impermance

Following on from my last post.... if you can think that far back. I'd thought to dig out and post a song from the Split EP I did for Zaftig Research about 8 years ago. It was probably my first attempt at taking a more technique based approach to writing a song. It was when I'd first got my Juno 6 and I was taken by the idea of writing a song using only that and a patch for my Nord Micromodular that was an emulation of the Juno 6. In my own way I was laughing up my cuff about the fact that the elements of the track which sounded more typically "analogue" were generally coming from the Nord and the more abstract and digital components were cut and processed out of recordings from the Juno.

Ah, what a merry japester I was.

Anyway, this all ended in tears when I discovered that my copy of the Split EP is gubbed. Zaftig was a CDr label and it seems that the quality of the CDr's used weren't all that great as when I now play it (or listen to tracks that have been ripped to WAV from it) there is a layer of digital distortion and bit rate weirdness. I think that I'll have back-ups of the old song files somewhere on an old CDr but I'm now wondering whether they'll even read given that they'll be of a similar vintage and are data.

I'm sure there is a lesson to be learned here about backup regimes and such like but I can't put my finger on it. In the meantime, I guess that I can have a trawl through the CDr as it is for some Oval style sample harvesting.

calibrate your pretentiometers... this is getting messy

I've recently been starting to pull together some songs with a vague notion about what my next release might be. As I've been going through songs, parts of songs and simple sketches that might be worth expanding on I've noticed that the songs can fall into a few different categories. Which in turn makes me wonder what drives other people to write music... maybe most musicians are more focused and as such more productive?? I'm not sure.

I'd say there are probably three categories: emotive, technique based and little vignettes. By emotive, I mean that the song starts out as an attempt to capture an emotional response perhaps in the way that vocal based song-writers do every day. But it seems moot, because when it's predominately instrumental who's to say I'm not just writing a track about withered prunes. The technique based songs (perhaps these are tracks?!?) are extrapolations of ideas in sound that interest me. Just really looking to come up with something interesting on an aesthetic level. The techniques? Anything from when I'm continuing to explore my home-knitted ideas of music theory to an exploration of specific synthesis methods. Lastly, the vignettes I mention are where there is an event that leave a strong visual impression that I want to describe in sound. I'm trying my best to dodge past the usual cliché's of electronic music being a soundtrack for a film that doesn't exist but perhaps there is a small kernel of truth in there. A good example of this would be the song Thick Accents And Red Leaves from my EP that just came out on Gravity Halo which was about a banal situation involving a Ukranian fellow in autumn.

I suppose one things that marries all of the above together is that I can't write anything when I've an instrument in my hand or I'm in the "studio". I can come up with ideas and "jam" to an extent, but I always find that I write my music away from it as I'm ambling about my daily business when ideas are just percolating away. Harmonic percolating maybe?

But enough for just now. I'll try to get back onto less indulgent footing for next time.

partying like it's nineteen ninety nine

It dawned on me that getting into a millimetre by millimetre account of what synthesisers I use and why might not pan out to be the most exciting of reading. So I'll just talk about my latest acquisition for the now which is a hardware rack-mounted sampler. On the surface it might seem like an anachronism given the advances with software samplers. Perhaps doubley so as I have and use NI's Kontakt 4 on a pretty regular basis. Although I've seen signs of a rising fashion for "vintage digital" such as the clamour for classic Akai MPCs, that's not been my own reason for splashing the cash. I've a degree of skepticism about the "sound" that is attributed to this sort of gear which I often think is just hipster justification. I do agree that there is an audible difference but that is only part of the equation; the remainder being the interface, workflow and how you just use the thing. Which I think you can get from any sampler, not just the one's that the latest flash in the pan hip-hop producer suggests is their own personal magic bullet.

