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ZoeB

Knob Twiddlers
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Everything posted by ZoeB

  1. Haha, yeah, that was me. :)
  2. The sawtooth-plus-inverted-sawtooth trick works best with a sample of a single cycle from an oscillator (at least, I assume it does, maybe I'm wrong), so you only need a few hundred bytes or so. There's no need to sample each note or every few notes individually, as it's an unnatural synth sound anyway, with no filter or variance in pitch or volume that's going to follow you up and down the keyboard. The trick is detailed in Synth Secrets.
  3. That's an early effort? o.o That's good rotoscoping!
  4. The artwork's by my artist, but I wrote the script. Page 1:
  5. ZoeB

    BT

    I realise that people who claim instrumental music isn't real music are wrong, and have hurt the feelings of some people here. Saying that all vocal music isn't real music is its mirror image though. Think of instrumental music as like books, and vocal music as like films. While it's easier to watch a film than read a book, and that's the way most people usually prefer to learn stories, it's conversely easier to write a book than to make a film, so I have a lot of respect for filmmakers. Anyway, to anyone who doesn't like vocal music, that's cool. It's just people who are dismissing it out of hand, or judging artists by their haircut, that I'm questioning.
  6. ZoeB

    BT

    Well now this thread is getting interesting... It sounds like acid1 and Goiter Sanchez are onto something. I think I've had this argument before, when I was a teenager. I drew an anarchy symbol with the letter A neatly inside the circle and someone told me I couldn't do that. I never did like the idea that I have to do something a certain way, even when it simply means I have to rebel all the time and can't ever do the "normal" thing sometimes just because it's fun... If you feel like you constantly have to act a certain way just to be different for the sake of it, then that's not really freedom. I've been listening to These Hopeful Machines a bit lately, and I believe it's good for the same reason Drukqs is: someone with a love of sounds and music has spent many years honing their music making craft, and then has spent many more months on a single album, painstakingly micro-editing together an eclectic blend of sounds and styles as they see fit. I don't really see how one is IDM and the other is... whatever it is... or why one has artistic integrity and the other doesn't. If it's just because one of them is more successful than the other, then that's silly, he's only more successful because of things like his inclusion of lead vocalists singing lyrics as the focus of the songs. I think both instrumental music and songs can be great, and wouldn't want to live without either. Of course, everyone has their own valid personal preferences, but it seems silly to dismiss music just because it's unashamedly enjoyable to listen to, or popular. This is my own fault, for listening to pop music the other year, and discovering that some of it is good. Now I realised how elitist I was being before, and I really can't go back to that. I don't know... if I have to be against people who studied music at uni, that's just as bad as if I have to be against people who didn't. Both are valid paths to pursuing a passion for music making. I came here to share a fanaticism of good music, not to squabble over whether someone has artistic merit due to their lack of a decent haircut and shoes. That's completely besides the point. Really though, I shouldn't do either, when I should be actually making music instead of merely talking about it. I think I'm out. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
  7. ZoeB

    BT

    Seriously, you people aren't just ranking musicians based on how boring their haircut is, right? That'd see Kraftwerk and Ursula Bogner slugging it out for the most nonchalant credibility, while Skrillex and BT wouldn't have a chance. Meanwhile, Daft Punk and Deadmou5 are too mainstream to even have visible hair. It all makes sense now...
  8. ZoeB

    BT

    I don't really go to clubs or pubs, but if an American director / digital historian who isn't particularly into IDM has seen the video to Rewind (I didn't even realise it had a video until he mentioned it), I'm guessing the whole genre isn't exactly a secret. :) I remember a TV show using snippets of Windowlicker as the stinger music, and you can barely watch a BBC documentary without some Brian Eno or Boards of Canada playing. So people are being subjected to that kind of music quite a bit, just maybe not as consciously as at clubs. Then again, I've heard of people playing such music at clubs too, so great. I don't really get why people want the things they like to be unpopular. Or, for that matter, why some artists seem to want the things they make to be unpopular. For all this posturing, if you specifically want things you make to be a secret, then you do care what other people think. Self disgust is self obsession, honey.
  9. ZoeB

    BT

    Please don't tell me Uwe Schmidt is too mainstream for WATMMers? :D
  10. ZoeB

    BT

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfQY8_jFZKU
  11. ZoeB

    BT

    Seriously, I envy you on this. I will not/cannot listen to music if the person who makes it is a douchebag, even if I would otherwise like it (last step and acidwolf, for example) because I cannot separate their personality from the music. Haha... Well, I like (some) Apple products, and yet I firmly believe that Steve Jobs was an actual psychopath, so... :) Sometimes bad people can either make good things, or get other people to make good things for them. It's not like I know the first thing about whether any of the musicians I like are actually nice people or not. I've never met them. The same goes for the people who make all the other products I buy. I just have to buy them or not based on their own merits, not their creators' personalities.
  12. ZoeB

