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ZoeB

Knob Twiddlers
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Everything posted by ZoeB

  1. The latest addition to my studio: Hopefully the spring reverb should arrive this month too! :D
  2. That would be Synthesis Technology's E340 Cloud Generator module, finally available in a Eurorack version.
  3. Well above all I love music, but brands such as artist aliases and record labels help me seek out other music I'll like, given that I consistently like most of a given brand's previous output. That's the point of branding. If several bad products (eg albums) were released under a brand I liked, then sure, to begin with I'd buy them, but in the long term, I'd wise up and go elsewhere for stimulating music. The brand would be diluted, so untrustworthy. It's surprising how many people in charge of companies seem to miss this, or at least ignore it in favour of some quick money. Well, thinking about this a bit more, that seems partly true, but I'm still not sure if it's the whole story or not. You only need to go through the slush pile of a record label to realise that amongst people you've never heard of, some are better than others, and the music itself has to be at least a part of why some musicians are more successful than others, amongst many other factors. I have no idea how you'd go about testing whether your liking of music by artists you haven't heard of is solely due to their similarity to works you're already familiar with, or something else too, but it would certainly be interesting to find out. To paraphrase Feynman, I only see how more knowledge adds to an experience. I don't see how it subtracts. As a musician, I think it's important to work out as much about music as possible, such as whether any given two pieces really can be qualitatively compared or not.
  4. I'm guessing that's more in time for Saturnalia than as a gift? It looks like a pretty featureful machine, I'm sure you'll enjoy it once it does arrive. ^.^
  5. Of course, it could be possible that that's the problem, and he wants to prove his music's still objectively good enough for people to buy because it's good music, not because it has his (brand) name attached. To be honest, it'd make my life easier if he was honest about his releases, because I like almost everything he's made, but never the first time I hear it. I almost overlooked the Analords and the Tuss releases because I didn't like them the first time I heard them, even though I love them now. If you specifically make "grower" type music, rather than the instantly accessible kind, branding's not necessarily a bad thing. Like you, I trust that if something's branded with his name (if not his label's), I'm pretty much guaranteed to like it after a few listens, if not right away. And that brings up more questions about whether his music (or, for that matter, the genres we enjoy) really is that much better than everyone else's that I've heard, or whether I could have picked pretty much any artist at random and through repeated listens grown as attached to their output. I'm hoping the former, but it seems doubtful. I like food my partner hates and vice versa, just because of what we happened to eat when we were younger. They're interesting thoughts to ponder, at any rate. Well, your life's probably going OK if that's what bothers you the most. :) Take some comfort in that!
  6. Like the adverts in The Invention of Lying. It'd be great if all adverts were like that, actually not allowed to lie at all, even via insinuation! :D ...but then no one would buy the products, sadly.
  7. Some musicians seem to look down upon simple songs, but they really shouldn't. To the general music-buying public, a simple, catchy melody that you can hum in the shower is much better than an intricate jazz riff. Creating simple songs can be easier and the result more popular, allowing you to focus your energies on improving the catchiness of the hooks, the solid foundation, the production, the musicianship and so on instead of solely on coming up with intricate notation and impressive performances. Playing an instrument really, really well impresses other musicians. Playing an instrument pretty well and getting a tune stuck in the listener's head impresses the record-buying majority. Pick whichever fanbase you want, and write simple or complex pieces of music accordingly. :)
  8. Less talk, more gear porn!
  9. Wait, is "Zole" me? I didn't mean to insinuate I was offended, sorry if it came off that way. I just wanted to clarify that when I said I steal ideas, I mean that in the "good artists copy, great artists steal" way, not in the "outright plagarise whole riffs" way. I steal ideas, not tunes. Although I don't mind what anyone calls it. I don't want to start arguing semantics. Technically it's not stealing, but it's certainly a catchy idea to call it such, so I'm happy to go along with that.
