ZoeB

For anyone curious, here's a pair of articles from 1992 that interviews people like Ed Stratton (Man Machine; Zero-G) and Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) about samples: Criminal Record part 1 Criminal Record part 2

Also, right in front of him, there's a QuadraVerb and the homemade device shown in the Aphex Effect interview.

Totally! Even my main setup has helps with this, using a separate computer to record on. If I get bored while recording a part, I don't check social media sites, I start messing with the oscillator's footing or the filter's cutoff point, adding little flourishes that make the track idiosyncratic and mine.

I still haven't got around to properly trying out Renoise, in my mind trackers are sequencer+sampler combos... As for the Atari ST, I'd like to occasionally try composing without any modern DAWs as it seems like the change might be somewhat inspiring; I thought it'd be fun to try out the combination everyone was using back in the day (ST + S1000); I have this theory that the tech you use, especially the sequencer, affects the style of music you make, so I wanted to try out various now-free old MIDI sequencers (Tiger Cub, anyone?); and given that I often tend to make one or two sections and essentially mute/unmute their tracks in buildups to make whole pieces of music, I wanted to try out Creator, which seemed to be designed from that viewpoint. Creator in particular seems to bridge the ideas between MIDI sequencers (a single long list of MIDI events, grouped into tracks) and earlier digital sequencers (patterns chained together into songs), with muting being automatable. I mean, it was good enough for Fatboy Slim, the Future Sound of London, and Orbital... Curiously, my first track with Creator sounds (to my ears, at least) just like my teenage Impulse Tracker music, only now I'm adding delay and reverb in the mix. Which is nice.

Getting there with Atari corner...

Ack, only just noticed this reply, sorry! It's a Voltcraft ML-1 OR. My partner had some spare, and she was kind enough to screw one into the wall for me. I gather they're intended for electronics engineers to use, but they're just about a perfect fit for 3.5 mm cables too, although these braided ones are slightly pushing it. Anyway, yeah, I recommend them to Eurorack users.

Yamaha HS5s. DrumStation, the yellow first revision kind.

Thanks! I took this photo just after putting the studio back together, before using it again... I've got the two modulars patched up again now, so it's somewhat messy again, heh... Nah, they're Canford. Much nicer than the previous ones I had too.

SH-101 many many years ago, to pay rent. I missed it until I got an A-100. Oddly, I never missed the TB-303... I'm on my third DrumStation, so I guess that's one that's borderline worth selling/keeping. Even for digital sounds, twiddling knobs beats browsing samples (at least for me), it's just I usually end up making my own patches on the modular instead. Not that you can really get rid of it, but I kinda miss the tracking days too... But I like my current setup too much to get back into it...

Nearly there revamping the studio...

That looks like a really interesting sequencer, cheers!

Necromancing this thread because I always wondered whether he used Notator or Cubase, given those were the two main MIDI sequencers on the Atari ST in the early 90s... And it turned out (at least for Analogue Bubblebath 3 opener .215061) it was neither. There was a more obscure MIDI sequencer on the Atari ST called Dr. T's Tiger, and he used the cut down version of that, Tiger Cub. You joke, but I happened to use a toaster in my last track... Hell, I'm listening to .000890569 right now, and that starts off with a vacuum cleaner...

From an interview in 1993.

...

Aww, yeah, I think they got me good and proper there... ?

Might be interesting...

I still maintain he needs to hire an assistant to help out with things like digitising his old tracks, so he can concentrate on actually making music.

I tried that at the time of the CWLP, but Richard/Grant weren't interested... Thanks for asking back then, it was worth a shot! Yeah - I tried to convince them to do Melodies from Mars (aka CAT087) but Grant insisted Richard had 'plans' for it, and likewise for the ABB5. It's a hell of a long trip to Mars, innit? Huh, well that'll be nice if he does ever get around to it. It's certainly a good reason for saying no to releasing the existing version, that he's hoping to make an even better version instead.

I tried that at the time of the CWLP, but Richard/Grant weren't interested... Thanks for asking back then, it was worth a shot!

https://crackmagazine.net/article/long-reads/crack-magazine-x-aphex-twin/

So can we look into crowdsourcing this like with the Caustic Window LP..?

Ah, cool. I hadn't noticed it before. Thanks.

Has this been mentioned here yet? https://aphextwin.warp.net/release/85662-afx-analord-07 I saw someone add it to MusicBrainz.

He had a Roland R-8 early on (including the SN-R8-04 card for TR-808 samples, and Simmons tom as on Green Calx). At least, that's what I'm inferring from what DRN said. So perhaps the acoustic samples are from that too, distorted a little, with reverb from the QuadraVerb? I'm not sure, they're not the most interesting sounds he's used... I know he used the VCS3 a fair bit during the ...ICBYD/Ventolin era, I think for things like ring mod... And he'd do things like flange white noise, probably with the QuadraVerb... And he said he sampled hitting an ammo box from the inside with a wireless mic, if memory serves... Though for nice metallic drum hits, personally I like sending a brief burst of noise to a spring reverb... Things like ring mod can work well too... He also sort of confirmed using an aerosol as an open hat, like in S'Express. Just think laterally and you'll do fine. That's all I have off the top of my head right now. I briefly had a QuadraVerb the other year, and you know what? It was just regular effects, awkward to program through a fiddly menu. It's not the equipment you use (or only to a certain extent, at most). Work out what weird things you can do. SAW 85-92 still sounds great, and that used TR-808 samples, not the real thing, and was premastered to Compact Cassette. Make do with what you have, be creative. Otherwise it's a cargo cult emulating the specific examples of another person's lateral thought.

Thanks! Yeah, it's almost all hardware. The only samples I used were of the Mellotron. Everything else is my Doepfer A-100 through an AnaMod ATS-1. (I think that's right, anyway. I could be wrong, I've made a few more tracks since then and my memory's terrible...) What am I using exactly? Let's see... I think that about covers it!