Week Fix a forum and mash it up some

This week’s forum saw us spend a large chunk of time listening to mashups in conjunction with completely unrelated visual material (which of course, our minds spent the entire time trying to relate to the audio). The end of forum featured the obligatory debate between 2nd/3rd years and lecturers again with the theme of value. So, our bringer of mashupdom, a woman called Vicki Bennet says herself that she takes music of little note and mixes it with more music of little note. (of course, this is assuming that everyone hates a catchy tune just because it is simple). It was suggested that because the end product possibly required little energy to create, it has little value.. Well, to me, it seems like Vicki is using the songs like Pierre uses sampled sound, like a DJ uses vinyl, like a pianist uses the piano or dare I say, like a composer uses an orchestra. Does the end result have worth? It is certainly listenable. How much energy goes into making it? Does it matter? The composer is still striving for a preconceived musical aesthetic. Does that not put the mash up artist in the same category as a traditional composer? Could it be that the concept of instrumentation is evolving, ever more things coming under this scope (I mean, if John Cage can stand there is all seriousness and play a bowl of water…). Whatever conclusions people draw, I think Vicki could conceivably be put in the same box as our friend Pierre.

Week Fix Creative Curmudgeoning

Well, didn’t feel like I needed to do too much more to my sequenced composition
as I had already effectively mixed it (I felt) and incorporated such tools as
volume automation and effects to make it feel more natural. I did however
attempt to pan one of my more melodic sounds for the sake of interest and I
panned the ‘snare’ and ‘hihats’ a little to the left as they would be if they
were in a rock recording. The end result being a somewhat empty right-hand
speaker for most of the 45 seconds but oh well, in the name of realism ha ha.

MP3 here

Patchwork take 2

week fix audioadvancementation

Guitar micing and results…

For an immensely distorted (and LOUD) signal coming off the amp…

57 - very trebly

neumann – bassy/muddy

414 – like a mix between the neumann and the 57

57 behind amp – very bassy


Potentially the 57 in front and the 57 behind compliment each other (phase
issues pending), the 57 and 414 sound pretty nice, 57 and neumann not quite so
nice. Various other combinations yield different balances of trebly and bassy
sounds. Really, save yourself some hassle, work with your mic/mics and your amp
to have a sound you like coming through the monitors, straight off the bat.

Double tracking is obligatory in rock music, you are a fool if you do not
practice it.

I would have been curious to achieve good results with a lesser volume of sound
coming from the amplifier (I have heard tell that this achieves good results and
from my own experiences can say that if a guitar track is recorded with nasty
distortion…all 2.5kHz static...it is very hard to redeem it.)

For my example, I have blended all four mics sounds and double tracked the
riffage with respective tracks being panned left/right by 50%. You will hear
noise at the beginning and end. I have left this in because if I was taking a
recording to be mastered, the engineer could use that noise sample to get rid of
all the noise in the track.

Tada, Scott ripping it up on the guitar check it out!

For Rum...where is the rum?

Truly, hit and miss/random chance composition is the composition of our era. It is rife through commercial music (the stuff of bands, not the stuff of pop singers who could not be more removed from hit and miss composition if they jumped on a boat to the Antarctic), it certainly appears to be the main mode of music creation amongst the electronic noise artists, even the Classicists sometimes abandon themselves to formulas (take Serialism for example). So, today in forum we found out about a French, Music Concrete fellow named Pierre. I wouldn't say so much that this guy is a composer of one kind or the other, more a fanatic of sound. Sound is his instrument, he has a library of samples as long as my arm and the means to summon them at will (almost, and with the aid of his wife Bernadette). His compositions consist of to my interpretation, simple improvisation with his samples as the notes on his instrument. Of the works that we heard, I much preferred his collaboration with standard rock music than his pure noise works (with Pierre referring to his best known Rock music collaboration as being to him as The Bolero was to Ravel...to both these composers I say - lighten up, perhaps the people like these because they sound good, perhaps a good composition is not necessarily a technical one!). Amazingly enough, his remixed Classical music features standard mainstream techno beats, these works have aged quite well...

