’t spent more then 15 minutes trying to come up with a decent reverb sound… so please take this with a grain of salt.. but my impression is that the effects bundled with Digital Performer are.. perhaps good enough to get you started, but probably not enough to get you all the way there.. to put it a certain sorta way.

All of which is enough to give me a moment of depression..  if not for the fact.. and this is funny as they don’t really emphasize this too much, that Kore comes with 32 different effects.. including a number of reverb and delays sounds! So it may not mean that I have to go out there and look at effects packages just yet. 

In truth, however, I don’t think you can normally expect to buy a DAW and have all your bases covered, right out of the Box. I guess I was hoping that the need would be less pressing.. I have, as I may have mentioned in recent blog entires, been at least taking a look at various effects bundles that might add something to where I’m at.. It’s just that.. 

Latter that night: 

Moving from Cubase to Digital Performer 

Perhaps I was over stating how much I have to learn when it comes to DP. The truth is that I’ve simply forgotten a lot, and much of that comes back pretty fast.. Still, I have far to go.. Much of which has to do with knowing the best way to approach certain problems.

It’s often said that a given DAW is like a religion.. they each have there own way of going about things.  I use enough of them so that it’s mostly intuitive for me, picking up a new one.. But what of the DP way versus the Cubase way?

For the moment DP feels a lot more unwieldy to me.. I say for the moment because I’m quite sure that if I knew better… it would be a lot less unwieldy.. It’s like going from a master of one thing to an amateur of another.. you’re a lot more effective as a master. 

To some extent.. I might have said gong from Reason to DP + Komplete, and I’ll explain why.

Without really knowing what instruments are what, without really being orientated to this new world.. I found myself jumping in with certain presumptions. For instance.. when I think of my music production I think of certain categories of instruments.. of sounds, that I would conventionally mix together.. and roughly, based off what I know of the Komplete bundle.. I jump into those instruments which might have sounds that fit that need.. but without any clue as to how the specifics might work out.

So I start with Battery, loading up a rock type drum kit. I don’t bother to figure out anything with regards to how Battery works.. I just want to load it up.. There’s not really that much in the rock category of drum kit, as it turns out.. and the resulting kit I’m not entirely sure how to be expressive with.. This for two reasons.. #1 A certain cluelessness about DPs MIDI sequencing.. and its editors.. and #2 A certain cluelessness about the drum kit its self.

It turns out that DP will generally throw out a default velocity value of 64. Velocity, in MIDI, is a number between 1 and 128. Velocity represents how hard you hit a key on the keyboard. Now in the case of Battery and our Drum kit, this has two significant implications.

#1 How hard you hit a key impacts how load that instrument is going to play.. how sensitive a given instrument is to velocity is something that can generally be programmed into the instrument.. So.. bare this in mind..

#2 Battery has a hell of a lot of velocity layers in its sample maps…Ok.. this is going to take some explanation:  For the purposes of Battery, a sample map has two things to think about.. A, What drum are you hitting.. another words.. what key are you pressing.. depending on what key, that’s going to effect what sample.. is it a bass drum, or is it a snare drum? B, Velocity layers means.. at different velocities.. at different numbers between 1 and 128, different samples will get played.

It is perhaps important to note here that drums are a kind of instrument that are expressive in how hard they are hit, as well as there timing.. so to speak.. or lets say rhythm.. and will sound very different depending on how hard you hit them.. and indeed, on a real acoustic drum kit.. where on the drum head you hit them.. so they really do need to take advantage of velocity layers, right?

Ok.. Digital Performer sends a default value of 64… And I’m used to production environments that send a default value of 100.. that’s point one. Point 2 is we are dealing with an instrument that is deeply expressive relative to how hard you hit the thing.. that’s point two..

Now when I say a “default value” what I mean is.. you’ll open up an editor.. lets say a keyboard type editor.. and you’ll mouse onto a note on the keyboard to hear a sound.. by default you get 64.

If we compare this to Reason for a moment.. Reason is much less expressive then all this. In some cases Reason drums only have 3 velocity layers.. hell, maybe only one.. so if the entire expressive range of an instrument is squashed down to that.. and you’re used to be expressive in that world.. there’s a certain type of leap you need to make to be expressive in this here Digital Performer + Battery world.

