Well I thought I’d share the lyrics to the song / music I’m working on.. blogged about in this post, among others. But it should add something to our understanding of like.. the thematic whatevers of it.

I don’t know, what the future holds. All I know, is the unknowns know it all. They are the contexts, that breeth the meaning into it all. How do you live, in relationship to this truth? I could tell you.. but then I’d have to kill you.

Would you like to die? Oh would you like to die? Only by dying, can you glimps what I’m meaning. Would you like to know? Oh wouldn’t you like to know what I’m meaning!

All life is suffering,

All life is suffering!

Would you like me to save you?

From all you’re suffering?

I would like to help you.

I would like to help you!

I would love to help you, cause that’s just the kind of guy I am.

I’m a loving compassionate soul, don’t cha know?

A loving compassionate soul, that’s right!

So why don’t you let me love you,

why don’t you let me love you?

Don’t cha know we all need love!

So baby, why don’t cha let me put my love into you!

I don’t know, what the future holds. All I know, is the unknowns know it all. They are the contexts, that breeth the meaning into it all. How do you live, in relationship to this truth? I could tell you.. but then I’d have to kill you.

Only by dying, can you glimps what I’m meaning. Would you like to know? Oh wouldn’t you like to know what I’m meaning!

All life is suffering!

Would you like me to save you?

From all you’re suffering?

I would love to help you

 

So why don’t you let me love you,

why don’t you let me love you?

Don’t cha know we all need love!

So baby, why don’t cha let me put my love into you!

 

OH YEAH! OH YEAH BABBY! I KNOW YOU LIKE IT WHEN I DO IT LIKE THAT.

OH YEAH! OH YEAH!

Mmm YEAH Mmm YEAH!

MMM MMM MMM YEA

I don’t know, what the future holds. All I know, is the unknowns know it all. They are the contexts, that breeth the meaning into it all. How do you live, in relationship to this truth? I could tell you..

The formating is a little messed up but.. other then that

[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..

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.

As we speak I’m getting ready to rush out of the house for a Jeff Pulver type meet up thang…  So not too much time to talk about too much..

I’m working on the guitar solo section, for the track I’ve been talking about in recent postings.. I haven’t figured out the proper work flow with the liquid mix.. even when I turn all the plugins off.. I get high latency… so I decided to just create a new project, where I’d do the the guitar parts, and then import then into the main project.. hoping i can import the midi tracks whole sale..  just another thing to have to work out.

I’m engaging in a process I’ve done before.. You sit at your guitar and try and work out the parts, while programing them into the computer.. for synths to play / stand in for the guitars… so you can work out exactly how things fit together.. This process has its pros and cons.. not the least of which is it’s hard to make things swing.. and the midi parts are more approximations of what it’ll sound like, and the performances.. then they are actually what you plan on playing.. which creates the problem of hearing things kinda wrong during this stage of things. Further.. or even as a result.. this process can change what you’re writing.. so you write it in such a way to make it easier to program or perform.. which is less then ideal.

The advantage of this sorta thing.. well what I’m trying to do is create a solo section which is somewhat of a “jam out” section. You have two guitars doing there thing.. they, to one degree or another.. exchange between playing rhythm and lead…  and will eventually work out to doing harmonized leads.. 

The plan is to actually attempt to perform the thing.. probably at about half speed.. and then edit / speed up to real speed.. in post, so to speak. This will result in a lot of work…. but I’m hoping it’ll be worth it. Just the fact that it is a lot of work.. may make it so this section will be rather short, tight, and concise.

lyrics 

Another issue I’m having is in the lyrics: There is no verse chorus thing going on.. right now we just have 3 riffs that play into each other.. I’m writing out vocal lines without knowing what they should say. I have this feeling that there ought to some sorta chorus-ish part.. where we here the same lines repeated at different parts of the song…. but for now it seems like the first few words of the first riff.. will repeat.. and then it’ll all go in a different direction after the repeat.

guitar 

Another idea that’s evolving is we might have 2 solo areas in the song.. The one I’m working on now.. and another that’ll be… fairly insane…

insanity

One thought is to just improvise out some guitar playing.. and then edit the solo’s in melodyne… make them all work together.. The challenge I foresee with this approach is.. that I play too damn fast.. The song is already a very fast song.. and even relative to that fast tempo.. the notes will no doubt go faster then any grid will work..  and I’m not sure how well Melodyne will cope with all that. 

The real advantage of working this way is.. its a lot more human.. a lot more “the real me,” in a certain sense.. The performance will be more organic.. and the actual playing will be.. more and unpredictable. 

Later, back from Pulver:

Had a really great time, I LOVE these things. There was a kind of after twitter-ish party that lead out to karaoke.. It was a rather intimate crowd at this point…  Apparently there was a party from Google there as well.. which made it sorta surreal.. being with social media folks and the fellow who started VON….

I’d say more about.. the project or the night.. but I’m feeling like my blogging has had better moments, so I’ll just leave this as it is. 

Ok, this is a somewhat long-ish story.. the story of Matt’s recent woes.. from anxiety, career, money, banks, and what not to.. well lets say stuff..  which will eventually lead us into my most recent trip to guitar center, the buying of the Liquid Mix 16, and then into the current music production project… 

It all started last Sunday. I was in a sleep deprived state, and as is my way, running late to the Boston Media Makers. The Boston Media Makers is now taking place at Doyle’s Cafe in JP.. (Boston).. so it’s new media plus breakfast…  and so I needed to go to the bank to get money to fill up my gas tank, buy an energy drink, smokes, and still have enough left over for breakfast.. and then things turned ugly! 

The bank tells me I put in the wrong pin number.. a few tries latter and the ATM won’t give me the time of day. WTF I think… but being sleep deprived.. in a somewhat LSD like consciousness.. made even more LSD-ish after watching a documentary on the Beats.. who knows, maybe I did get the pin wrong?

So long story short, got Gas, smokes, and my Monster on credit, breakfast on cash… but it was a stress feast combination of sleep deprivation, running late, and.. the ATM experience. All of which fueled a little extra anxiety over how I presented myself at the media makers..  but that’s another blog entry.

[Editor’s Note: This is a long, sometimes rambling entry.. so brace your self, you hardy souls whom might actually get through it.. also to note is a certain connection between this entry, and the recent social media cool-aid entry.] 

More problems:

1. I was actually planning on buying a computer monitor, at Micro Center in Boston, with cash after the meeting… It’s the closest “good” computer store I know… or at least see if they had the Dell I wanted, what there price was.. and that sorta thing.
2. The food supply in the house was running low.. so grocery shopping had to be done soon.
3. My dad had medication that needed to be picked up from the CVS

I should maybe break off from this and explain my anxiety paranoia at this point? When my mom died I was told, by a couple aunts, not to pay the credit card bills that were my mom’s bills. Someone had talked to a lawyer about this.. and something to do with Massachusetts state law.. trouble is, I never actually talked to a lawyer.. and am kind of vague about all this.

[Editors note: Matt wanted to insert this scene from the end of THX 1138, as it seems express of the psycho reality of his situation.

You’d perhaps have to see the full movie to really appreciate the significants of this clip.. and probably need to read the rest of the blog entry to, while you were at it.. but pay attention to a certain subtext of this blog entry.. its all sorta crystalized here..] 

In any event… there’s lots of credit card companies calling the house.. I have yet to talk to any of them as.. well until I get the iPhone.. I’m a very difficult person to get in touch with via the phone.

