This week, we come to you from the bleeding edge – caution was thrown into the wind and Live 6 beta 1 was used to produce the set. Aside from a couple of crashes, I made it through the other side with an episode in hand.
This week is also special because it saw the release of The Colors in the Wheel, the new album by our friends Venus Hum. Given the somewhat technical nature of this blog, I asked VHum member Tony Miracle (who has been featured here before with his minimal side project Satellite City) if he had any insight into the recording process he might be willing to share. He was gracious enough to give us the following to chew on:
i guess the thing to talk about from a tech angle would be theoverall technique/idea for the making of this record. we wanted tomake a really electronic sounding record, but by using no synths (you know, the standard oscilators and what not). instead we started with all acoustic sources (be it instruments, found sounds, whatever), then via computer editing and manipulation we morphed, warped, and mangled the sounds that you hear. the first track (turn me around) was built entirely of manipulated acoustic guitar.
for TURN ME AROUND i used ableton live to write the track, and a lot of the parts we put down quickly- like the chords, the ‘guitar percussion-hitting the back of instrument, ect…’, the counter melodies, and the basic arrangement. we later recorded a straight guitar part with a good mic/pre-amp/compression chain. for manipulation the source material i used the kitchen sink method of just chopping the gtr into microsecond samples, re-pitching and filtering. i used max + pluggo, reaktor, and the nord modular. everything eventually found it’s way to pro-tools for final editing and mix. logic might have been involved at some point too, but i can’t quite remember. this was a pretty typical method for most of the songs.
a couple tracks were recorded and finished in one version and then micro-sampled, chopped, and re-sequenced to make a new version (the 2 best examples are DO YOU WANT TO FIGHT ME? and YOU BREAK ME DOWN. the first version of those were pretty straight forward rock (FIGHT ME) and tom petty-ish folk (BREAK ME).
in general, there’s a lot of granular stuff going on- you can catch it if you’re wearing a pair of headphones.
Feeling inspired yet? If you enjoy it, The Colors in the Wheel is available from Nettwerk, and should be in record stores everywhere.
Following our Venus Hum portion of the set, I bring you a couple of tracks from Where’s Our Piece of the Groovy World by 3kStatic. If you’ve been frequenting this place for the last little bit, you’ll probably know that I’ll be performing as part of 3kStatic here in Nashville (at the Basement) on the 31st of July and at The Knitting Factory on August 5th. I thought to give a bit of a shout, since I’ve been working with all of these tracks anyway.
Winding the set up, we have a little example of the new Sampler instrument in Live 6. I took some elements from a couple of different attempts at working with Andrew Duke’s latest remix project and layered them together to give you a taste of Sampler’s power. The majority of the sound you hear is one rhythm loop having it’s looping parameters and filter modulated by various LFOs, with some judicious use of the FM modulation as well. The two pad sounds you hear come from two of his FX samples, given very short loops which I then modulated the position and length of with the modwheel and pitch bend. A little filter and a touch of reverb were added.
Of course, I’ll have more to share regarding Live 6 in the coming days and weeks. Also, I’ll have an announcement to make in the next day or so that might interest any of you in the Chicagoland area…
Pink Champagne (Satellite City Remix)
Turn Me Around
Yes And No (Remix)
Do You want to Fight Me?Second Coming
Signal IntelligenceDuke Sampler Experiment