Interestingly enough.. if you listen to my music.. you’ll note that an awful lot of what is going on is mixing.. it’s via mixing that I get expressive in how loud or soft sounds are.. generally. Or you might say that’s almost like my default way..

Ok.. I don’t mean to make this drone on forever, but now its time to bring up another thing.. that I think I meant to say in a blog entry sometime ago.. It’s as if I have music production skills that.. lets say were X deep by Y wide.. That depth and width is more then what I can bring into my consciousness in a single day of playing around.. What happens is.. I need to warm up.. and once I’m really warmed up.. why yes, velocity is absolutely something I’m expressive with.. but I’m not generally all that expressive with it when I’m just warming up. 

Arguably.. Digital Performer is set up to be more expressive in terms of velocity, by making 64 the default.  Believe it or not I was using Performer back in the early 90s.. when it was only a sequencer.. and at that time, velocity was the only way I was able to be expressive with volume.. though DP may have had some ability to automate mixes then that I might not have known about.. 

Ok.. so that covers the challenges of Battery, right?

Well next I gotta turn to Massive! 

By no means do I have a clue as to how to work Massive. About all I understand of Massive is that it has “some aggressive applications.” Well ok, I’ve read a little more then this about it.. but basically. 

Well, upon bringing Massive into the mix, the first thing I notice is that Massive overshadows all the other instruments in the mix.. or at least the patch I selected did. This is what we call in the biz “a problem.”

Mind you at this point we are just throwing paint on the wall.. eventually we will react to that paint, and develop something out of what we see in the wall.. so facilitating process is important.. and by Massive having this sort of effect.. well, that means we need to figure out how to approach process again…

Ok.. so the reason Massive is over shadowing all the other instruments is because it is a frequency hog! The job of the Mix engineer is to isolate the various instruments into there own frequency spaces.. so you can hear everything.. and Massive wants to be in everyone’s frequency space. The answer to this problem is simple, we call it EQ.

Or is it so simple? For starters DP offers us two EQs.. a parametric EQ and a “Master Works EQ,” which, as it turns out.. is a kind of parametric EQ.  Ok ok ok.. I know,  your asking “what the hell is a parametric eq anyway?”

Basically, all sound are fluctuations of amplitude across a frequency spectrum. Amplitude being loudness to softness.. frequency being something similar to pitch. With a parametric EQ, you first select what frequency you want to effect, you then choose how much you want to turn up or down that frequency, and then you decide how broadly you want the effect to happen.. the sort of curve if you will, around your target frequency. Make sense?

In Cubase you have 4 bands of parametric EQ as a default part of every channel in your mix… In DP you have to actually add plugs into to your channel to get your parametric EQ. In DP the Parametric EQ can have 2, 4, 0r 8 bands. The Master Works EQ in Digital Performer is a 5 band EQ, but its much more complex then just that.. enough so that it takes up 7 pages in the manuel.. and I haven’t gotten around to reading it all just yet.

Basically.. when you’re creating a mix, when your job is to isolate different parts of the mix into there own frequency space.. what you would conventionally do is throw a parametric EQ on each channel (or sub group, but I wont explain that here as that would only make this all too complex, not that it isn’t already).. and you would turn up the frequency that instrument was basically taking place in, and turn down the other frequency.. doing this with all the instruments.. taking instrument that occupied overlapping frequencies and putting them on opposite ends of the stereo field..

The trouble with my music is it’s “kinetic” which is my way of saying.. things move around.. and I like to have the freedom to move things around.. what this means is that if I’m to throw a parametric EQ on any channel.. I have to then automate that in a way that makes sense for what the content of that channel is doing at any particular moment.. which at the very least is an extra layer of labor for me.. which will impact process negatively.. at least until such time as I get warmed up..

A little latter:

I haven’t really gotten to the heart of the Reason VS DP + Komplete thing, have I? Or what I wanted to get to here. The best I can do, for tonight, is to say this is all but once small nuance. What I had wanted to get to talking about is working with REX files (a kind of loop technology) in Reason versus in Kontakt.. which will use REX, as I understand it.. but Kontakt is a very different sort of loop player then Dr. REX, as we find in Reason.

There’s a lot more going on in my production, that seems worth mentioning.. but alas I am too tired..