Now the LSD like consciousness of sleep deprivation does have… well you sometimes attribute causality to things that, in reality, don’t have a causal connection. These causal connections are truths of a kind of symbolic nature.. they have something to do what’s going on in you psyche.

So what’s going on in Matt’s psyche?

This is really a subject for another time, I mean to really dig into… I will tell you that since my mom passed things have not been real easy… and that most of the uneasiness of it is not something that expresses its self consciously.. It’s kind of a complicated thing.. and I feel like blogging about it might actually be helpful to me.. or at least talking about it.. but it’s somehow hard to talk about.

All these inward tension.. they expressed them selves in the paranoid dilution that.. well I think the bank might actually be one of the creditors… so the paranoid delusion.. was there was something more to my inability to get into the bank then.. some sorta pin number problem. And with this was the fear that I wouldn’t have access to money to pay bills.. so I shouldn’t write a check till I got to the bottom of this.

On top of all that.. another expression of anxiety is a procrastination of bill paying.. so the bills are.. now in the over due column.. and one expects one’s credit is getting dinged.

Crazy is as Crazy Does 

Ok.. so allow me to stop here and try and explain a little of this.. For one thing I’ve been behind on sleep for a little while now… for another I’m being a little operatic in how I’m talking about it.. which is to say I’m amplifying the story a little.. which is not quite to say I’m not crazy.. just that.. I’m turning up the gain of a certain sorta crazy.. or perhaps on the microscope through which we are looking at it… 

[editors note: Matt’s operatic-ness, at this point in the entry, is mainly expressed through with language like “paranoid delusions,” which sorta overstates things “a bit.” And what he’s talking about is the casual connections sleep deprivation is facilitating.] 

Matt’s Plot 

Ok, so lets pull back a little and take a look at my life’s plot, and where this moment fits in it all. I’m trying to do this “artist” shtick thing. I don’t know if you’ve heard the cliche about starving artists? Well.. I don’t believe that being an artist means you have to starve.. but the cliche is at least expressive of the fact that making a living as an artist is no easy feet.. more so when you’re as uncompromising as I am.

Though I march forward in a sorta heroic-ish way.. I don’t think anyone could walk this walk without there being a lot of really huge tension over what the future might bring.. It’s really that I’m crazy enough to not let that keep me from walking this way…  [Editors note: This would be part of the significance of the THX reference] but there is still that fear that it might all come to naught.. and that perhaps all my sacrifices are in vain..  and this is a very big tension.. particularly as it interacts in a larger ecology of tensions.

Now.. if you ask me about the “objective real reality” of the situation.. I’ll tell you.. things are probably “A-Ok.” Allow me to give you reasons why things are probably “A-Ok.”

1. I’m doing the social media shtick. Why would this make things A-Ok? Well.. I’m connected / networked in with a pretty substantial crowd of folks. If you’re reading this, you might be one of said substantial folks? There’s a humanness to.. many of these connections where.. to one degree or another, we really do care about each others well being.. and.. all of us are pretty well connected, one way or another.. and the long and the short of it is.. social media is a powerful tool for finding work.
2. It is not an infrequent thing that.. I get a job lead.. or some connection leads to something. Of course I don’t put a premium on following this stuff up.. because of how focused I am trying to be on trying to do my own thing.. but the point is there is stuff out there.
3. Very sweet and wonderful people have actually come out and asked me what they could do to help. Can you dig that? For me that’s down right mind blowing.. but its true.
4. What I’m doing.. in my own adventures.. has within it’s self the idea.. that I’m putting together a skill set for a job that does not yet exist. And believe it or not I’m actually networking with people who could us those services.. even if they don’t know it yet.

Latter:

There’s more to this story… lots more.. but for the purposes of this blog entry I only want to go so far as to say that tensions can obscure this reality.. so that it doesn’t feel like things are “A-Ok” in the big picture… even if they kinda sorta are. And we could talk about this more but…

Yeah.. so imagine the fear like.. you don’t know if you’re going to be able to take care of your father or your self, that the world could be crumbling down… This kind of stress inevitably leads me into pushing harder in my work.. and my self criticism gets much worse then it sometimes can be anyway.

None of this would have been a big deal if not for.. by that monday.. there was very little food in the house.. and if not for.. I had gotten to the bank that day prior to its closing.. I didn’t realize this.. but our bank likes to close at 4PM.. in order to get there I kinda have to fight my way through my tensions over it.. and so find myself there and.. the bank closed.. and I didn’t even know there hours! And so days passed with this hanging over my head.. all of it.

Add to all this that here I am gearing up on these music projects.. and I need to go out and buy more gear! I was also planning on getting an iPhone.. still needed to buy my Podcamp ticket.. I’m not sure what else.. and all of that was.. at least in my fears, looking like it might not work out.

And the dark clouds reseed.

Well finally I did get into the bank.. did make a with drawl so I have enough cash in my pocket to run for a few weeks.. somehow the pin number.. sorta fixed, accept it still wasn’t able to use it.. so maybe I’ve somehow miss remembered it.. anyway they are sending me the numbers so I’ll have them..

That dark cloud emphasized how fragile I can feel.. way out here in starving artist vill.. and it was a crazy rough week for me.. when the clouds finally did leave.. I finally decided that it was indeed time to make my trip to Guitar Center and pick up Liquid Mix 16. This was a long deliberation.. most of which is documented in this blog.. 

But wait, there’s more! 

I couldn’t find my car keys.. and not only that but I still had grocery shopping yet to do.. I had done a little after the with drawl…  but.. now without my keys, how could I do this? It wasn’t till sometime today when I finally found the keys.. and boy do I hate doing grocery shopping on the weekends, when the places are a crowded madness.. screw that!

So I made my way over to Guitar Center, finally. Was I really going to do it?

I wish I knew these guys names more.. I told the sales guy “I’m here for the Liquid Mix 16.” His eyes sorta widened.. “That’s a great little unit.” What? Every sales guy in the pro audio department didn’t even know what it was.. nor did they know much of anything of any of the mix engineer-ish tools I had been looking for.. but this guy new it.. and was thinking of getting one for him self.

I then rattled off a number of things I had been looking for..

Ok, let me explain. Guitar Center has a thing where you pay no interest for 3 months, 6 months, a year.. depending on what mood there marketing department is in.. what this means is you can buy stuff on credit without interest payments.. which is something you can’t easily do over the internet.. and credit card interests rates being what they are.. buying on credit will add a hell of a lot to your bill.. so going to Guitar Center for the big ticket items is what makes the most sense at this point..

So a number of pieces of gear.. gear that other sales folks had never even heard of.. stuff that you often can’t find on the Guitar Center website.. he could find in the computer.. stuff that the other sales folks didn’t think they carried.

So it was pretty awesome.. I mean he could actually answer some of my questions!

Onto the Liquid Mix 16

I had read where people had had problems with instillation.. particularly with Digital Performer.. and boy have I had software problems lately..  so I was a little nervous.. but the instillation was more or less as smooth as they come.. and before you knew it, I was up and running.

Liquid Mix is… well you get a library of 40 compressors and 20 EQs. I’ve explained this ad nauseam else where in this blog.. but basically you’re getting this library of the most high class EQs and Compressors on the planet.. each of which works in slightly different ways… is good for different sorts of applications.. colors sound differently.. etc. 

The first problem you run into is.. “which should I use?” To further complicate matters.. its sorta like a hockey video game where they can’t use the names of real NHL teams.. where they can’t give you the names of the real gear you’re using.. not that that would make too much of a difference as I don’t actually know the names of the real gear anyway.. but.. if you read interviews with various mix engineers.. telling you what they use for what.. or articles on these subjects..  you’d kind of like to know what you’re dealing with… Fortunately I found an old Sound On Sound review of Liquid Mix that included the names.

