Syro Gear Discussion

[Audioblysk]

JUST GIVE US A PROPER STUDIO SHOT?! I know it'd be hard to do, but the one he recorded the first 3 tracks in sounds like a trans-dimensional sonic battleship.

[marf]

I don't believe you. I'll accept proof in form of FLACs from the record in .zip so I can compare side by side

what he said. i bought it so it wouldn’t be stealin

[sun drugs]

how you guys think he gets the tremolo sound on like CIRCLONT6A (Syrobonkus Mix), maybe some hardware gate. such a cool sound. similar sound at the end of mt saint nichel + saint michaels mount.

 

blown away by his claims of doing it with hardware but fuck what else would i expect from him, hes got the time and studio obviously..

 

love that metz break too, great to hear him talking about amping up stuff or recording stuff through big systems. Really gives the metz break character

[Real Human Bean]

how you guys think he gets the tremolo sound on like CIRCLONT6A (Syrobonkus Mix), maybe some hardware gate. such a cool sound. similar sound at the end of mt saint nichel + saint michaels mount.

Sequencing + gating.

[sun drugs]

gating i like it, gonna play with some gates in renoise for kicks. i feel like it would be done post recording but who knows anymore with this guy

[rst]

you can also do this with every sampler, synth, groovebox etc. that has amp envelopes, a syncable lfo or just a hold parameter. no prob to do it otb. since more than 1 track seem to be affected though i guess he does it with the cv controlled gate thingy he's talking about.

 

btw. tremolo?? we ARE talking about the gating effect at around 1:40 etc.??

[sun drugs]

yeah tremolo or gate, maybe tremolo with a triangle or sawtooth, starts at 1.40 ish

[rst]

yeah that's it! you mean staccato btw? bc i hear no tremolo there?! if you mean the gating effect an (offset) square wave would be my guess in this case, otherwise you don't get the staccato effect as amplitude would only change graduallly with tri/saw waveforms. you can get really good but different results with sawtooth/ramp as well though! i'm pretty sure he has a bunch of vca/gate modules with a wide range of tweakable parameters...

 

this is one of the techniques he's a real virtuoso imo; esp. on tuss stuff there's so much variation regarding this (among countless other things...)!!!

[m0rb1d]

He explains in the noyzelab interview that the whole mix is running through a Drawmer stereo gate triggered by a sequence.

[Guest skibby]

papat4 uses the d550 i strongly think.

 

also, i was planning to get the fs1r and the k5000r before the gearlist came out. so i got all cunty all apologies master rich.

but i bought them from people who didnt see the gearlist yet.

[Haste]

I've seen a couple of people asking "What synth did Aphex use on Syro?" on various forums recently. I usually respond with "You need to buy a GX-1."

[Guest skibby]

I've seen a couple of people asking "What synth did Aphex use on Syro?" on various forums recently. I usually respond with "You need to buy a GX-1."

 

aha, so its YOU!

[Haste]

Oops.

[awepittance]

papat4 uses the d550 i strongly think.

 

also, i was planning to get the fs1r and the k5000r before the gearlist came out. so i got all cunty all apologies master rich.

but i bought them from people who didnt see the gearlist yet.

 

not a problem really, both synths are on the gear list but it's not evident by listening to the songs they are on. I think the christmasy synth chime in Xmas evet10 is an fs1r but i can't be sure. The only artist I've heard using obvious K5000 sounds is Tetsu Inoue, but i dont say that to knock the guy his music is amazing.

[psn]

i always assumed the funky synth present on most tracks was an fs1r about 80% of the time. i get a very fm bass with formant filter vibe from a lot of those riffs. there's a lot going on in syro though, it's a great mix of everything.

 

The wet FM bass in CIRCLONT6A is definitely the DPO, and I suspect the Rubicon is doing similar duties on CIRCLONT14.

 

The formanty bass stuff on the intro to syro u473t8+e (piezoluminescence mix) is probably partially made with the Res4?

[Guest bitroast]

this is more along the lines of syro-gear-discussion discussion as opposed to actual syro-gear-discussion so sorry in advance for asking this dumb question.

 

is it possible to apply a filter to the song title row? to the google spreadsheet in the original post?

so you can select a song and filter the spreadsheet down to that specific song.