Right now my brain is turning towards.. well.. You know I hope you don’t take any of this as me putting down Reason.. Reason’s simplicity is what makes it great.. but what makes DP + Komplete + X great is its unbridled power.  This probably doesn’t make any sense as a way to assess these things.. but one way is to look at price tags.. my off the cuff statements here could be off by $100 here or there.. but you’ll get my drift.

Reason costs around $400 or $500. Digital Performer’s list price is around $800, or was last time I checked.. and Komplete’s was somewhere between $1500 and $1000… and probably a substantial savings at that. If We were to throw the mixing effects into the bag.. add another grand to that.. so how’s a $400 or $500 environment to compare with a $3000 environment?A little more if we were to add Kore to our equations?  My experience has been that the cost of software often has a certain relationship to it’s complexity.. and I must say that I feel like I’m jumping back into the deep end.

So far, and I haven’t scratched the surface.. I have to say that its “un fucking believable.” Massive, the more I listen to it.. and just that one patch I’m using.. It’s just amazing sounding. I mean it has all the richness of.. well lets say a guitar sound.. in a lot of ways.. I mean it has a lot of the character of it.. you could see it being in Marilyn Manson’s studio, or something..

And the drum kit I’m using.. gosh it just sounds so organic.. I find myself wanting to make the kinds of mixing decisions that I normally hear grammy award winning mix engineers talking about.. which is such a subtle craft.. I often wonder what the hell they are talking about.. but now I feel like I’m in a world where it all makes sense.. ahh but if only I had the money to get some good studio monitors and some acoustic treatment for my studio.. then I could really be in a position to make those kinds of critical judgements..  well I guess that’ll just have to wait for gainful employment or.. budget revaluations of what kind or another..

So.. I’m working on my first bit of sound work since upgrading from an 867 MHz G4 to an 8 core 2.7 GHz Mac Pro…  This is totally produced with Reason thus far..  It’s a work in progress, and I wanna share…  so check it out by clicking here (and then following the link), And if you’re feeling kind.. leave a comment and tell me what you think.

It’s been a while, ha? Man, I’ve been suffering through a bit of a nightmare. My old computer died.. and with it all my passwords and user names.. and access to all my sites.. and so it’s taken me this long to get back in here.. I’ve been blogging, in the mean time, on my myspace.. if you’re into reading me and find  that nothings happening here.. that’s a place you could always go and look.

So lots has been happening since last I spoke here. I’m not even sure what I’ve said here and what I haven’t.. I don’t mean to repeat myself.. but um.. I don’t know, I think today’s blog post ought to be a random smattering of.. just whatever might be in my head and wanting to express its self.

I finally got Reason running on the new computer, and I’ve started my first project… Reason on a Mac Pro is very different then reason on a G4 Power Mac, or for that matter Reason on a budget PC laptop from a few years back. My suspicion is that Reason doesn’t have great multithreading.. which means it’s not great for taking advantage of multiple processor cores.. which is at the heart of what makes this new computer so powerful..   I’m only using, at the peak points of my current project, about 10% of my processing power, but Reason tells me I’m about half way through my processing power. I’m not sure exactly how this works but…

A big part of the difference, between working with Reason on the G4 versus Mac Pro, is how many effects and instruments you can use before your computer starts to choke. Normally I’m working under fairly strict restrictions.. but so far on the Mac Pro.. I have no sense of limitations.. or at least not of limitations that I in anyway feel.

The implication is… well I just keep throwing instruments and effects into the rack.. I’ll sorta be thinking “well, for the next section I want to sorta go in this direction” and I assemble a kind of sonic pallet for doing so.. but I feel as though I’m putting together a larger pallet then I’m actually using.. Or.. the project simply hasn’t grown into the pallet yet.

An implication of this is you’re projects can become a little unwieldy.. Suddenly you have to organize and manage about 10 or 20 times as much stuff.. You’re thinking along the lines “how can I take advantage of the power difference between the new system and the old one?” An obvious answer is that you’re now able to enter a world of sonic complexity that is many order of magnitudes beyond where you previously were at. All of which is great, but it also magnifies the labor in equal measure.

It’s been a little while since I’ve done much with Reason.. since I was doing serious sound work.. not since november really.. So a part of what I’m doing now is really just warming up.. really just sorta.. well trying to get to where I was at before.