The sampler in question is a Yamaha A5000 which you could say is one of the last hurrahs of the hardware sampler along with the Akai Z series. It's amazing to think that in the 10 years since it was released it's gone from costing £1500 down to the level where I scored one that has nestled unused in someones rack for less than £200. Naturally, I've only just scratched the surface of it in the few weeks I've had it but I'm already seeing loads of potential. Once I get myself sorted with an internal hard disk for it I think the first port of call will be to use it in conjunction with a hardware sequencer for further experiments where I'm not using the computer at all.

If I get time before my rotation is up, I'll try to pull together some audio examples of some of the more unique features such as the expand/detune functions or the loop remix/divide functions. Loop remix/divide strikes me as an interesting alternative to combining Beat Repeat and Slice-to-Midi within Ableton Live which, given the scarcity of the A5000 in comparison to Live, will hopefully not sound so "familiar".

As a final note, I'd recommend the page at Sealed's Deep Synthesis site on the A4000 as a great source of information. Reading that was one of the main things which turned me onto the idea of tracking one down.

am abend

Thanks to Chris for the intro, hopefully my ramblings will have some form of structure and sense to them. I was thinking about kicking things off with a bit about how I came to be writing music and what I've been doing over the years but as you'll have guessed from the intro I've been at this a while. Not just doing stuff by myself as Jeye but also in a variety of bands over the course... but I don't really want to kick the arse out of things and go over the score right from the get-go.

What might be a better start would be to talk about my setup for writing music. I'll talk generally first and say that I have no real preference over a hardware or software setup. When I first started writing music it was purely with software but started buying hardware because I felt limited at that time by what could be achieved with software only. Actually, when I first started writing music I didn't have a soundcard in my computer and I used to take files around to a friends house on floppy disk to listen to beats/song ideas on his Amiga. Beyond ambivalence to hardware and software as an approach I'm also fairly relaxed about what specifically is used. I usually find I get frustrated with gear snobs of any description. I think Chris expressed it well in his previous post here about ghetto production.

I'll maybe break out the camera now and go take some photos and then I can talk specifics. Until next time....

Rotation 6 - Jeye

Scottish producer Jeye has an EP titled "Hatch End Dot" coming out on Gravity Halo next week and he's kindly agreed to grace the Rotation(s) blog with some knowledge over the course of June.

Jeye, better known as John Muir, has been creating melodically focused soundscapes for 10+ years, performing gigs around his native Scotland as well as releasing a few EPs on the independent circuit.  His style blends atmospheric ambiance, live instrumentation, field recordings, haunting melodies, chilly, evolving beat work and progressive song structures.  The following track "So It Goes" is taken from his upcoming release on Gravity Halo.

So It Goes by jeye_musik

After a mostly dark month in May (thanks to Fluorescent Grey for filling the void a bit), we're psyched to have the Rotation(s) back in effect, so give Jeye some love and stay tuned!

Aural Relics of Operating System's Past - Hyperprism Stand-alone

Hyperprism stand-alone for OS9

Named after the Edgard Varese composition of the same name and coming before the Korg Kaoss Pad, before 'bit crushing' was a term used in music production, we had the Hyperprism stand-alone for OS9. A set of over 25 x/y grid controllable effects that ranged from bread and butter compressors and EQs to Eventide-inspired DSP manglers. Notable effects included the Sonic Decimator, Frequency Shifter, Bass Maximizer and Harmonic Exciter. Even with the high quality mastering plugins like Waves, there hasn't been anything close to what the Bass Maximizer was capable of. You are able to take a bird chirping recording and add deep realistic bass & subharmonic bass tones to it.

The x/y grid could be controlled with a mouse, which at the time was a huge leap forward in and of itself. You could actually then record and then playback x/y grid automation, at least 2 full minutes worth. Kush Arora's early noise project Involution would lug out multiple G3 powermacs running Hyperprism at his shows. I remember checking out the computer screens on their setups right before they were about to go on and they always had these crazy spectrograph looking premade automation patterns ready to go. Unfortunately, the only version of Hyperprism that’s easy to find these days is a Dxi plugin for Windows. The Windows plugin version of Hyperism, even up to its last rumored iteration, always stayed somewhat behind its Mac counterpart.

