ZoeB
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Everything posted by ZoeB
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...and pay your programmer well so he won't put in a backdoor that disables all the security and lets him steal anything.
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Treat yourself to a nice chair. Don't underestimate the importance of being comfortable when you're trying to get your creative juices flowing. And yeah, having everything within arm's reach is a great idea.
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I swear by my Edirol R-09, although I'd imagine there are many other digital recorders that are just as good, but I haven't used them personally to know for sure. Make sure it's lossless and can record to an SD card. A modern, digital, portable sound recorder is the most convenient thing in the world, so light and small you can take it with you everywhere, then when you're back in your studio you can just slide out the card and move the files. Next picnic with your girlfriend, find a clanging gate in the park for an Alberto Balsalm style track! :D I used mine to record the birds in Coldrum Stones, the clanging knives used in a bunch of tracks, and a whole bunch of other things. It's also great to keep by your bed to jot down ideas in the middle of the night without having to write down notation at three in the morning. Just hum it! So yeah, by all means, go cheap, go second hand, but don't go DAT or MiniDisc cheap, it's not worth the hassle of transferring the data across, or in the MiniDisc's case, having a lossy format. Portable sound recorders are the unsung champions of recorded music, putting the squeaky shoes and flickerboards in Tha!
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Oh! Also, have you heard of the DrumDokta? It looks pretty neat, although without a kick drum as nice as the BD88's, and requiring an add-on for the clap sound, it's a bit redundant for me right now...
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Yes! Although Halloween's come and gone and still there's been no news, ack! I'm hoping they might sell a nice handclap module, as I have the Analogue Solutions modules for kick and snare drums, and the Doepfer one (plus a multimode filter, attenuator and a couple of envelope generators) for cymbals. Then again, it's fun making drum sounds with non-drum-specific modules anyway so I won't complain! :D
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Thanks! It's a shame I'll have to wait until next year to properly use the Concussor modules, as my main client right now doesn't want anything too eighties sounding... but yeah, it's gonna be fun including them in future mixes! :D
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A newish addition to my setup: TR-808 style sounds! (Judging by the circuit board, very TR-808 style.)
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To clarify, 2350 is impressive considering it was apparently performed in real time, but I don't see much point in releasing a recording unless you take advantage of the fact it is a recording and layer it in the studio... So yes, it's nice enough, but I find myself listening to other Fax releases such as From Within much more often. Maybe I'm being stubborn, judging whether I should have something based on whether I'll get use out of it, rather than appreciating the context in which it was made. :)
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I think most of the non-Fax ambient albums I'm aware of that I'd rate highly have already been mentioned, but for what it's worth, these are all great: Soothing Sounds for Baby (OK, maybe it's not great, but Lullaby sounds like it inspired Fingerbib in terms of the lead sound. Then again, maybe I'm just imagining things.) I'm undecided about Mother Mallard. Probably not. Phaedra (which surely inspired most of Pete Namlook's career) Discreet Music (compare to [Lichen]...) Ambient 1, 2 and 4 Apollo The Pearl, Lovely Thunder (probably The White Arcades too but I haven't managed to find it yet) The Blade Runner soundtrack Watermark and MCMXC a.D. if new age count Microgravity if ambient techno counts Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (ditto), On, Selected Ambient Works Volume II and Analogue Bubblebath 5 (and most of the Artificial Intelligence series if ambient techno counts). Kissing a Robot Goodbye might just about nudge its way into your definition of ambient too. Excursions in Ambience: The Third Dimension (it's a compliation, but you'll need it for a digital copy of [stone in Focus]) Lifeforms, plus the singles Cascade and Lifeforms 76:14 Point 3 - Water (Fire is better, but not really so ambient) 1194 or Woob 1194 or whatever it's called The Quake soundtrack Substrata The Riven soundtrack Do Music Has the Right to Children, Soup, Stay Down or Geogaddi count? Probably not... What are Consumed and Closer, minimalist techno or something? Never mind... Opalescent and Rumpistol almost definitely don't count, but get a bonus mention for being so awesome and fun respectively. RH-8SB and The End of Tel Aviv Hydroponic Garden My own Hello Calm! :D Hmm, I guess I must have stopped listening to other people's music after that or something... Anyway, in short, there's a lot of good music out there, and most of the good stuff is pretty hard to classify. Most of the albums listed above are good for listening to while you work, have a bath or drift off to sleep. Enjoy! ^.^
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Seeing as there's been nowhere near enough mention of Pete Namlook on this thread, try these: Silence (Silence 5 is even better!) Air Shades of Orion 2350 Broadway is quite popular, although I don't really get it myself... The Fires of Ork Dreamfish The Putney Ambiant [sic] Otaku is another popular Tetsu Inoue one that's OK but I much prefer, say, Selected Ambient Works Volume II... From Within Outland (underrated in my opinion) Psychonavigation Organic Cloud (another Inoue one that seems too popular to me...) Jet Chamber Many of these are collaborations, and some aren't really ambient, but they're amongst the cream of the Fax label as far as I can tell. Spyra's Phonehead and Peter Benisch's Waiting for Snow are great too, although don't have any Namlook involvement besides him releasing them, as far as I know.