  10. I don't even go as far as to steal snippets of melodies, so much as ideas like "use a four line vocal throughout the song" (which Moby and Fatboy Slim did an awful lot, and I've done in a few songs now too); "throw in an acid line for the more hectic parts" and "don't be afraid to combine an acoustic and electric piano" (from Praise You, to my remix of 2012); "alternate between two instruments, such as sampled and analogue drums" (PWSteal.Ldpinch.D); "hold the last piano chord, and reverse it" (from Hans Zimmer's Time to my Beginnings). Stuff like that, not actual notes or anything, just ideas of what works well.
  11. Yeah, I use call and response all the time. Blah-blah-go-up-like-a-question, blah-blah-go-down-like-an-answer. It's amazing how effective such a simple trick can be. Arps can be surprisingly useful too, just play broken chords, change the inversions to taste, and then change the rhythm, jazzing it up a bit. Remove some notes, or slide some along in the piano scroll. Again, don't be afraid to repeat a note twice in a row. This bit can end up being a very catchy rhythm section. I do this in quite a few songs in a forthcoming soundtrack, but alas, I can't share them yet for examples. Walking in the Rain has a jazzed up broken chord type rhythm thing going on though. Broadening out the subject a bit, I think the best thing to do is find songs you like, analyse them (which takes more time and effort than simply listening to them) and work out what you like about them. Steal little ideas from everywhere, such as using call and response in your main melody, and playing jazzed up broken chords behind it. Just don't try to cram every idea into every song, work out which idea fits best where.
  12. ...or it's a Yamaha R-60B, which definitely is in the Electone range. Although it's really not important, and far too close to the world of organs for my liking, even if it does happen to hook up to technically one of the best synthesisers ever made. I guess it's another marketing issue, make a fantastic synthesiser and market it is being a bit like an organ.
  13. Technically, I believe the GX-1 was designed to work with TX-IIs. These are pretty top of the range, with a woofer, four squawkers and four tweeters, but no Leslie-style rotation. Having said that, the GX-1 will work with any Electone cabinet model. I believe the speaker in the video is a Yamaha RA-200 or RA-200R. (There's also at least one other model in the series, the RA-100, but that only has two rotary speakers, not three, so it's not the one in the video). Not that any of this matters because there are plenty of synthesisers that sound great which are much more affordable, lighter, smaller, easier to maintain, and easier to integrate with the rest of a modern studio. :D The GX-1 and even the CS-80 (while we're talking about flagship Yamaha models) sound like they're very expressive and versatile, but more hassle than they're worth given how hard it would be to find a technician who can repair them or, say, retrofit MIDI into them... although it sounds like RDJ managed to find someone to do the latter somehow, so good for him. If you got any more GX-1s into the UK, this small island would sink under the weight!
  14. I was going to steal that idea from Doepfer (and that XKCD strip) until James beat me to it. Now I need to come up with some whole other shtick.
  15. Calm down, you're talking at crossed purposes. Yes, Rbrmyofr, people can buy whatever they like, even if they don't want to invest the time to learn to use those things well, and that's a great freedom to have. And yes, o00o, buying some very high quality tools to do a job is only a good idea after learning enough of your craft to make use of them more than you'd make use of their budget equivalents. You're both right.
  16. Yeah, I wouldn't go as far as to call it cheating, but I'm very proud of the fact I've bought my current synthesiser using money earned from licensing out and selling my music. If you start with lesser tools to do the job with, it can sometimes help in interesting ways, too. Learning to use four track tape recorders before sixteen track ones helps you to be economical with what you lay down to each channel, for example, although I for one am very grateful to live in an age where I can have practically unlimited tracks. At any rate, it's much more beneficial to make do with what you have than to pine for what you don't have.