The x/y recording feature was never an option, nor was running Hyperprism standalone on Windows. It's buggy on anything past Windows xp, and most host sequencers don't accommodate DirectX plugins anymore.

When hyperprism was first on the scene there weren't any high quality native digital reverbs for the computer platform. 'Hyperverb' in the hyperprism suite was worth the price of admission alone, offering rich realistic room tones with drone capable reverb tails.

There are a couple of stores on the net that seem to have sealed copies of the OS9 version of Hyperprism for sale, and one of them charges $259 for it. The only problem is. even if you absolutely had to have a used OS9 copy, you'd still have to have access to a SCSI floppy mac G3 to run the copy protection scheme, and who knows if 15 years later you'd even get it to work without some kind of challenge/response from the long out of existence Aboretum company. And to top it off, there is little chance, unless you are a UNIX configurist, of getting some sort of virtual floppy drive

workaround in an emulated OS9 legacy

mode running on a newer mac with OSX.

Status: virtually unfindable for mac, directx plugin version 2.5 easily obtainable for windows




Edgard Varèse - Hyperprism (1923)

Aural Relics of Operating System's Past - Anarchy FX

Anarchy FX


This is the newest software I'll be talking about in this series. Coming out around 2000 Leighton Hargreaves designed this plugin pack for Windows that had many unique ideas packed inside of it. To say this is an understatement, together they make up probably the most unique plugin pack ever created.


The Corkscrew filter was a multiband pitchshifter that utilizes the Shepard tone (or Risset tone) technique to create an infinitely rising/falling audio illusion effect. The harmonic adder put glowing, crystalline upper order harmonics to the sound, but not in an apex aural exciter sort of way. It would add rich synthesizer textures to whatever sound you were running through it, spectrally built off of that source material. The spectral Convolve was an interesting spin on the bit crushing effect: tnstead of using bit depths and sampling rates, it would spectrally detect the 'noise' and the 'tones' in the sound and let you fade between both extremes. Where both extremes sounded like totally different flavors of very degraded low quality mp3s. I never could get 'length separator' to do anything too compelling, but the concept description here sounds pretty fascinating if one could get it set right:
"Bisects the input signal according to the lengths of its component frequencies. Short sounds become the 'transient' part, long sounds become the 'stable' part. These parts can be isolated (ie the other part removed), or assigned different pan positions to create stereo movement."




Bonus: from my email correspondence with Leighton Hargreaves:

Reflecting on sound: “As I've become older and wiser, I've had to re-evaluate the idea that "there must be sounds that could exist, which no one has ever heard, waiting for someone to invent a way to make them" - now I think this is a tad naive. Reductively speaking, the vast majority of possible sounds will never be heard by anyone. If you pick 12 notes at random from an 88-key piano, the number of possible combinations is greater than the number of stars in the universe (and amazingly, after a vst plugin has output five frames of audio - just over a tenth of a millisecond - there have been the potential for more unique output possibilities than the number of stars in the universe).....



......But most of these combinations wouldn't be musically meaningful, which is why it's hard to write an original melody. So the objective must be to invent a good sound, not just a new sound! This takes us deep into the subjective realm of human cognition - it's a mistake to even think of 'sound' we perceive (as opposed to the measurable physical vibrations) as a distinct input channel, or as separate from our other senses or our internal mental state, as beautifully shown with in McGurk effect. “



regarding his plugin work: “a few months ago my AnarchySoundSoftware web server crashed, I lost my online shop setup, and all my old plugins disappeared off the web. Until yesterday that is. Inspired by your email, and a few other recent emails from AnarchySoundSoftware users, I've quickly thrown up a new site, over which I'm publishing everything.” All of his plugins are now free of charge on his website including many new curious goodies like 'Geosynth'


I hope that this was an interesting look back at a plugin that has been all but lost to the shifting sands of new technology, and I hope that you check out Mr. Hargreaves’ site.

Next time: Hyperprism Stand-alone