The light in my room is out.. so I couldn’t actually go digging through magazines to find that recent article on mix buss compression…  but upon doing the google.. I found this blog entry.. from of all people.. Charles Dye, which covered the subject.. and recommend an SSL compressor for my master buss. (Charles is quite the sophisticated fellow for this sorta thing).

And with that I jumped in

First, you must understand that I usually make crazy music like this (click on the little arrow to hear, and yes, it is a free download.. but it’ll stream for ya fine )

Matt Searles – Offering A Hand To The Ghost

This kind of electronic music has very different sorta mixing requirements from my new experimental electronic metal thing.. I mean.. now I have to try and be “a real” mix engineer. God save us!!! And I was fearful that.. well I hear a lot of stories of the struggles folks go through when they are first starting out..

But strangely.. I felt as if I had discovered that I had a real talent for this…  upon reflection

The Start of my Mix Engineering Training: “The JP Years.” 

After college I would hang out with.. the man we call “The Doctor” aka Diggity Dave.. and Ev-on, as he sometimes refers to him self in the comments of these blog entries.. Now.. these fine upstanding citizens..  well

1. They are artists to.. and were struggling to
2. There was more alcohol and Pot going on then…  lol, good times
3. Crazy adventures were the norm.. one could become quite a fine author with the material our of those times.
4. Diggity did indeed have a stereo system with the best speakers I had ever heard in my life.. at that point.

We’d throw CDs in there.. just to see what we had been missing all these years.. and I was forever analyzing the mixes. Mind you, at the time.. I wasn’t really all that sophisticated in my mix analytic abilities.. but it was surely something.. Dave and Evan’s music tastes had a whole lot of Hip Hop going on.. classic rock.. metal, electronic stuff..  even Curtis Mayfield.. quite the eclecticism.. and I with my Zappa and assorted strange stuff… and there was Jim whom would sometimes be there.. with his punk and indy rock.. and so.. though we were all rather poor.. we were wealthy in terms of the music we were all able to hear.. and it was quite an education.

I’d just listen to those records and dream of the day I could have a chance to put one together.. and could I ever make one as good as some of the stuff we were hearing? Oh my god, so much amazing stuff!!! Seems like these days I don’t get a chance to listen to too much.. but back then, oh wow!

The electronic music Mix training:  

Ok, how about another one of my tracks?

Matt Searles – Vasperian Blogocombat

The production in this track was a little rushed.. so there’s certainly things in there I’m not totally happy with.. but there’s also a lot in there that has me feeling very proud…. that I think is sorta amazing.. the marriage of the mix and the composition.. the experience.. the scenes.. the painting of it.. to put it a certain way.

When you listen to stuff like that.. you can kind of tell I’m really thinking about the mix… even if there are huge problems here and there.. and even the problems.. its sorta like a punk rock school of mixing or something.. where we kinda consider them in a different light.. or something.

So.. my music production is kinda all about the mix, on a certain level… but the mix isn’t static.. nothing stays still. In metal.. things stay still. The guitarist stays over there.. the bass player over there… no ones moving that drum set.. so my electronic music is all about a mix that has a virtual stage that is forever in flux. I regard it much more as being about “Mix Painting” then “Mix Engineering.”

Buckling down into Metal. My god, how am I going to handle this? I didn’t know.. but I knew investing in Liquid mix would be an important step along these lines.

First Impressions on the mix metal path

The first thing you realize is that what you’re really doing, as a mix engineer, is quite subtle. No wonder those guys seem so obsesses over so many little things that I don’t think I can even hear! Being subtle is the first thing you have to get used to… That you’re really thinking in terms of a lot of subtle colorations which, hopefully, eventually lead up to a whole that is more then the sum of the parts.. 

My recent obsession with effects has been one of… well a kind of obsession with with subtleties. 

Next morning (still not really awake):

The metal I have going on right now is.. incredible

The transition from my normal experimental production and composition style.. to a metal sorta song writing thing is a huge jump. In my electronic stuff there are no rules… there certainly isn’t anything like a traditional structure.. and In Metal.. I’m not sure how traditional my structures will turn out to be.. but at least from a starting point sorta perception of things.. I need to figure out how to make my music work inside of the limitations of a popular music format.

The funny thing is.. I’m kind of an amazing heavy metal guitarist from certain perspectives. As a guitarist I’ve never been too terribly big on playing other people’s music.. I’ve maybe learned 3 such songs in my life.. but I’ve certainly learned a lot of riffs.. and what not…   The point is that my guitar playing has really always centered around.. being more interested in making original music then replicating other folks stuff. 

I would say, generally speaking.. my style draws heavily from the riffs of Black Sabbath.. and a kinda speed-e metal of Metallica and Megadeth… and from there comes an original vision. That vision is largely about a strange interpretation of music theory… and a strange kind of aesthetic vision.

For me, a lot of what you of what you see, in say a John Coultrane.. is like.. just natural and obvious? Let me share with you two videos.. one with Coultrane playing, another with a critic talking about it.

In a certain sorta way you could kinda imagine critics talking about my work this way.. hope that doesn’t sound arrogant but..  

Now I’m not sure if Ben Ratliff totally gets it. See… composition is about “organization” of sound, and the framework for how we organize sound.. is the same sorta thing for how we organize facts into a conception of reality… and that’s sorta the implication of what Coltrane is doing… Thus a critics application of the terms of American Transcendentalism is… not really all that far fetched. [Editors note: The second critic quoted.. his “conversion story” has some relation to the earlier THX clip]

So if I tell you that I have a hard time thinking inside of conventual structure, that’s sorta what’s interesting in my work.. So here I am embarking on an adventure to.. think in conventional structure? I’m not totally sure about this, I think maybe its like.. that’s just the starting point.

So I’m obsessing on song writing.. thinking about song writing, or thinking about music making from a “song writers” perspective…..  

It’s so hard to know how to bring you in on this.

In a traditional structure there are lots of possibilities. (sub structural interest?)

Lets say you have a chord progression going on..  Now really, that chord progression could be anything.. but what we usually here is sorta limited… I mean were used to a fairly limited number of chord progressions. Once you have your chords progression, there is the question of how it gets voiced by the individual instruments… What’s guitar 1 play, what’s guitar 2 play, what’s the bass playing… Even if what we have going on is a simple riff… that riff can be interpreted different ways.. you could have two guitarists harmonizing the riff… or playing different parts of the chord.. and perhaps they don’t play it the same way twice.. 

Then you have the matter of how each instrument “interprets” the other instruments.. I mean screw the preconceived chord structure!  This where we are in some ways echoing Coultrane.. or Jazz..  This is especially doable in a metal context because… the guitars are generally not playing the 3rds.. So how is the vocal line to relate to the guitars?

Then you have.. well you have things like how one riff relates to the next… how the riffs are moving around.. In the particulars of how I’m working.. the consideration is generally.. where’s one riff starting and ending.. what’s the chord there.. and then if you look at that riff over all.. where is it hanging out most.. and how do these characteristics relate to the riff that came before? There’s also issues of how the energy works in a given riff.. contrasts in energy.. and a number of other things.

So all of this is kind of how I think about music generally.. when making it, but it’s different in that.. It’s like going from free verse poetry to poetry with a structure. What’s interesting about being forced to work inside a structure is.. you find your self spending more time refining things… as I write vocal lines I’m like “oh, no really, what’s the right word to put here?” 

