Guest Dr. Elemeno von Hat X: PhD Posted December 31, 2006 Share Posted December 31, 2006 so, word has it he builds gear, or used to. has he ever gone into detail about it, or just made fake samplers for magazines? i feel it's very likely he has built some custom effects, and i'm quite curious... probably circuit bent stuff too, but i'm more interested in fx... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awepittance Posted December 31, 2006 Share Posted December 31, 2006 so, word has it he builds gear, or used to. has he ever gone into detail about it, or just made fake samplers for magazines? i feel it's very likely he has built some custom effects, and i'm quite curious... probably circuit bent stuff too, but i'm more interested in fx... its very hard for me to believe what RDJ says in interviews in general. If he says he built a sampler or a synth i usually assume its false until i see him using it. His track record of compulsive lying has colored my ability to check out his supposed creations. Is there any evidence of him doing this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dr. Elemeno von Hat X: PhD Posted December 31, 2006 Share Posted December 31, 2006 well, i have no direct knowledge of his work in that area, but i think i've earned the right to a little speculation, because i do that stuff myself. circuit bending is another othello topic (a minute to learn, a lifetime to master). you can crack an early 90's toy open and get some fun noises quickly. doesn't take much more than soldiering skills, a basic knowledge of circuits, and a sense of adventure. that's why it's gotten a bit popular! so, i would be shocked if he _hadn't_ tried this, esp. because you can't just get shit like that at a store. and it's so easy it's stupid to buy circuit bent stuff off ebay... not to mention ebay has only been around a few years... funny how you stop noticing it's so new.. what i was really curious about was building gear from scratch. i also wager it's very likely he's at least done a little. companies like Paia will sell you kits that, in my opinion, aren't terribly hard to build if you have patience plus a little practice soldering... and you still get a quasi-serious bit of kit! given that he's said he went to school for electrical engineering or something, i would also be surprised if he's never done anything like that, from paia or otherwise. after that, however, i'm not sure. i've done things like download schematics off the net to build, and that's a little harder. from there you get into all sorts of shit - building modules (also from schematics off the net), modifying gear in an organized way (adding CV control to this or that bit of your expensive moog prodigy, instead of screwing with a $5 toy by poking it with alligator clips). finally, you get into designing your own things, which is the most hairy. personally, i can follow schematics well enough. i build stuff because it's fun, and if i had lots of $$$ i would certainly buy a lot more kits! it's honestly quite addictive... i'm not much for designing circuits, however. the best i can manage is to take selections from other circuits i've built, and combine them into new ones... thanks to being a comp sci major, i can also work with digital logic a bit... but designing my own analog phaser, or something, is a little beyond me. and, also, building a sampler, or one that's somewhat useful, anyways, is not a simple project. fx and synths are somewhat more managable, as they are often built from analog and discrete components, while samplers have a lot of digital crap... EEPROM burning... microprocessors... a much more difficult venture. that's why most people used shit like the mellotron or fairlight until the 80's. but, i could whip up a light box that looks like a sampler in an afternoon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bubba69 Posted December 31, 2006 Share Posted December 31, 2006 I don't think he really lies most of the time in his interviews. Theres a couple of classic outlandish interview situations but apart from that.... I doubt he has built a sampler but. yeah, im sure he'd like to. Im sure he's built a few boxes of sound. Im sure he has at least learned how to modify and maintain modular components. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awepittance Posted January 1, 2007 Share Posted January 1, 2007 i was harsh in my orginal response. I agree with both of you guys. What i really find hard to believe are the claims of him designing his own fully functional gear. Even references like "homemade polysynth" on Analord strike me as possibly false or misleading. While im sure it would be fairly easy for him to build a kit, it wouldnt be that easy to build a polyphonic synthesizer from scratch, albeit a melodic one with keybboard or midi control. It would not surprise me at all if he did circuit bending (a lot of the gnarly ring modulation and frequency modulated synth sounds on I care because you do sound like circuit bending to me) or kit built synthesizers. Building a sampler beyond one of those radio shack kits i find more of a stretch to believe. If he actually built or designed one that was usable beyond triggering a small 8-bit chip to record playback, and slightly manipulate the samples i would be utterly blown away by his skills. Something like making his own module for a modular synthesizer is not very hard to digest. Even if it wasnt based on someone elses schematics, you can trial and error alter someone elses designs till you get a pretty different sound (and will probably blow a few caps in the process). I took a class at my college that had us build a wah pedal and some other simple effects, nearly the the entire class got distracted by the interesting audio output from hooking up the components incorrectly. I've never built anything from a kit myself, just followed schematics out of basic circuitry text books. Alot of them have pretty basic synthesizer components. I remember the first time itried building one i had absolutely no idea what i was doing, had no knowledge of electronics whatsoever. I hooked up like a 7 component schmeatic on a little bread board and got white noise out the speaker! it was a very pleasurable and perplexing moment for me. I was dumbfounded by the idea of how a tiny little circuit could create such a fast random sounding signal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dr. Elemeno von Hat X: PhD Posted January 1, 2007 Share Posted January 1, 2007 you could "home build" a polysynth if you had a suitably complex modular... OR, do something via software routing, like, write a silly little max/msp patch that takes polyphonic midi input, breaks it up into three voices, then sends each voice to a seperate monosynth... to be honest, i get the impression that it's kinda like... the obvious lies are probably screwing with the interviewer, but most of it is true "in a sense." like... potatos are vegitables in a sense, but, if i may depart from the views of the nixon administration, ketchup is not. the best way to create confusion like this is to intermix truth, and slightly fudged truth... as well as the occasional outright lie when it's too good to pass up. i might have done the sampler thing too in his position... is that online anywhere, by the way, or is THAT story just a rumor? and, yeah... transistors generating noise is a bit magic... people will sort through a pile of them trying to find ones with a good sound... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest AlexPallas Posted January 1, 2007 Share Posted January 1, 2007 the educated guess is that he has augmented them and used to write a few computer programs (which he once commented are not nearly as good as professional ones) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest meatmouf Posted January 1, 2007 Share Posted January 1, 2007 my first exposure to aphex twin was an interview in which he stated that he built his own gear. being very poor myself, and from a small town in the USA where samplers and synths where unheard of and looked down upon anyway, i took it upon myself to build my own gear. i began by building simple little drone modules with 555 timers in astable multivibrator mode filtered through vcfs or resonant filters to eventually building two versions of my own sampler (non midi). one i packaged into an old gameboy and the other i did on this crappy ISA breadboard using an old intel 8255 3 port io chip. i had to write a driver in assembly which was the hardest part. they only used 8 bit convertors and sounded really shit but i loved them and made a lot of good music with them. i believe he said that the sampler would screw up and make some crazy sounds which mine did all the time as well due to improper prom addressing. anyway i think it is entirely possible that he built his own sampler. if it is a lie then im glad he told it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dr. Elemeno von Hat X: PhD Posted January 1, 2007 Share Posted January 1, 2007 ya, you're right, it's certainly possible. i guess my point, in brief, was that building a few stomp boxes is vastly easier than something like a sampler, and if he was making stuff up, that's about where i'd draw the line... though perhaps it was all true, i don't know! is it still feasabile to build something like that? i imagine pci is more of a pain than isa... serial and parallel ports are still hanging in there though! the few bits i've built that interfaced with a computer went that route... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Idiron Posted January 1, 2007 Share Posted January 1, 2007 yoyo, check a couple of my benders http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFuNXnlfz_8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSaU2EmwKpY i found them in richard's bins whilst looking for a lock of his hair! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest meatmouf Posted January 2, 2007 Share Posted January 2, 2007 I definitely agree, stomp boxes would be WAY easier. i guess isa is still feasible if you can find a pc with an isa slot! i would have given anything for a pci prototyping board, but yeah way more difficult. and anymore if you cant code something up in c++ or java/c# you can always resort to supercollider or max/msp for custom soft-samplers, or kyma if you're rich (i have a capybara but cant afford to upgrade it). foregoing the hardware route is just way too convenient nowadays.... i often wonder if aphex uses a kyma system... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest HankCrank Posted January 2, 2007 Share Posted January 2, 2007 my first exposure to aphex twin was an interview in which he stated that he built his own gear. being very poor myself, and from a small town in the USA where samplers and synths where unheard of and looked down upon anyway, i took it upon myself to build my own gear. i began by building simple little drone modules with 555 timers in astable multivibrator mode filtered through vcfs or resonant filters to eventually building two versions of my own sampler (non midi). one i packaged into an old gameboy and the other i did on this crappy ISA breadboard using an old intel 8255 3 port io chip. i had to write a driver in assembly which was the hardest part. they only used 8 bit convertors and sounded really shit but i loved them and made a lot of good music with them. i believe he said that the sampler would screw up and make some crazy sounds which mine did all the time as well due to improper prom addressing. anyway i think it is entirely possible that he built his own sampler. if it is a lie then im glad he told it. I don't know why, but thats a touching story. A little bit like that film, "Field of Dreams". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awepittance Posted January 2, 2007 Share Posted January 2, 2007 i often wonder if aphex uses a kyma system... i havent heard of any dead giveaway kyma uses on any of his tracks. He uses a lot of spectral decomposition on Druqks and in Come to Daddy but my ears are leaning towards Metasynth (as evident by that phot of his mug on windowlicker) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dr. Elemeno von Hat X: PhD Posted January 3, 2007 Share Posted January 3, 2007 metasynth metasynth metasynth... there are many ways to do image->sound... there's also a program called coagula for windows. on the DIY front, you could probably do it with csound or something too! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awepittance Posted January 3, 2007 Share Posted January 3, 2007 metasynth metasynth metasynth... there are many ways to do image->sound... there's also a program called coagula for windows. on the DIY front, you could probably do it with csound or something too! its not just because of the face. His Windowlicker album is littered with metasynth based synthesis. Its possible hes using a different program to do it, but it sounds exactly like metasynth to me (not just the face part). Ive used coagula, and the Csound/Cecilia spectral stuff does not sound like this. he could also be using a noise reduction plugin like the sonic foundry one or others that create spectral artifacts, they have a metasynth like sound to my ears. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest meatmouf Posted January 3, 2007 Share Posted January 3, 2007 he could also be using a noise reduction plugin like the sonic foundry one or others that create spectral artifacts, they have a metasynth like sound to my ears. interesting. i always assumed it was a noise reduction plugin... dead right about kyma anyways. not to turn this into a "how'd he do that" thread but what do you suppose he is doing on Inkeys? i thought it may have been a strange use of variphrase technology, but i dunno... cant place it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.