minimal dub/techno

[Guest Duke Remington]

its 2 sounds at a time guys, you have 2 ears. sound location is done by comparing the difference in amplitude and time between the 2 sounds.

[foresense]

i don't think you really need schooling to learn it well, i got most of the stuff out of the manual anyway, and looking up interesting objects while playing with the program. but it gave me an extra push to really start doing it. i prefer a more hands on music making approach.

[Guest iep]

i don't think you really need schooling to learn it well, i got most of the stuff out of the manual anyway, and looking up interesting objects while playing with the program. but it gave me an extra push to really start doing it. i prefer a more hands on music making approach.

 

kinda offtopic, but what ARE you guys doing with max/msp at school..? (i'm gonna do my admission exams in a few weeks, so any tips on the math-/listening-test and shit would be wicked too:))

[Guest Duke Remington]

yes im in an EA program but my uni doesnt offer max msp courses because they say they dont want to be so technical but they want the program to be centered around composition, conceptualisation and psychoacoustics. actually, they use max in another department to control little robots... anyway

 

im not a max expert, but it took me a solid week of studying the manual to be able to build and actual oscillator the first time i openend the program. i did the tutorials very slowly and i would say 6-7 months is good to get around the program. if you take a course, you might do it in 2 months.

 

 

if you have discipline and method you dont need anyone to teach you a program. but you do need someone to teach you discipline and method :)

[Guest bowen]

i don't think you really need schooling to learn it well, i got most of the stuff out of the manual anyway, and looking up interesting objects while playing with the program. but it gave me an extra push to really start doing it. i prefer a more hands on music making approach.

yeah the same here, its the structured nature of learning it, as in having to use it which forces me to learn, rather than a teacher explaining every object or concept.

 

kinda offtopic, but what ARE you guys doing with max/msp at school..? (i'm gonna do my admission exams in a few weeks, so any tips on the math-/listening-test and shit would be wicked too:))

 

This term (my last ahhhhhh) synthesis, a generative patch using radio and an installation using dna codes

[foresense]

kinda offtopic, but what ARE you guys doing with max/msp at school..? (i'm gonna do my admission exams in a few weeks, so any tips on the math-/listening-test and shit would be wicked too:))

man don't worry you will get in easily. take it easy there, the teachers are kind of shifty sometimes.

 

edit: we did some cool spectral manipulation things with it. i made an effect that split the spectral amplitudes according to how loud they where. i had three outputs: soft, medium, loud. after that i could process the three seperately and do all kinds of crazy stuff with it. it wasn't that complicated. and we did some external programming. i made a simple compressor, but it doesn't work half of the time, it's pretty shit hehe.

 

 

oh and melody is derived from timbre so it doesn't really make any difference that you can only hear one or two melodies at the same time. playing two different melodies at the same time produces nonsense, but it has nothing to do with the fact that you can only follow one line at the same time. it's just bullshit music. you can see harmony as an expanded vocabulary of timbres that we can recognize and play around with.

[Guest Duke Remington]

max was developped by IRCAM, and what these guys do with it right now is fuse electronic music with acoustic instruments, program ax to follow the performer etc etc.

 

what i used to do with max? stuff that i didnt have plug ins/hardware for.

 

although im kind of bored with it because it takes alot of time and its not that useful to me anymore. i like the simplicity of cubase, i like touching hardware, i like to play as much as possible and program as little as possible. i have a cyclopean analog studio so i use that instead, theres nothing really in max that i like more than something i can do with a machine i have in my studio EXCEPT....

 

 

GRANULAR SYNTHESIS

 

yep thats something max excels at

 

 

and yeah, im really more into music theory now and musical structures than experimentation with programs, i havent opened max in ages. next year im taking contrapunctal courses, harmony, etc etc... one of my idols is vangelis, id like to do something of similar complexity musically.

[Guest iep]

kinda offtopic, but what ARE you guys doing with max/msp at school..? (i'm gonna do my admission exams in a few weeks, so any tips on the math-/listening-test and shit would be wicked too:))

man don't worry you will get in easily. take it easy there, the teachers are kind of shifty sometimes.

 

edit: we did some cool spectral manipulation things with it. i made an effect that split the spectral amplitudes according to how loud they where. i had three outputs: soft, medium, loud. after that i could process the three seperately and do all kinds of crazy stuff with it. it wasn't that complicated. and we did some external programming. i made a simple compressor, but it doesn't work half of the time, it's pretty shit hehe.