There also is structural anarchy going on.. which in a certain way you could call the linguistic framework of the music. Or the anarchical aspects create the linguistic interest…

My Goal

My goal is to make something that is.. as good as anything I’ve ever heard before, at least. Good in the sense of.. how developed the details are, in the sense of the refinements of the song writing.. the composition… the mix. Beneath all of this there is the essential idea of what it is I’m doing.. the core of it.. and that… that I think is amazing.. and that’s one of the first things that hits me…. that’s one thing that is already in it.

I think it must be the anarchy speaking.. It must be my difficulty fitting in, in a certain way.. it must be how strange I am.. that that strangeness has been allowed to evolve for so long.. to have its own depths, its own maturity.. that it managed to escape the forces of socialization.. that we are seeing a kind of new animal before us.. one that lives within us all.. and it is like a call to becoming… a voice we have often heard before.. but perhaps did not have the courage to follow.

Creating the Mix and the Song at the same time:

The process is an experimental one.. one where the composition it’s self, at a certain point, is made to fit the mix, just as the mix is made to fit the music…. and the mix even is the music. So again.. I’m drawing from my experimental electronic music.

A we bit latter:

So let me wrap this up

For starters I’d say that I think this new direction in my music.. will correct certain problems I have with my work.. I’ll leave this at that.

Now I want to talk about Anxiety.

A little while ago I did a post entitled Death by Anxiety. It was a kind of strange post. It was strange in that it painted a picture of myself that was.. raw and naked and.. well what it was. After making that post, and the feedback I got on it.. I started to think of my self in different terms then I normally do. The people in the videos suffered from very bad anxiety.. and I both identified with them, and began to see the roll of anxiety in my life in a way that threatened my self concept. This then lead into a wrestling with the subject.. and it reached it’s worst point when I ran into my ATM trouble.

One of the things you run into thinking, or I did, was.. is anxiety an organic problem? Some sorta genetically inherited issue.. was it a mistake to blame my mom for it? Perhaps heavy metal is nothing but a kind of expression of anxiety? Or I mean about anxiety? What is anxiety?

Well you know I’m kind of a philosopher of the mind… and in my LSD like sleep deprived consciousness… I began to explore my mind in relationship to anxiety. Indeed the anxiety threatened to capsize me!

One of the things I notices was that anxiety seemed to be a “normal psychology” that relates to reality in “interesting ways.” Anxiety seemed to be a situation where the unconscious mind is participating in our organization of the details of life, of reality, and painting a picture for us. Reality is ALWAY this… as we experience it.. detached objectivity, though it is a modern ideal, is an illusion. Reality is ONLY experienced through the lens of consciousness. And so it is that anxiety is an adventure into our own depths.. with our depths expressing its self on the world around us, or through our experience of the world around us.

This is obvious enough stuff.. to any student of depth psychology… medication treatment is never about fundamentally changing the matter, its about living with it..  where as the natural way of the psyche is one of changing the matter. Indeed, it would seem that anxiety is actually a kind of advanced process of self evolution. We are confronted with the question of how do we relate to our own depths.. as this is projected in front of us. Our living in the world becomes about a psychological process / evolution.

I have a long held belief, a kind of presumption, that one’s psychological reality is always as it is for a reason. The existence of a psychological phenomenon is there to serve us, if we can just find the proper relationship to it.

As I stated earlier in this entry… there are things In my life that I’m having a hard time dealing with… It’s hard enough that I’m really only able to deal with so much of it at a time.. in a kind of direct experience. When the pressure of it builds up to a certain point.. it forces a confrontation. It can ether do this via a sorta psychological confrontation, or via reality.. by which I mean that the unfolding events of one’s life are direct manifestations of the inward realities, versus a projection onto our understanding of reality.. we are, after all, talking about the first stage here.

When I talk about composition as being about organizing factors that have a relationship to how we organize our understanding of reality.. and when I say my music is prophetic in the sense that I’m developing new organizational methods.. more advanced, I think, then what has come before.. my music, on a compositional level, is a way of dealing with all of this.

This is really deep and profound stuff.. 

Latter:

THX 1138 Revisted

THX 1138 is a dystopia… its is a kind of prophetic vision of our modern situation.. A few points

1. The power relationships relative to mental health, define what is a normal or not normal… and of course proscribe medication.. treatment that, as mentioned above.. is more about coping that dealing with the underlying problems. In THX it is law that we take medication, and when we stop taking it.. we become anxious
2. Consumption is the enforced behavioral norm in THX.. again leading to the behavior control.. the sense that everything is “A-Ok.” We see this in normative modes of being.. in our modern situation.

It’s really all about the power to define a thing. We are now used to –

Next day

I’m thinking this entry is long enough, and I ought to cut it short.. what I want to suggest is that there are connections between social control, anxiety, human potential, the structure of the psyche, collective evolution, and um.. so the symbolic significance of what I’m trying to do… has to do with how I’m relating to this complex of factors, and how my work does..  and we’ll leave this at this for now.

[editors note: This is yet another one of them unpublished blog entries.. it’s a long one.. that never real gets to what it aims to get to be about.. this idea for a “new super metal.” Think of it as part one, or like a fragment of a larger idea. ] 

My process, at the moment.. at least in some areas, is more about thinking then doing… and at the moment this involves an awful lot of research related to sound studio tools. As wee speak, in fact, I find myself gong through about 4 or 5 years worth of Sound On Sound magazines.. SOS being a music production orientated mag… and um.. checking out various web sites and just.. doing a lot of poking around.. and I suppose in all of this I’ve only started to do my research.

It’s probably not a good idea to dream too much about what you could do with a tool.. till you actually have the tool.. as.. well dreams and realities in this area can be two very different things.. but none the less, one of the things I’m dreaming about is the notion of creating a new “super metal.” Allow me to try and explain this.

I make a kind of experimental electronic music. At this point in the story of this, I’m interested in exploring different sorts of processes as a part of my productions… That said.. there are certain processes that are sorta like foundational elements of how I work. I call them foundational because.. its as if when ever you do anything.. you develop muscles by which you can do that thing better.. perhaps more efficiently.. perhaps whatever..  

In my production process, one of the strongest muscles I have has to do with programing the performances of various instruments and effects… indeed the mix to. This muscle is very very strong.. but also very limited in the scope of what it can do. A part of exploring new processes is about broadening the scope of this muscle.

It’s looking to me like Melodyne will fit into this process in a rather exquisite sorta way… Allow me to speak of this.

For starters… when the new version comes out.. it looks like you’ll be able to sequence audio in more or less the same way I do with MIDI now…. err, kinda sorta. But to put it simply.. if you can change the pitches, and where the notes fit time wise.. well, I can build guitar performances the same way I can build any other sorta performance.. for any other sort of instrument.

The history of MIDI as a part of the electronic music production environment is one that is dominated by keyboards as you’re controller.. Most people will play a keyboard into there computer, edit there performance.. and that will be how they work. I, on the other hand, program from scratch. While I’d love to work in a process that starts with a keyboard performance.. the truth is that I’m not much of a keyboard player. One can be not much of a keyboard player, and still use ones keyboard playing as the basis of a production.. and so rather effectively.. but this is a process I have yet to really explore.

Now.. if you can take a guitar performance and basically edit it the same as you would a MIDI performance.. well, exploring the possibilities of using my guitar playing as the basis of a production.. starts to make a lot of sense. Further, because you can convert the audio to MIDI, to then control various instruments.. well now we are entering a world where.. in a lot of ways, working this way might make a lot of sense.

