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ZoeB

Knob Twiddlers
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Posts posted by ZoeB

  1. 21 hours ago, pizza said:

    also has the benefit of zero distractions

    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.

    • Like 1
  2. 10 hours ago, Wunderbar said:

    What made u go for an atari instead of a tracker like renoise?

    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.

    • Like 3
  3. On 7/11/2021 at 11:25 AM, Rubin Farr said:

    What did you use to hang your patch cords? I made a wooden rack attempt and it was fugly.

    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.

    • Like 1
  4. 1 hour ago, Wunderbar said:

    What speaker are those ?

    Yamaha HS5s.

    18 minutes ago, TubularCorporation said:

    Drum Station or Super Bass Station on the upper right?  I can't tell for sure.

    DrumStation, the yellow first revision kind.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
  5. 4 hours ago, Silent Member said:

    Oh wow, that's the nicest cable arrangement I've ever seen. Super clean.

    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...

    1 hour ago, psn said:

    Are those the IKEA shelves made 19" racks?

    Nah, they're Canford.  Much nicer than the previous ones I had too.

    • Like 1
  6. 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...

    • Like 3
  7. 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.

    On 12/1/2011 at 10:32 AM, noise said:

    a toaster

    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...

    • Like 4
  8. Releasing things pseudonymously is a good way to try to gauge whether they're good, without getting false positives from people who already trust you.  Although then you can get false negatives, what with there being so much new material from lesser known new artists.  The Tuss was a pretty neat idea in that respect.  I'm not sure how a "fake fake" double bluff would work though.  Isn't that what the SoundCloud dump was in the first place, kind of?

  9. I just spent a few days scrutinizing the spectral content of every Analord track and found no signs of ATRAC compression.

     

     

    Not that it matters, but what the hell...  How about e.g. Boxing Day?  The steep cutoff points at 15kHz, 16kHz, 17, 18, and 19 look very reminiscent of lossy encoding to me.  While I've only looked at MP3 files as far as that's concerned -- I haven't had a MiniDisc recorder since iPods took off -- I'm guessing ATRAC might look like that too?

  10. He said this, quoted above:

     

    Strings I'll play, but everything else has to be accurate

    I might be misinterpreting it, maybe he played them and recorded the MIDI data of playing them, then when he was recording everything he was barely doing anything at all, just letting it play out...  Although this was 20-30 years ago anyway...

  11.  

     

    How cool that young RDJ had access to digital multitrack recording equipment in the mid 80s!!

     

    Maybe you were being sarcastic but in the case that you weren't, RDJ has said that he doesn't multitrack when he records.  He sequences everything and just hits record on whatever he's using, DAT/laptop/hard disk recorder/etc, then hits play on the sequencer.  He records everything straight to a stereo two-track.  

     

    Really? What's the source on that?

     

    It's always good to check, so:

     

    Everything was originally mastered on standard tape on a hi-fi cassette deck...  It's 99% sequenced.  Strings I'll play, but everything else has to be accurate...  I never keep sounds on disk.  This does record companies' heads in 'cos they like you to remix, but I just don't like to do it.  Sometimes I might spend three or four days to get the sounds together, then do a track with them.  The next time I work on something, if I have a wicked idea for a melody and I'm feeling lazy, it would be too easy to use a disk of drums that I'd used before.  That's why I don't save anything, because I like everything to be different.

     

     

    Over twenty years later:

     

    ...there were no analogues runnin live on druqks at all...  none of the tracks on syro were multi tracked into the computer , they were all recorded live to 2 track, which is kinda insane but the way i like it.

     

    It all depends on the setup he's using at the time.  There's no right or wrong answer.  Most of his music, I believe, is heavily sequenced, with some live FM pad playing over the top, recorded live, albeit with multiple takes to get one that's spot on.  He doesn't seem to multitrack record all that much, which seems bizarre to me, but there you go.  Then for Drukqs (and I'm guessing the Richard D. James album), it's all samples of analogue gear that he then composes with after the sound design, as far as I can tell.  Yay tracking!  Takes me back...

     

    It seems odd to me that where most people would just record a part, then record the exact same part again to double it, he'll instead buy twice as many modules to do the same thing live:

     

    that 1.54 [into Fenix Funk 5] is a conventional europatch but dual path , so like 2 mono synths, so 2 filters,2 osc's 2, vcas etc i rek it was mostly doepfer modules, there wasnt many other eurorack modules out then anyhow, you can make the doeper modules sound much smoother/delux like that, 2 of everything and pan it

     

    I'm not sure how he avoids the problem of running out of hands two twiddle knobs with...  Presumably he uses a lot of automation!

  12. Wait - so one person (minus one track) mastered the CD and digital releases, and someone else mastered the vinyl release? It makes sense if one person has more experience mastering for one medium over another, but then that ostensibly means outside of Minipops, there are two "versions" of every track on Syro, and even more confusingly, with the expanded edition of Syro Richard's offering, now some tracks are mastered by Beau, the others by Mandy (since presumably they would use the digital masters from the original CD/digital release Mandy did). I guess they could have used the vinyl mastering as the Bleepstore digital source...

     

    I need to go lie down and have a think about this.

    My sweet summer child, promise me you'll never try to work out which is the best version of The Beatles' albums. Records, 1988 remastered CDs, 2009 re-remastered CDs... stereo, mono... the 1983 black triangle Japanese Abbey Road CD based on the premaster that wasn't supposed to be released... All using different takes, no less...

     

    Meanwhile, the Twin's recording to cheap Compact Cassette tapes and format shifting to DAT longplay before giving it to someone to master...

     

    You might as well just ignore it all and enjoy the fine music.

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