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I couldn't agree more. The latest (OK, now second latest) addition to my studio:
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Well now I'm curious, how is a vertically rackmounted QWERTY keyboard useful?
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Longing for the day when I can paint the walls a decent colour...
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I now organise my projects to absurd levels. Each potential album I make is a git repository. I have a handy history of every change I've made to every one of my tracks. Occasionally a particular track will start to seem better suited to a different project, and I'll move it into the appropriate repository, but otherwise I'm about as methodical at organising my music as I am at organising my day job's code.
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Unless they're young enough to have the CD or download... :)
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For what it's worth, I got mine relatively cheap as it was refurbished. I figure getting the machine a few hundred pounds cheaper is worth having one or two dead pixels...
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Neither did I until they ran on Unix. :) If you think of it as the combination of Unix and a pretty interface, you can't lose!
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The only thing that would be cooler is if it was actually in the sea, so you look out the window and there's fish looking back at you!
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Here we go, I finally found some old footage of my "studio" as it was ten years ago, back when I was nineteen: Roland SH-101 in my bedroom Roland TB-303 in my bedroom (I can only assume I liked to play it when I first woke up or something, I really can't remember) Korg MS-2000 Novation Drumstation, cheap vocoder and TB-303 clone, Akai S-2000, Roland U-220, I think. It's been a while, so I could be wrong about some of those. Plus Windowlicker poster, naturally. For contrast, here's my current setup. Since I moved into my own place with my girlfriend, and actually had to start paying proper rent, I could no longer afford (financially or in terms of storage space) to collect synths. And as we're renting, we have no control over the garish wallpaper/paint, although you can just about see the corner of a Designers Republic poster I'm using to brighten up the place. Hopefully we'll be able to buy our own place soon, then I hope to at least get a bigger desk and full size keyboard.
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Yeah, that's a sensible choice if that's what you need. I don't really notice latency much, and I only ever gigged once, back when I made more upfront, in-your-face kind of music. I can't really imagine where I could play my new ambient music live without annoying the customers, so live playability isn't a factor I have to consider. :)
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Even better priced, and even easier to integrate into my current studio setup, are the Digital Sound Factory soundfont versions of the Proteus modules' presets. I haven't yet used them as much as I was expecting to (I'm currently in another phase of making my own patches in a more versatile synth), but I still think it's amazing that technology moves on so quickly that I can have unlimited duplicates of all those romplers in effect. A dozen software samplers loaded with Peter Siedlaczek's Advanced Orchestra is even more impressive in that regard. In reasonably priced software and CDs alone, I have the kind of rack of samplers that a Hollywood composer in the nineties would have paid thousands for.
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I'm impressed! :D It was my attempt about ten years ago to draw an Orbit, Super Bass Station, Drum Station and U-220. Well spotted! Out of which I've had a Drum Station and U-220. I also had an actual TB-303, but looking back, the Super Bass Station would probably have been much easier to sync up and to be honest, it seems silly to get a synth that's a one trick pony while pretty much anything with a resonant filter can make nice acid lines.
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I can't give away all my secrets. ;)
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