As a guitarist I’m.. I have very good technical chops. Indeed I could be a regular guitar hero.. accept that I’m not really a “whole guitar player.” What I mean by this is.. basically I have other things to do then play guitar all the time..  so my guitar playing has a lot of flawed areas, never mind that it’s perhaps not growing as much as I’d like. But the thing is.. if I can compensate via sequencing type editing of my guitar performances? Well now we’ve got some really interesting possibilities.

The commercial issues of metal versus my experimental electronic music

From my point of view there is the issue of commercial potential. The kind of electronic music I made is, basically, a kind of “serious electronic music” which doesn’t fit into a popular form too terribly well. I can imagine it being popular.. but it does carry a lot of challenges with it. A significant part of those challenges is simply that.. it doesn’t fit into any known genera which really complicates marketing…

Heavy metal, on the other hand, is one of the most popular music forms going.. It’s a much larger market, and it’s a much easier market to reach. 

Another interesting element is.. I don’t really know that much about the electronic music market, electronic music genres, the history of it.. or anything really… So I’m at a real disadvantage. Metal, on the other hand, is something I know very well… even if I’m not totally up on what’s new in Metal.

What I’d do with Metal

One of the things that’s really important to me is that my music have a lot of integrity..  The notion of moving to metal because the commercial potential is better might sound a little like selling out…. but there’s no reason that that has to be the case…

Another interesting point is that my interest in electronic music.. started out with a notion of exploring things that might have metal type applications… It was as if there was a certain metal aesthetic behind how I was thinking about electronic music. This was more then 10 years ago.. and I certainly have evolved but… there is this strange way where the structural thinking of my stuff has certain metal kinds of things behind it. How about some examples…

What I want you to take note of in this is..  The way its a kind of heavy metal roller coaster ride.. the technical sophistication / demands of the music.. It might also be worth noting that we see harmonic minor modalism going on in here… both the roller coaster and the harmonic minor modalism I take to further extremes in my music… you could think of my stuff as almost like megadeth on steriods in a certain sense:

 Not that I’m the biggest Metalica fan at this point.. but here’s Metallica at a similar stage.. Note the changes.. again roller coaster ish metal

Of course… what I’m thinking of doing is a little more candy coated…

[editors note: Matt wishes you could hear the line “just who’s mystic am I anyway” a little better.. sorta fits into the conceptual continuity of the blog, ya know?] 

Of course, I plan to be “a little” more creepy… as unlike Manson, I shall be presenting serious philosophical challenges to civilization as we know it. Err, and did I mention I want to be explicit about corrupting you’re children? (too complex a topic to go into here.) The other thing to make me more creepy is I tend to indentify more with God.. which is a hell of a lot more scary then Satan!

Another type of Candy: 

So what do you think, to much compression in there production style? I’ve always thought these fellows where a little too candy coated:

Ok.. so lets cut the BS, ha? Lets see something much closer to where I’m coming from… how about this? (No one does slayer like these guys!)

I think there’s a lot to the Metal genera to be critical of.. cliché’s up the ying yang.. a kind of stupid pose..  A way the form often has more to do with low budget commercial conceptions then anything like “art” or creative possibilities.

I suppose the metal quality to my work might be something like.. a surface glaze?

Much Latter:

Ok, well lets talk about my metal, lets see if we can get to it.. cause I’ve been working on the design for.. geeze, a good 15 years or so?

There’s a kind of starting point.. and then there’s how it stretches out into abstraction. See, as you no doubt know, metal starts in rock, and rock starts in blues and… well metal also starts in Jazz.. but… 

So I start out in minor chord progressions.. the “minor” quality and abstract into synthetic scales.. which is sorta.. well welcome guitar geek-dom, right? Well music theory geek-dom anyway. I’ve mention in the above Megadeth track.. that there was “harmonic minor modalism” going on.. modalism is probably most often associated with Miles Davis.. and harmonic minor comes from classical.. It’s what gives the Megadeth it’s middle eastern flavor.

Modalism, really, is a kind of..  lets call it “a tactical response to the challenges of improvisation.” 

[editors note: So Matt sorta stopped writing around this point, which is probably where things would have likely gotten interesting.. *sigh* and then there was this other fragment that he was going to try to integrate into the flow latter on.. well, lets have the fragment] 

Well it starts with Ozzy actually. When I was first starting to listen to music / explore music.. Ozzy was one the first bit of music I found that was like..  I’d listen to endlessly… and it was also some of the first stuff I started playing on the guitar.

 [editors note: And that’s where it ends, just like that.]

If you follow me on twitter, there is at least some probability that you would have ran into me talking about.. a voice synth. Now if you like, you can follow that voice synth link and play with the voice synth right there on the web page… You type something in, hit play, it speaks it back for you… and you can try out different voices.

Also on that page is a download link.. which allows you to down load the program to your computer.. and you can throw text files into it.. and save the results as MP3s… 

Latter:

So what I did today was.. I just sorta randomly attempted to write lyrics in the voice synth’s text field.. ”hmm, what does this sound like?” And the results where… the make the hairs stands on the back of your neck sort!

I think what it is is.. the feeling that.. well you know.. my music is conventionally instrumental.. of an experimental electronic sorta sort. It’s stuff that is kinda out there.. or its like.. lets say conceptualized from a point of view that is radically different from.. any thing you’ve heard before. What’s impressive about that is simply that..

I don’t think most sound artists are as comfortable going out on a limb like that..  What I mean is we all give lip service to innovation and.. originality.. but I think there are certain things that…  create certain norms.. and so.. I don’t know..

There’s a lot of norms in music.. There’s a lot of norms in everything.. and… hmm.. I don’t know how to totally describe this.. but it does have something to do with the core of who I am as a human.. as well as as an artist..

The more outside of the norms you go.. the harder it is for people to understand you.. things often take a little more explination.. its consumption is a little more challenging then the same old same old.

So one of the things lyrics could potentially do for my work is.. give you something to hold onto.

I’m feeling, as I write this, that I have sooo much in common with Frank Zappa.. he’d make this music that was outrageous.. I mean really interesting stuff.. and then he’d kinda put this cultural satire on top.. in part to try to give his work some commercial potential…

Latter:

It took me a while.. I was looking for a good example here.. where you get both.. his lyrical thing… and the interesting musical thing… I think this is pretty good…

What I’m digging about this is.. On the one hand the music is a very.. well a particular sorta Zappa Jazz thing… it’s crazy and fun..  and then you have the whole lyrical thing.. and the performance. What I’m digging about this performance is.. where is the narrator coming from? He’s very blasé about the whole thing..

Next day sometime:

I think what’s strong here is… look, listen to the music.. Is that Jazzy thing.. I don’t know, how broad is the appeal of that kinda thing? Lets face it, if you’re in a Jazz band.. you’re probably struggling.. I mean assuming you haven any ambitions that don’t involve day jobs.. Throw those lyrics on it.. now how broad is the appeal? Suddenly we are in a position where folks who would normally not listen to that kinda Jazz-y music.. well they’ll kinda dig into this a little.

I don’t want to get too side tracked by this Zappa tangent.. but take a look at this video… It really shows of some his musical sophistication:

I wish there was more music like this going on today.. in the sense of guitar solos that are worth listening to.. hell, there aren’t even that many guitar solos, are there? To say nothing of that kinda complex crazy stuff..