?????? cheers

[psn]

Was the pseudo time stretching on the FZ-1 something that AFX had talked about publicly a long time prior to the Syro release, or did this guy narkeworld sit on inside info did back in 2009?

 

http://forum.watmm.com/topic/44719-new-aphex-twin-album-due-this-year/page-11

 

 

Do some DSP work with the Casio FZ-1 Richard, I'd like to hear that.

 

 

[entropi]

He explains in the noyzelab interview that the whole mix is running through a Drawmer stereo gate triggered by a sequence.

"He"?!?! Did you read the end? Everything stated by rdj or someone speaking for him should be taken with some truckloads of salt. The syro gearlist is probably highly inaccurate as well - the only thing that matters is to make a buzz, to get people speaking about it all.

[Guest yikes]

look at the synth list on xmas or mini pops

the circlon i think only has 4 midii outs

if he is doing all of these tracks live thru a board to 2 track how the fuck could he have used all of those synths in one take?

[psn]

Five MIDI outs and two dozen CV outs. And gear with MIDI thrus.

[cern]

And lots of computer editing LOTS

[Ingwe]

look at the synth list on xmas or mini pops

the circlon i think only has 4 midii outs

if he is doing all of these tracks live thru a board to 2 track how the fuck could he have used all of those synths in one take?

 

each midi out has 16 channels, so if there are 5 midi outs on the cirklon then you can drive 80 synths at once with it. plus the cv outs.

 

but i think these 2 songs are done in a DAW, i don't think cirklon was listed for these 2 trax.

also the acoustic parts (vox/piano on minipops and zither/piano on xmas) would have been multitracked into the computer. iirc there are multichannel audio interfaces listed for these two as well.

[Rbrmyofr]

look at the synth list on xmas or mini pops

the circlon i think only has 4 midii outs

if he is doing all of these tracks live thru a board to 2 track how the fuck could he have used all of those synths in one take?

I've got a Cirklon and have three Kenton Midi Thru 5's connected to three of its five midi outputs, so now I can control 18 synths at once, and that's without using any of the synth's midi thrus, or the Cirklon's CV/gate outputs.

[Jez Courtez]

 

 

 

Seriously, you can buy vinyl records if you want something to touch and some big artwork, but don't kid yourself that they sound anywhere near as good as CDs or digital downloads.

fidelity wise I agree, but in the case of Syro the vinyl was mastered by the same guy who did Minipops all the way through, not so on the Cd, all tracks besides 1 were mastered by a different person. In my mind the vinyl sounds drastically better, it sounds less compressed, the bass drums have more transient punch especially on tracks like Produk (that bassline and bass drum on the CD sort of get in the way of eachother)

 

If you dont care to buy the vinyl, Id recommend at least getting a good quality rip of the vinyl to hear what Im talking about.

 

I don't doubt that you could have a preference over Mandy Parnell's masters versus Beau Thomas's masters, but the point remains that you could perfectly encode, store, transmit and decode both of them digitally. Vinyl has restrictions on what you can do to audible waveforms (such as not being able to hard pan bass) whereas CDs and FLACs don't. Incidentally, vinyl tends to need more compression to sound good, whereas CDs don't, so if Parnell's masters have more compression, it'll be a conscious choice, not a limitation of the format. Presumably she thinks they simply sound better that way.

 

 

The production, mixing and mastering talk is all fascinating to me, if also beyond my realm of expertise. Anyone kind enough to use their skills to give a comparison/opinion of Beau Thomas's mastering and Mandy Parnell's, setting aside the difference in format playback? Can't find a rip of the vinyl and, presumably, the Bleep downloads are of Parnell's cd mastering.

 

Thanks for the knowledge WATMM!

[nickthefish]

As an aside, Mandy Parnell did an interview with SoundOnSound recently:

I can't vouch for her mastering ability from any sort of position of knowledge or experience but Syro sounds ace to me (particularly on headphones).

 

 

There's no mention of Syro in the interview.

 

 

Edit: apologies, I've just spotted it was already posted here: http://forum.watmm.com/topic/84544-aphex-twin-syro/page-365?do=findComment&comment=2423816