 

hehe wicked. at the openday i met a guy who programmed a granular synth/sampler that derived the frequency/amplitude values from a set of 'chaotic' formulas, which produced some AWESOME drones, shit i could listen to for hours on end. maybe you know the dude... semi-bald guy with glasses, kinda nervous, probably because of his professor watching over his shoulder:)) there also was a english(?) bloke who also used max's granular-features to split incoming audio into different bins (which were in turn processed into seperate grains) which he could pan in a quadraphonic-field using a pc1600x controller.. really awesome, intense shit...

 

btw do you guys work with Kyma alot? that Capybara in your labs was one of the main reasons i decided to goto the conservatory once i've passed my exams (just a few more weeks, argh) :))

[foresense]

haha yeah i think i know the guy, nice fellow..

 

you work with kyma for half a year. i didn't think it was thaaaat great. the way you build patches is really annoying.

[Paulie Walnuts]

my music idol of late's been debussy

 

i'm deconstructing all of childrens' corner and images (which for me means learning it inside out then transposing it into C, which is what i "know" in, engraved into my DNA from early piano lessons) - there's something so colourful about his harmonies... you can see a lot of his influence in japanese electronic musicians

[Paulie Walnuts]

its 2 sounds at a time guys, you have 2 ears. sound location is done by comparing the difference in amplitude and time between the 2 sounds.

 

yeah, from what i understand about consciousness, there's separate parts of the brain dealing with left and right audio - so we do receive them as distinct, and even delays less than a ms between them enable us to localize the sound in space

 

but i gather phenomenal representation is still singular - the parts of the brain which localize and encode the sound, like the parts of the brain which deal with decoding visual imagery, are non/pre-conscious under normal conditions

 

re: simultaneously playing different words in each ear, or playing unrelated melodies into each ear... the brain will take them both to a certain point, but the attention will skip between them

[Guest bowen]

re: simultaneously playing different words in each ear, or playing unrelated melodies into each ear... the brain will take them both to a certain point, but the attention will skip between them

 

what kind of speed can the skipping occur at?

[Paulie Walnuts]

i think it would probably depend on the individual - i'd guess about 5hz off the top of my head - but these issues of attention and phenomenal consciousness are extremely difficult to deal with because exactly how/why they could/should arise in the first place is still a controversial subject... and certainly, on acid you seem able to have access to phenomenal representation in parts of the brain that would never normally be conscious at all

 

with vision it's very quick... you tend to live with this idea that you're generally seeing quite a wide field of vision, like a video camera or something - and while it's true that you could notice movement almost instantly in a wide field of vision, you're only really conscious of a tiny spot in the middle... and even the quality of the vision around that is much poorer than we tend to appreciate

 

when you look at someone's face, your eyes actually scan their: left eye, right eye, nose, mouth, etc. at incredibly rapid speed, and build up this mental image which is only really assisted by direct, real-time visual information

 

i think when we listen to music we're probably doing the same thing - very rapidly switching our attention between chord, melody, bassline - and generally locking on to one of them as a sort of reference point

[Guest Barbed Q]

debussy! yes of course he is my n1 idol. ever heard the complete piano music by jean-yves thibaudet in 4 cds? my favorite interpretation.

 

other idols: scriabin, erik satie (especially de leuw's interpretations)

 

yea i said vangelis because it's ``classical`` level music but electronic. i mean what i REALLY want to do is be a kind of electronic debussy/scriabin if you can picture such a mix! :)

 

hey man id like to hear the music your making, could you pm me a link? im leaving work in a few minutes but ill upload some of mine soon for you as well.

[Paulie Walnuts]

oh yeah, i've got a tonne of debussy, satie and ravel here i've been robbing off my folks lately

 

i can definetly picture the mix - in fact, i got it into my head about this time 12 months ago that that was what i needed to do - and i started a thread on here about how i'd been working on about 3 seconds of music solidly for the last year, and managed to upset a lot of people :laughing:

 

what i've been doing since late '99-00 is working on my own sound with whatever spare time i get, and working on other ppl's music to pay the bills

 

lately i've wondered if i'm just too anal to ever really be productive with my own vision - i find it much more relaxing, and almost zen, to do music i've got some kind of emotional distance from - like dnb, or producing for friend's bands...