Ok.. here’s a video that’s essentially an advertisement for the Berklee College of Music… I’m not big on Berklee.. took a class there, and blah blah blah, but.. Well the thing to may be appreciate here is that Steve Vai is like.. a technically amazing musician.. Many folks who are serious about guitar will tell you he’s the best guitar player ever… I’m not sure I’d go that far but.. yeah, he belongs in the pantheon of guitar heros.. so lets take a look at what he has to say about his experience with Zappa

Ok.. so enough of this craziness… I’m starting to loose the impulse of what I wanted to get with this entry!

Back to the Music of Matt: 

So what kinda blew me away about “lets go play with the voice synth..” It’s a cheesy kinda voice synth, right? But that’s sorta not the point. The point is.. you throw in some lyrics, and out pops a rendering of it.. 

My lyrics.. there’s a kind of dark mystical bent to them… There’s a kind of depth to them that’s.. well they can potentially be mind bending.. This particular bit of lyrics.. it was as if it were being sung by a serial killer.. though we aren’t totally sure that he / she is a serial killer.. clearly the person speaking wants to be our lover.. and it sounds like this somehow involves killing us..

Ok.. but there’s the connection between love and death.. that the love potion is a poison.. symbolically.. the person speaks of how all life is suffering, and how this person wants to save us from our suffering.. There is the symbolic idea that through death comes life.. You have to die to your self, in a certain sense, to reach that next spiritual step.. a message of Christ’s, certainly, is that life is not something to be clung onto.. The love potion is a poison because we have to die to our former life in order to take on this kinda love..

So the lyrics are sorta playing around with all this stuff in a very edgy sorta way.. and this is really just the kinda thing that… comes off the top of my head.

So…  well the lyrics of Zappa’s Jazz Discharge Party Hats is speaking to.. a couple of things… It’s speaking to a kind of adolescent male’s take on sex… lets say.. but with a detached blasé quality of it.. is on the one hand sorta making fun of the whole thing.. and on the other hand its sorta.. sympathetic to it.

You can also get into the banality of it.. and the way Zappa’s stuff is sorta echoing, in some senses, certain qualities of pop art.. Zappa deals with issues of high and low brow art.. and the issues of art in the market place..

What I’m doing is… much much much more about this kind of transcendent mystical experience.. but dark and edgy to a kind of extreme… 

Next day some time:

I loaded up the vice synth renderings into Ableton Live. I figured Live was probably the place to go when it comes tempo matching and all that.. but I’m not totally sure I’m getting it all right… Or how to make it really work.. The solution, of course, is to wrestle with all this stuff…

A thought, I’m having, is one I had with my Deep Space Adventures track.. which was early ideas on the relationship between linguistics and music.. with DJ style productions:

You create content.. Now this content is in now way a “finished work” or even “something good.” This content is more like “research and development.” What I mean is that the content is made out of a kind of experimental adventure process… and it’s not work that actually has to stand on its own in anyway.

Generally, the result is… well lets say it’s an audio file.. that audio file will have its own continuity… Whatever trip you were on when you made it.. well who knows, but its somehow about that, right? And.. just as you can see things in the clouds when you stare up at them.. it is as if there’s some kind of a meaning and story associated with these audio files… some kind of a perspective on stuff.. some kind of a take on stuff.. a kind of voice, if you will.

You then, eventually, move onto a process where those audio files can be like the raw building blocks of a production. What happens is.. in a rather strange sorta way.. those elements.. behave in a kind of language like way..

So lets look at this in more concrete terms.. with the vocals…

Screwing around in Live.. I have the words “I don’t know what the future holds.” That is one fragment of the lyrics I wrote. It’s almost as if you  wrote a paragraph and thats about the first half of the first sentence. What I’m now starting to think about is.. take the whole set of lyrics.. and chop them up into little fragments… where we experiment with the little fragments..

So far.. the experimentation consists of.. lets take that clip.. from one of the voices renderings.. and lets copy and past it across 3 channels.. and put various filters and effects on the 3 channels.. have them panned around.. automate the mix a little…  make those lines repeat…

The voice synths have a kind of archetypal feel to them… Every time you’ve heard someone who couldn’t speak, using a voice synthesizer.. it sounded like this.. so these are sounds we’ve all heard a million times before.. so in some ways its a bit like “sampling stuff from our culture.” You might not even realize you’ve been listening to voice synths all this time.. but hey look, you have..

So what I’m thinking is.. have these little experiments that are like.. parts of a whole… where we do.. who knows what with them.. then, latter on.. we reassemble the lyrics… into the song, so to speak.. inside the context of a larger production.

What also interests me is.. we could have clips from these vocals.. coming in and out all over an album. 

Process wise.. this is very much like some kind of abstract painting..  

My goal is to really try and make a kind of huge giant jump into the darkness…  To jump way the hell out of the universe that’s known to me.. to try and create a work that is.. somehow way better then I could do… 

Latter that day:

I’m really processing the hell out of these vocal tracks.. and trying to make the automation of the processing parameters interesting. I imagine possibilities.. 

I’m looking to various effects that I might add to my rig.. I’ve blogged about these in the past… or most of them anyway. I have this kind of “old school” set of ideas.. of ways to mutate sounds. For instance.. I take what I’m working on now, render it to an audio file, put it on my iPod, and record the sound of it playing back in my car.. or in any number of other places.. or through a guitar amplifier.. or who knows what kind of craziness. Well, I’m not actually doing any of that.. It’s much easier to just twist a few virtual knobs in your software.. and half of what I’m thinking is the effects I’m adding to my rig would allow me to achieve whatever.. just via knob twisting…. basically.

The real challenge, in all this.. is to maximize the amount of energy I have going into these projects. 

Err… this is probably a long enough blog entry to kinda.. cut it off here..  so to be continued! 

Ok, here’s the latest version of Toshiro Mifune VS John Wayne.. if you’ve been following my music production / composition chronicles, this may interest you… Even if not, it may.. As always, of course, looking for feed back. And here’s the link to the free MP3. (no, you don’t have to sign up for anything, just follow the link for Toshiro Mifune VS John Wayne .2)

I’m not sure, at the moment, what I think of it myself. Of course my view on the subject is one with a lot of emotional investment, making it hard to be objective really.. but that’s all a part of process anyway.

One last note.. check the lyrics part of the file.. that’ll give you the copy right information.. and like.. a somewhat personal-ish message from yours truly.

Anyway.. thanks for taking the time.. stay tuned for further updates.. umm.. I’m not sure what else.

Oh, I should say something about this is you haven’t been following: This is sorta a marriage of classical and electronic.. Kind of serious music.. someone on last.fm called it “conceptual music” which I think is a good way of putting it.. music that somehow works on your brain..  It’s subject, besides Toshiro Mifune and John Wayne, seem to have something to do with order and chaos as well.. and we are plotting out “new conceptual frameworks for organizing sound” or perhaps reality. If you read this blog a bit you’ll see some of the recent evolution of my thoughts on these subjects.. 

Sometime ago I did a post on a software instrument / effects bundle that goes by the name of Komplete… The FM8 is a software synth found in said bundle…  

If  you’ve ever seen the movie Blade Runner, recently rereleased…  If I’m not mistaken, that film’s sound track was made with the Yamaha DX7…

The DX7 is a “frequency modulation” synthesizer.. or FM synth.. This is just one sorta technology for synthesizing sounds electronically. The DX7 was a very popular synth, Brian Eno is famous for using it.. and the DX7 now considered a classic. The FM7 is a software emulation of the DX7 and the FM8 is an upgrade from the FM7… 

Some notes about FM…

1. It tends to be very efficent with respect to what sorta demands it places on processors. 
2. The sound created tends to be a little cold, dark.. simple in some ways.. so you’d probably want to put it through a few effects to give it some character.. 
3. FM synths tend to be difficult to learn to program.. its just the nature of Frequency Modulation

Ok.. so the FM8 is sorta like a sci fi version of the FM7. I haven’t really gotten the chance to explore the FM8.. till now, but I can tell you about what’s new in it.. at least with respect to what this particular moment leads me to wanting to take advantage of.