    BT

    So if I get the general consensus right, pretty much no one else here likes his music, because: The artist cares "too much" about his image It doesn't have enough "soul" It lacks direction The vocals are bad It's a team effort, without credit given where it's due As I'm a fan of music, not musicians, I don't care about the first point. (But hey, I guess at least you're objectifying men and women equally?) I'm curious about the second point, though. Is this a lack of emotion, or originality, or sincerity, that you're perceiving..? The lack of direction is also intriguing. I view it as a plus point, his music takes you all over the place, like a wild ride, and it never feels contrived in changing direction, merely interesting. As far as the vocals go, yes, the lyrics seem a bit trite and direct, but at least he's put in the effort to actually write lyrics. For a lot of music fans, they're a necessity. The team effort thing's interesting. Is it the lack of credit you object to, or a group of people co-operating in order to make music together? I've heard the same criticism raised against Hans Zimmer, and in both cases, I think the music itself is often great, regardless of how it was made or by who. Yes, people should be given proper credit, but can anyone cite a source regarding Zimmercorp or Transeaucorp? I guess I shouldn't even bother asking what people here think of Xenomania... I guess I don't make a distinction anymore between manufactured music and artistic music. If it sounds good, it is good. If it's popular, good for the artist. Making music that people want to hear in order to subsidise making artistic music sounds like a pretty good strategy to me, and who says the two have to be mutually exclusive anyway?
  13. ZoeB

    BT

    I'm curious, what are people here's opinions on BT's music? He seems to have a similar thing going on (creating a vast array of different styles of painstakingly built up music, often from scratch by programming or making electronics).
  14. That's a good point, I forgot about that. Although directing something takes a lot of time and effort, so you'd probably outsource the music to someone else even if you can do it yourself.
  15. After a brief search on YouTube, I found a Sun Moon Stars advert from 1994, which really doesn't sound like Aphex Twin wrote the music, but then again it doesn't look like David Lynch directed it either, yet apparently he did. (Contrast this with Ridley Scott's adverts, which are practically mini Blade Runners, complete with Vangelis soundtrack.) Chris Cunningham's Orange advert sounds more like Aphex Twin to my ears, but probably isn't. They could be anyone, really. There are various adverts that use his off-the-shelf music rather than having anything original written for them (anyone else remember the Pirelli one?), but they're not of much interest, as those tracks are widely available. And then there's Aphex Airlines. :D So I have no idea, sorry. :/
  16. That's a good point, and maybe it's silly hero worship on my part, but hearing (OK, reading) him talk about how he achieved a unique sound because he couldn't afford to use the same equipment as other people really resonated with me about how I used to make music, and why my own music used to sound weird compared to how it now sounds comparatively bland in some ways. It just helped give me the push into getting back into more experimental and idiosyncratic sounds. Hearing him talking about sampling various unique sounds of his and sequencing samples of almost everything on an FZ-10M -- surely not the most coveted equipment -- really drove home to me what I already knew but wasn't properly feeling, that it really is what you're doing, not what equipment you're doing it with.
  17. I'm not really attracted to guys, sorry to disappoint... In terms of career, I want to be like him. I don't want to be with him. I don't care about him at all, outside of the context of music making.
  18. Just so long as this doesn't turn into another creepy stalking thread. I care about his music, not his personal life.
  19. Oh, I agree aphextwin.nu is a fantastic resource! I'm just looking for scan-ins and preferably some more recent material too.
  20. Hi! Is there a thread anywhere that brings together all the different interviews and press releases that Aphex Twin (under his various aliases) has given? I had a brief look in the archives and the closest I could find was a broken link to a .doc file. Magazine scan-ins would be preferable as it's less likely they've been mistranscribed. I only ask because seeing his April 1993 interview with Future Music in another thread here a while back is partly responsible for me getting back to my "sample all the things!" roots, helping me shed that unhelpful gear lust and rekindling even more of my early passion for music making. That and I'm working on an article charting the various memes he uses, sprinkling it with the odd relevant quote about his process and methodology. Thanks!
  21. I haven't used an A-106-6, so I can't make any recommendations either way, I'm afraid. Filter wise, I now have an A-105, A-106-1 and A-106-5, and each has different situations it comes in useful for. I think the main thing is to make sure you at least have one multimode filter, otherwise it shouldn't be too important which you get. So the A-106-6 might well be a good choice. If you're interested, I've put up (very amateur) demos of my A-106-1, although I haven't yet learnt to use it properly. It's quite whacky in terms of how a bunch of different settings all change how it sounds in a not too intuitive manner, so it should be fun to learn, and hopefully quite versatile! http://soundcloud.com/doggiedogster/acid-test-a-106-1 http://soundcloud.com/doggiedogster/acid-test-a-106-1-day-2 Yes, I'm getting the A-199. I realise I'll probably have to dangle the tank outside the case to avoid mains hum, but that doesn't seem like the end of the world. I'm still far too much into irrationally wanting to have everything neat and matching as much as possible, rather than having a big Katamari-like mess of different boxes on my desk... Plus it's nice to know it can easily be placed in the middle of a patch, even though I'll likely be using it mostly as a send effect. Mostly I'm into versatility, moreso than even how good something sounds these days (I got a real analogue modular partly because it would sound imperfect, which is more pleasing to the ear), so all I feel confident recommending is a multimode filter rather than just a low-pass one (which it sounds like you're already going for anyway, so yay) and something with a feedback loop. (The A-106-1 has this, although I haven't tried it out enough yet to comment on it. I'm hoping the A-199 will really come into its element when it comes to the feedback loop. The A-188 certainly does!)
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