 

i mean, doing a really original dnb break is as anal, engineering wise, as anything i've ever known - but there's always a definite end result in sight... but with trying to achieve something as ambitious as debussy, ravel, etc. in a much more minimal and stripped down form, it's like an equation which has never been balanced

 

i've had a little inspiration from japanese soundtrack and game composers, like joe hisaishi and kenji kawai, who draw obvious inspiration from both french impressionists and from modern, electronic music - and there is this sort of melodic middle ground - it's really the sound and formula which i've been struggling with

[Guest maus]

alot of these minimal guys put every single track through it. its all about the enveloppes and hp/lp/bp sweeps.... FFFFFSHHHIIIOOOUUUUU.

 

isn't this what you'd call a "sweeping generalisation"?

 

:teeth:

 

love,

c

[Guest Barbed Q]

yeah man i knwo what youre saying i used to have a kind of block because i pay so much importance to details and i couldnt get the flow going because in the middle of composing i would be like oh this reverb doesnt work then dial and edit for like 10 minutes on my pcm and there goes the inspiration.

 

what i trained myself to do is have a method: first ill do all the sounds (if i use my sampler), edit all the effects im going to use, get everything setup so i can just sit in front of the keyboard and play. im working strictly with analog synths and sometimes my s5000 sampler but mostly modular synths so the trick i found is to record everything midi with and then i can play back the midi and send cv to my synths and loop the midi so i can plug the modules together until im satistisfied while ilisten to the notes. yeah its still a very uneven and broken way to work and it does affect my everyday thinking.. but it works for me. if i block somewhere, doesnt matter, i just keep going, do different sections of the track, and eventually i come back and it works, i know what to do.

 

i worked my mind to forget all the little details like ``oh is the cubase summing algorithm better than logic or pro tools or analog damn im going to do a 3 hour obssesive research on the net``. i think you know what im talking about. i also used to think alot about how things have to be pure and not mix analog and digital and emulations, have 0 noise, etc etc. im a real obssesive compulsive sometimes and as soon as that appears while im music making i stop because i know im never going to finish anything. i relax and come back with a clear head and remember than i can allow a few errors/impurities here and there , whats important is the final product. i used to need weed for that, i dont anymore.

 

please dont be afraid to do your own music and dont postpone that like say yeah im going to do some dnb tracks or other peoples music and THEN do my own. because obviously youre really intelligent and understand stuff so you should make music.

 

i hope i dont sound patronising, its just i think we have some things in common from what you wrote

[Guest Barbed Q]

alot of these minimal guys put every single track through it. its all about the enveloppes and hp/lp/bp sweeps.... FFFFFSHHHIIIOOOUUUUU.

 

isn't this what you'd call a "sweeping generalisation"?

 

:teeth:

 

love,

c

 

 

no thats what i'd call ``knowledge from observation and discussions with other electronic musicians``. and i said ALOT not all. why do you think pole is called pole? and i wasnt only talking about a shermann, i said a filter, which can basically be used as a STRONG EQ.

 

love,

 

BRBQ

[Guest iep]

ya can't use a sherman as a strong eq.

[Guest Barbed Q]

...

[Guest iep]

i'm not kidding. it's a beast. do not use it for minimal, dubby techno (as i've said in one of my previous posts which you probably skipped or some shit)

[Guest iep]

edit: doublepost from the bowels of hell striking with a vengeance

[Guest Barbed Q]

i'm not kidding. it's a beast. do not use it for minimal, dubby techno (as i've said in one of my previous posts which you probably skipped or some shit)

 

 

well ok it depends on the sound you define by minimal dubby techno. for me dub has to be raw in the mid frqs, smooth in the low and cutting in the highs. ive used a sherman before, i know how it sounds, and i know how i used the bp filter a a send effect to eq a snare and it sounded awesome and a bit tubely distorted, exactly what i wanted. and also processing a 606's hihats and it did sharpen them up like on a king tubby track. again these are only words, not sounds, so...

 

and i dont skip posts i read everything :)

[Guest bowen]

and i dont skip posts i read everything :)

but not always understand it ;)

 

isn't this what you'd call a "sweeping generalisation"?

[Guest Barbed Q]

and i dont skip posts i read everything :)

 

but not always understand it ;)

 

isn't this what you'd call a "sweeping generalisation"?

 

yeah i got the joke the first time. it was funny. thanks anyway.

 

i however also took it as a comment about me generalising too much, and since i always think there is a more serious message behind every joke i simply explained myself.