 

 

1. New onboard effects…  These effects are very very nice.. ranging from guitar amp emulations to reverb and EQ… to chorus and flange.. lots of goodness.. The question mark here is I don’t know how well integrated into the sound engine these are.. my impression is that they aren’t really tightly integrated.. what you’d probably like to do is.. have the effects parameters modulated by the synth program.. and I don’t think the FM8 does that.. though I’m not sure.
2. Morph Pads… You have X/Y Axis’s… think of this as like a grid.. on a square piece of paper. At the 4 corners of that grid you can put a synth program / patch. Another words.. if you had some sort of a programed horn section… you could put that at one corner.. you could then have some sort of a programed string section put at another corner.. as you move between those two corners the sound will morph between them. Since I’m thinking of using the FM8 in a ambient sorta way.. morphing between sounds.. will allow me to create a kind of morphing ambient sound scape.. which should be great… the big challenge here is figuring out how to automate the XY movements in the sequencer

I’m still working on the Toshiro Mifune VS John Wayne project.. or I should say this is that sound project. Up until this point all the sounds are acoustic sound of two types: Orchestral and Ethnic. There’s a certain kind of “timelessness” you associate with these kinds of sounds.. How long have the instruments found in todays Symphony orchestra been around? So the feeling you get from these sounds is that this composition could have been made anywhere since the dawn of these instruments.. (Though compositionally.. no composer in history would approach composition in anything like the way I’m doing it)   In the case of the ethnic instruments.. the dates go back even further.. we get a sense of primordial human experience…  

The sounds of the FM8 are the opposite.. They were used effectively in Blade Runner to call to mind a futuristic dystopia..  We tend to associate FM synthesis with sci fi / futuristic stuff… So there’s the question of how do we integrate them into this production… 

The title “Toshiro Mifune VS John Wayne.. calls to mind post WW2 cinema history..  Films by John Ford and Akira Kurosawa… It’s sorta the Samari versus the cowboy.. It’s perhaps interesting to note that Kurosawa was hugely influenced by Ford.. and that Kurosawa’s Samurai pictures and a huge influence on the American western.. as a for instance the Magnificent 7 was essentially a remake of Seven Samurai. Perhaps it should also be mention that Kurosawa’s films were a huge influence on George Lucas.. and Star Wars… 

In a strange way the music seems to be commenting on film history.. 

Latter that day: 

My sound work has always had a cinematic quality to it.. I always feel as if we are somehow moving through space.. its as if my music was “music with camera angles.” The challenge of integrating the electronic elements with the acoustic stuff continues..  I’ve started this process by using sounds that are atmospheric, often more atmospheric then musical…  

Besides the FM8, I’m also now working with Absynth and Massive…  

The entrance of the electronic sounds involves automation of volume, effect sends, and pan position.. I have a long section where the sounds are far away in the background and more or less moving closer.. The trouble is that the acoustic instruments are playing softly at this point.. so I feel as though we hear the atmospheric sounds to quickly.. they aren’t quite subtle enough in there entrance.

I’m not sure how much of a problem this really is. 

A tactic for countering this problem.. is to set up some delay aux tracks.. and bring some of the orchestral and ethnic percussion into the delays.. as well as more into the verbs..  Which ought to help fill out the space a little. Right now I’m driving at the notion of wanting to go deep into atmospheric ambiance soundscapes… with slowly evolving sections..   

Latter that night: 

Music’s going very well.. but alas I think I must call this blog entry to and end… Stay tuned, as they say, as I’ll probably make more new version of this track available shortly.. 

Well.. I’ve gotten rather into this sound project, and it seems to involve learning Kontakt 3 in at least some depth. So far the experience of this is mildly painful.. One thing Native Instruments sucks at is user experience.. making things simple.. thinking about the experience of trying to learn this stuff and making it “just work.” Excuse my Apple prejudices.

Examples of obvious problems: You have this manuel… printed, which is nice. In my instance I’m saying “I want to set things ups so that I have a convolution reverb that I can send all the instruments in my kontakt Instance into and automate. One would think this would be fairly straight ahead and obvious.. I mean how many production environments have I used before? But no.. this is stuff you gotta go to the manual for.

I wouldn’t mind if going to the manual was something you needed to do to get a complex piece of technology working… It’s that the manual is designed all wrong. What you want to do is figure out how to do one thing.. you go to that section of the manual and you realize that it’s description of how to do that one thing presumes you understand 5 other things.. and it doesn’t tell you where in the manual those 5 other things are located.

Eventually it seems to come down to trial and error… the manuel gives you some clues.. and you fiddle around and if you’re lucky you work it out.

The production I’m working with starts out, of course.. with a quarter tone tuned piano.. and what I want to do is create a string section that.. is more atmosphere then anything.. It’s something going on in the background. I don’t really want you’re attention to be called to it to much..

The way I’m working at the moment.. well I have a limited understanding of some of Native Instruments tools.. so this is all a learning exercise.. at any rate Kontakt 3 includes stuff from the VSL library. The VSL library is one of the top libraries you’d go to if you wanted to emulate real orchestral music on your computer.. Its the kinda stuff they use in Hollywood films if they can’t afford to hirer and orchestra.. and perhaps even if they can.. (so you can give the director / editors / whatever.. a kind of demo-ized version of your score prior to bringing in the orchestra.. and its a good way to work stuff out to, right?)

The VSL library you get with Kontakt, of course, is limited compared to the full VSL library.. but it’s still the best stuff I’ve got. So I start out by loading up a Violin Section. By default you can control.. would you call it the intensity or volume or? Well you can control it via you’re modulation wheel.. and it’s roughly the equivalent of “how hard the violin player is bowing the string.”So.. what I do is.. inside Digital Performer.. as I’m programing out the violin section.. I’m sorta making the violin swell a little bit.. It all ends up being somewhat complicated as I’m controlling key velocity, modulation, and pitch bend…. so far.

Tuning was, and still is, a big question mark for me. Ideally I might like to make the string section set out in quarter tone tuning.. but its not quite clear to me how to go about this, or what the implications might be. It might very well turn out that it’s a real workflow issue.

Lets explore the problem conceptually.. you have these things called “sample maps.” The sample map tell the sampler what samples to play depending on what note you play and how hard you play it.. So in our case all the notes of a violin are set up in that sample map. If you want to make that quarter tones.. do you have to do something along the lines of.. making it so that as you go up the keyboard… it only goes up a quarter tone per key.. and does that mean you have to radically change the sample map? If so, if you’re dealing with a complex sample map… that’s a task that could take a while to achieve.. and if it’s not really clear… all the details of how you do this.. you could very easily make a mess for your self.

Consequently I’ve decided to skip trying to deal with the tuning issue. A number of Native Instruments instruments are actually amazingly good on this front.. but its not clear to me how Kontakt works.. so screw it!

Now I’ve spoken a little about microtonalism.. and its implications.. in this blog.. as well as the implications for how I’m taking on this project. What I’ve decided to do is go with the usual tuning and just pitch bend stuff around. Trouble is.. for who knows what reason.. #1 Pitch bend is not enabled by default and #2 once I figured out how to make Pitch bending happen.. it wasn’t really clear to me how much pitch bending I was setting up..