You know.. my music production process is a little complicated. It’s the sorta thing where every breath you breath.. every bit of energy, you can put into it.. At that point there’s a richness, and a complexity.. that… well its as if your head can only hold so much at any given time.. and so to fully jump in these waters, you need to be willing to make a deep commitment..  and there’s a kind of transitional period between normal life, and the life of one who’s spending time in these waters.

Once I’m fully warmed up.. the challenge is to take this stuff to a whole new level. I suppose the trouble is that Reason is only a small fraction of the new software studio environment.. I’m also going from Live 6, to Live 7, going from Komplete 3 to Komplete 5, and going from a very old version of Digital Performer, that I never really mastered, to the new version. So as deeply as I might be trying to jump into Reason.. it’s really only a very small part of a larger world to jump into.

On my Zarmattathustra’s Deep Space Adventures project, I anticipated much of where I pan on going now. ZDPA was about trying to do the most I could with as little as I had.. that 867 G4…  So I explored creative possibilities that circumvented the limited processor resources.. which forced me to explore working in ways I hadn’t before. Well.. in many ways that’s where I’m going now.. accept add to that having a hell of a lot more power.. like maybe by a factor of 24 or so?

I’ve set before myself a notion of a project that would take 2 years to complete, but central in this notion is the idea of mystery. What this means is.. yeah, sure.. we have this 2 year guideline… but we don’t even know what the guideline really means!

Along time ago I was thinking.. If I could only get this set of tools together.. just imagine what I could do. Well, now its time to explore that for real. Will it be anywhere near my dreams? I don’t really know.

The guideline… lets just atomize it. Lets just talk about what we REALLY want to accomplish.. not what we think we should, or to worry about ways of rationalizing what we really want. I think there’s a sense of a timeline for skill development. Another words.. I’m interested in what I’ll be capable of at whatever period of time.. perhaps even more then I’m interested in producing finished, or great, product.

Another important thing is to actually produce finished project.. hopefully of some greatness.. and actually bring it to market, and try and make some money from it. Actually turn all this crazy art stuff into a business!

Do you spy a contradiction in here? Well I think what I’m saying is.. you could look at a 2 year span of time and think “what could I achieve in that time period?” I think what I’m saying is that my metric for success is not what I can achieve in that time period in a purely products sense.. I think product is a part of it.. is central to the journey and adventure.. but its needs to be balanced with other ends as well.. which must be given equal weight…. or weight equal to.. however important I want to make them.. Or I mean its an open question as to what the order of wills ought to be… this is a part of the mystery we must manage.

A few latter:

I think Reason is inspiring this thought.. along with the prospects of new sound software. In the mix of things I’m planning on taking on, sound is the part that I already have the strongest mastery of. Another words it doesn’t have a steep learning curve associated with it. I want to go nuts with music, but that doesn’t necessarily forward the cause of mastering steep learning curves, though it does further many things.

If sound were to be the center of what I’m doing.. Perhaps 3D and video.. perhaps I don’t need to bring these things to a super level of mastery.. I mean if these are projects that are more bout the sound then video.. I say this knowing full well that animation and motion graphics are important to me.. creating an aesthetic experience is important to me.. but maybe…

A few latter:

Well I guess the question could be like.. how complex a given thing is. Ok, we all know that high level 3D takes about 6 months to get so you can actually do it.. but lets say you carved out a kind of niche.. particular parts of the whole where you were to put your central focus on.

So lets say we want to start by creating some basic models… well maybe not all that basic but… If we are doing a space opera.. we probably want to build some space ships, some and some “sets.” If photography is playing a key roll in our adventures.. much of the sets could be.. almost like faux 3D.. like you take a photograph and cut it up, and use parts of it for different things.. instead of going to the trouble of modeling a forest.. you have pictures of clumps of forest.. maybe even video of forests… that get projected onto 3D Models that are.. well I don’t know what exactly.. but simple anyway. We’re not shooting for realism.. we are abstracting things, surreal-izing them if you will. And doing so in such a way that they require less mastery of the over all learning curve.

And we’d probably want to create some characters in here somewhere.. but the point is.. is it possible to get great results by limiting our scope in certain areas.. there by managing the learning demands? If I can create a visual language that only uses a part of the total tool set.. I can then bring that to mastery in a much shorter time period.  

Latter:

Ok, lets post this sucker.