"Creative" computing oh yeah now we getting somewhere

thus far i have created drum sounds from samples of strummage

kick - comparatively low chord, pitch shift down considerably, compressed lots, mass EQ boost at approx 250 as advised

snare - pitch shift up somewhat, reverb, vague EQing

hats - pitch shifted, reversed, squashed

these i sequenced into a basic drum beat that repeats and provides a frame work to explore other sound potential in sampled audio

more...

NB I used beat detective/my eyes to suss the tempo of the original segment of riffage. In theory, I could have layered it over my drum beat and it would have been in sync (I didn't want to use it though)

with a rhythmic frame work established, I sought to add depth and colour using melody....the guitar sample provided certainly did not lend itself to any melodic contours that I would put my name to...I experimented with stretching/condensing the samples, reversing them, pitch shifting them. A reversal of a strummed chord took my fancy and became part of the drum beat. I experimented with trying delay on chord samples/pitch shifted chord samples, nothing sounded good because none of the delays I tried sounded the note as it happened (only after the delay time had elapsed). A plugin called Resonator provided what sounded like a harmonic breakdown of the sound. This fitted in nicely with my reverse chord and became the final addition to the instrumentation.

I used trial and error to try and break the drum beat a bit and keep it interesting with some degree of success.



The long anticipated link to an MP3 of.....Patchwork all 43 seconds of sequenced glory

Audioooooooooooooo of voice and such

Well, revisiting old ground once again, experimenting with vocal recordings. I was really keen to try using the hardware compression now that I know how to patch it in but I could only get studio one and it doesn't seem to have a compressor. I also wanted to prove, once and for all that the 414 is a mic of considerable versatility (I had seen an engineer use it for female vocals one time and thought it sounded good). Of course, the 414 was being used by someone else. So, I got my vocalist to speak into a neumann (minus the pop filter as that was being used too) and a 58. I personally can't see any value in the tone of the 58 (unless you are going for something budget sounding). The audio example online is a monologue comprised of six different recordings: The Neumann in cardiod, the Neumann in cardiod with digital compression, Neumann in omni, Neumann in omni with compression, the 58, the 58 with compression. Black Cat Phenomenom NB My vocalist was a bit further away from the Neumann than he probably should have been, that combined with the incessant hum of the air con lends a slightly reverberant fell to the first half. Compressed to MP3 and heard through cheap headphones, the second half through the 58 actually seems to benefit from it's reduced sensitivity and direct feel. Disappointed with the apparent irrelevance of compression on the spoken word (compression didn't really make the voice sound any warmer through either of these mics, it just facilitated an increase in volume) I spent some time recording vocals through the Neumann and, before the night was out, a 414 (the other person finished using it). I think it is safe to say that the difference in sound between the Neumann and the 414 for female vocals anyway is non existent. I have yet to compare male vocals (but in a budget studio the 414 would certainly do the trick). Certainly beefing up the voice with compression through the head phones is potentially a good way to improve the confidence of your singer...I am still loathe to affect the signal being recorded, better to make the digital compression work I think. I wish the effects units in the studios actually effected the voice, if anyone wants to show me how to make them work, please do.

Wk 4 forum

Continuing on with the presentations of work done by second and third years, the idea that the composer is obsolete is now firmly established in my mind. The music that students create using technology rarely has any premeditated design...but it sounds fine, and is applicable to the real world..chances are people would pay for a CD of it (gullible fools). So, who needs a composer nowadays when you can grab and sound tech student from uni and tell them to go through a, b and c arbitrary sound manipulating processes to produce an end product. (Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, it could be the natural evolution of music, I mean, I use this same trial and error, do it if it sounds good technique when I am coming up with riffs..). So, what proof do I have of this phenomenon this week....our friend Freddy was told to make 'sounds' using a guitar (strictly not allowed to 'play' said guitar though). He sequenced and recorded these sounds using software sequencing programs where in real time he was then able to add effects and processing to these 'sounds' (like mass pitch shift, reverb and the such). He made recordings of his output and chose his favourite out of several. This end composition surely is nothing more than the nicest/most interesting sounding out of a collection of potential compositions generated out of the experimental process. But it sounds absolutely awesome, I would not be surprised if I heard it on a TV show, or in a video game, somehow, it has value.