  17. True words indeed. It's best to have some equipment, and also knowledge about how to compose, how to wire up patches, how to produce and so on. At least, in my experience it helps to learn a bit of everything, unless you want to specialise in one area and team up with other people who specialise in the other areas. And, of course, you need to practice a lot. And you're right, all too often people want a quick fix instead of doing hard work. Buying equipment instead of learning and practicing is certainly quicker and takes less effort. Although if you factor in how you earn the money, it's probably wiser to spend your time doing a job you love like making music on cheap equipment than doing a job you don't in order to get that money in the first place, to buy nicer equipment you don't have the time to learn properly. So perhaps that's a false economy there too. But regardless of that, people will still rather listen to someone with talent and enthusiasm and a real love of what they're doing and constant eagerness to learn more, than someone who bought some expensive equipment and mucked around on it for a bit. This is just a flaw of the brain though. It's the same thing that leads to fad diets when everybody knows they need to eat healthy food and exercise a bit, and to the lottery when how much money you make (let alone have the restraint to keep) isn't as important as what you spend your time doing to earn it. And yes, learning to promote yourself and your music is also important. No one will come to you if no one's heard of you, because it's not worth anyone's time to scour obscure places looking for talented musicians no one's heard of. Once your music's good enough, show it to people and get jobs making more of it and licensing it out. Become a useful part of other people's teams, working on their projects with them. Contribute to the economy and culture of society by doing what you love. You become what you constantly think about. That can be a fan or a collector or a hobbyist or a professional.
  18. Oh, I can wait! :D Although I'm still tempted to save up and get a Continuum Fingerboard and CVC, eight oscillators, four mixers, four filters and four attenuators... Although that's arguably going completely overboard, it would be very expressive. I bet it'd be more reliable than, say, a Yamaha CS-80, and still cheaper than a Korg PS-3300... But yeah, we'll call it a long term goal after I've licensed out a lot more music. :)
  19. Rockdelux published it on their website. I have no idea if it's an official publicity photo that gets given to magazines, or if it originates from an interview or something. In all fairness, the Korg PS-3300 does look quite nice... It's a real bugger playing chords one note at a time and multitracking it, and I've grown accustomed to modular levels of flexibility. Something like that would be pretty neat for laying the odd pad into a mix.
  20. I'd go as far as saying that especially the simplest melodies sound good when layered over the other parts of a song. It took me far too long to work out that a good, catchy song is not made up of a few complex parts, but lots of simple parts working together.
  21. I only know the beginning and the end of his collection. That and he apparently misses his DX-1. You'd be better off focusing on making your own music than speculating about what someone else uses to make his, of course. It's all in the fingers and brain, not the boxes.
  22. Yes, that's an interesting point. I can make my products as good as the pirated versions (no DRM, high quality) in every respect except for price. So I have to charge more than pirates, it's just a question of how much. What intrigues me more from a psychological or economical point of view is that selling a thousand copies of an album for £2.50 will get you the same amount of net income as selling five hundred copies for £5.00 and letting the other five hundred people pirate it. It's arguable that doing the latter will make your album seem higher quality. Having said that, I'm grossly oversimplifying things, and I don't know the statistics on how much people pirate music, nor how often they pirate it to try it out then end up buying it afterwards. You could even argue in the other direction and suggest that you should simply give away the music itself and sell tickets to concerts plus merchandise, or only sell the tangible vinyl / CD / whatever version of the albums, not the digital download. I don't really know which business model works yet. I just know I'm making some money from selling my albums to people for them to listen to it, and making much more from licensing my tracks out to indie filmmakers and game designers, and making custom scores for them. I think the best bet is to either play live, or make bespoke music, and I'm choosing the latter. As for the album sales, I really don't know what works, so you might well be right.
  23. Digital downloads should indeed be cheaper than tangible formats as they're cheaper to mass produce, but they still cost a bit to make that initial first master! Music's starting to become available more and more in lossless, DRM-free downloadable formats, which are perfect and all you could ask for. It's more books, films and TV shows that I'm worried about. Hardly any companies seem willing to put those in a DRM-free format, and until they do, the pirates have a superior product. Having said that, I think charging merely £1 for an album devalues it, giving the music fan the impression (rightly or wrongly) that the artist and record label don't think the music's worth any more, presumably because it isn't that good. It's a strange and interesting fact of life that the price of a product reflects not just how much it's objectively worth, but also the image the company wishes to portray. Making certain products more expensive can actually increase their sales as their elusive "quality," something impossible to actually quantify, is perceived as being greater even though nothing else has changed, just the price.
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