Ok, let me explain. On you’re keyboard you might have a bitch wheel.. in your sampler you have a pitch wheel range.. You could make the pitch wheel range one semi tone.. which would mean if you move the pitch wheel on your keyboard all the way up while playing a note.. it will be the equivalent of playing the next note up on the keyboard. If you set the pitch bend wheel to an octave.. you’re going to get a pitch that is 12 keys up..

So.. the problem is.. it’s not clear what I’m setting the pitch bend range to.. so again.. I’m force to fly blind folded.. or lets say it’s as if the readouts in my cockpit are giving me information in a foreign system.. the equivalent to driving a car where you don’t get MPH, you get it in the metric system, while the speed limits signs on the highway are all based on MPH… and now you gotta try and do math in your head.. if you’re lucky enough to know the metric system and conversion rates.. but imagine you don’t even have that.. because you really don’t know what the hell is going on.. .

So the results:

The piano part.. I wasn’t sure if I was 100% happy with.. as far as I’ve written it. Some of it sounds a little flaky.. or.. I’m not sure exactly. However, there’s a lot to love in the piano part: It has the very emotional kind of feeling.. a kind of ambience to it.. it’s own sorta impressionistic quality.. Once the strings are added, the parts of the piano that sounded flaky to me.. well they no longer sound flaky. It’s as if, the flaky of it,now sounds as if it has something to do with it’s interaction with the strings.. so now the flaky has been transmuted into interesting. Yup, that’s how we like to roll… But.. the problem is that the strings are calling too much attention to them selves.. It seems that we are not quite getting enough control over them via simply programing there performance.. it’s sounding like what we need to do is control them via mixing.. which brings us back to the earlier issue of how do I automate aux send effects in Kontakt.

I haven’t worked this all out yet. I really want to avoid making it sound like what you are listening to is the result of a lot of mix engineering…. I don’t want it to sound like my music normally sounds like…  At least not at this point in the production. I want it to sound like you’re listening to a group of instruments play..

To achieve these results.. my plan is as follows:  

<editors note, I’m now writing from the perspective of a couple days latter in the production:>

When doing the mix engineer roll you’ll more or less start by creating a “virtual stage.” What this means is you define where various instruments are in space. How far an instrument seems to be from you is largely defined by the ratio of a dry signal, to that signals sound going through some sort of a reverb.. So to make an instrument sound more distant you both pull down it’s level and add to how much of that channel’s audio is going into the the reverb.

The problem was.. I could never figure out how to automate this in Kontakt.. I can set it easy enough, but automation is a bitch…  and then there are the work flow issues related to how you go about this:

Kontakt is a pretty complicated program… You can set the pan position of an instrument in multiple places.. which is to say how much of it’s sound is going to the left versus right speaker:

You can set this on the level of sample maps so.. lets say you have a sample map with percussion sounds.. you might like to make it so that every percussive instrument has a slightly different pan position.. which will give your mix a little more interest.. you do that here.

I’m not totally clear on how this works but.. you can set up an instrument so that it’ll receive MIDI data that will set it’s pan position..  which is easy enough to set up..   you can set the pan position for the instrument in it’s editor.. and you can set in on the total instrument.. (I know these distinctions aren’t totally clear)

As if all this were not enough.. you can give all you’re instruments in Kontakt there own audio out.. and give them all there own mixer channel in you’re DAW (where you can again set pan positions).

So lets talk about some of the pros and cons of various approaches this presents us with:

I started going down this route with the idea that I wanted to use Kontakts internal audio engine to mix it’s instruments. The main reason for this is that Kontakt has a convolution reverb effect.. that’s more realistic then the reverb effects I have in Digital Performer. Of course the problem is that I was never able to figure out how to automate aux sends…

In this sorta set up.. what you want to do is set the pan position of the instrument prior to the aux send.. generally.. that way the sound of the instruments stereo position in the aux send will be the same as the dry signal. There’s reasons why you might not want to do it this way.. but doing it this way will help reinforce the spacial sense of your mix.

Doing it this way means you pretty much need to control the mix via MIDI. This creates a couple problems for you. The first problem is that MIDI only has 128 increments..  meaning you’ve just limited the resolution of your pan positions…. Kind of a minor issue.. and Kontakt even has ways of dealing with this.. but still an issue.. that becomes more serious for other sorts of parameters, like aux sends, that you might want to control.

The other issue with this approach is that you have to control it via midi channels in your DAW…. as a pose to by audio channels. The MIDI channels would probably be the same channels where you are programming the performance of the instrument in question… and the way DP’s editors work.. its not always easy / obvious.. what’s going on with all the parameters of a given channel.. 

The final problem is.. One of the things you want to do is make it so that all the instruments in the mix sound like they are in the same space.. you do this by putting at least a little bit of the same reverb on all the instruments.. so the convolution reverb you’re using inside of Kontakt is not something you can put on instruments out side of Kontakt… so.. you’ll at the very least have to put some reverb on the master out of Kontakt. The trouble is.. for various reasons, you really want a more fine grain control over how much of that reverb goes on what instruments.

What I eventually settled on was giving each Kontakt its own channel.. and mixing via audio channels in DP.. which gave me my better work flow..

It turns out that nearly every instrument in Kontakt.. and even on my piano, have the same convolution reverb effect on it… so they are all rather consistent..  Normally the problem with going this kind of a route is that convolution reverb is a processor hungry effect.. but seeing as I’m working on a Mac Pro with 8 cores.. this would seem to pose no problems at all.

A few Days Latter: 

I actually like the resulting sound better…  and there’s a couple of things worth talking about here: First of all, one thing you want to do in any mix, 99% of the time, is have some reverb effects that go on ALL the instruments.. to various degrees. This unify the mix, making it sound as if everything in your mix is more or less happening inside the same space. The second thing is that we are now working with a reverb that isn’t terribly realistic.. but it doesn’t really call attention to its self as “super unrealistic,” or at least it doesn’t when its stacked on top the individual instrument’s uber realistic convolution reverb.

This brings us into a complicated subject of the aesthetics of reverb.. It’s complicated because there is a history of reverb in music production that.. influences the aesthetic implications of a reverb. The reverb in DP is a reverb that is.. well lets call it “historic.” Basically the reverb effect..

I don’t know the dates of it.. but digital reverb has been with us for a long time now.. prior to which echo chambers where what you’d probably use.. and you would really have to go to greater lengths to get that sound..  And it was also a period where certain studios had an incredible amount of value because of there unique sound characteristics… the dawn of the digital reverb marked the start of a movement out of all that. Reverb is merely..  Well all materials reflect and absorb sound.. and they’ll reflect and absorb different frequencies differently. So… to model that realistically was not at all possible in early digital reverbs.. and I dare say the actual issues are a little more complex then what I’m pointing to now.

Digital reverbs have a more simplistic sound then do real acoustic spaces. In my philosophical point of view I think of this as Plato versus Buddhism: With Plato you have the ideal that gets degraded when it gets into earth.. in Buddhism everything is ideal, its just a question of your psychological attitude towards it. In a sense the simplified digital reverb I think of as plato’s ideal.. and convolution is more like a Buddhist ideal..  

I’ll end this conversation more or less here.. without digging much more deeply into the matter..  and just going so far as to say that the simple digital reverb really does add something to the convolution reverb.. making the sound sound that much better.

In any event, I’d be interested in knowing you’re reaction to all this: Have you played with mixing? Have you played with Kontakt? What’s your experience been like? Hell, do you have your own solutions to my problems?