a couple of us got together to do a totally improvised live electronic set at a gallery opening a few weeks back – three keyboards, two iphones and some effects. it came out pretty good, i edited it down to an hour or so and uploaded it to soundcloud here: http://soundcloud.com/remaincalm/live-at-culture-jam-15-04-2010
coincidentally, one of the iphones was running drumtrack8 from simpleisbeautiful – great little app, very “live” programmable and some decent built-in sounds.
some awesome blog posts on DSP theory (er… and sound design in mayan temples) appearing on valhalladsp, thought i’d give it a bump: http://valhalladsp.wordpress.com/. this guy did the excellent eos reverb and valhalla freq echo plugins, and there’s some excellent info in there.
also, autechre were awesome live, new version of reaper is good, and i’ve been slack finishing off the new go/no-go EP because i’ve been very very busy. oh well.
now that ‘autofocus’ is up on iTunes, i figure this is probably a good time to compare the recording process for that with what we’re doing now.
first of all – we recorded an absolute stack of stuff for ‘autofocus’, giant chunks of which ended up getting cut. there were multiple, wildly different versions of some songs, and we left off (or outright abandoned half-way) at least four tracks. that was kinda the only way it could have been done, though. the album was recorded the way it was written – a bit random and cut-up and berzerk.
‘lost in berlin’ (check the iTunes link) is a good example of that. it started as a riff on a microkorg, and was emailed to steve with some blippy drums. steve repitched and mutilated the riff into an actual song in ableton live, but playing it live like that didn’t work. we shelved the song. i think we had another shot at a vocal somewhere in there. months later, we tried playing it rock-style and it sorta worked. we tracked a new rhythm part, and i dug up the original keyboard parts, added a new recording of steve’s vocals, and mixed the whole thing in reaper.
months. that took months. nearly a year. the song goes for about three minutes.
the same process played out for the other eight songs. i tried to get all “brian eno” on taz at one point and recorded him playing bass for a song he’d never heard before, just kinda shouting instructions at him as we went. that ended up as the main groove in ‘catching up with you‘, which is fun, but was a nightmare to work out a live arrangement for. the version of ‘things’ that ended up on there is completely different to how we play it live, but there are lots of elements in there that were pulled from an early demo of it, just processed until it sounded like it had been stuffed full of tiny robots. every song has some synthetic element to it, and hopefully that comes across as a cool sound. it’s a bit hard to judge everything objectively when you’ve heard everything thousands of times.
the new recording – which is almost certainly just going to be an EP – is coming together a bit differently.
we’ve added some new personnel (steve from great apes + others), and we’ve been rehearsing the hell out of the band. new songs are being written more in the rehearsal room than over the internet, and it’s coming out in the arrangements – we’re concentrating a lot more on just getting the groove right. which is probably why we bashed through all five basic tracks in a day, and some of that stuff was first- or second-takes. the extra percussion is actually adding some space, probably because steve and i are taking more breaks. it’s coming together alright.
we’ve now got all of the drums, all of the bass, and half of the keys and guitar comped and tracked. steve c’s recording his parts at his place, and steve a and i will be tracking percussion and extra keys at some point this month. probably at his place. hopefully his neighbours don’t totally freak out. there’s likely to be a lot of cowbell action. all of the keys and electronic percussion is being tracked live – none of the songs for this session were recorded to a click-track, so i can’t sync up drum machines to anything.
also, i put down this completely stupid solo and it’s awesome.
it took about a billion years, but we finally managed to get the go/no-go “autofocus” release shipped off to the duplicators (and flying over the internet in the general direction of itunes, which feels a bit weird).
we got a few clips done as well, thanks to stu willis for making the “catching up with you” clip possible.
anyway, we did it all DIY, and it worked out okay, so we’re gonna have a shot at a follow up EP the same way. but hopefully a bit quicker this time. i’ve had the urge to write about the recording process for a while, and this seems like a good place to start. also, i’m waiting for a plumber to show up and can’t really do anything else in the meantime.
it took a few years, but i’ve finally got myself a mobile recording rig that works pretty good and fits in the back of a daihatsu charade. the main problem is getting enough equipment to get a nice drum recording – once you get past two channels, everything gets a bit spendier and more complicated. and you end up with mic cables everywhere, and i’m really bad at winding them up neatly.
anyway. last sunday, we dragged our gear down to zen rehearsals to track drums and bass. we record there mainly because they run free bbqs on weekends, and they have a well maintained cappuccino machine. also, because some of their rooms are really well sound-proofed and have excellent room treatment, which is important – if the room sounds boxy (or if sydney’s loudest metal band are bleeding through the air conditioning system), the recording will sound bad.
cue: five hours of recording, five tracks of drums and bass done, despite 50% of the personnel suffering from crippling hangovers.
check out all the mess!
once i get everything home, i usually mix up a nice sturdy martini and transfer the tracks over from the portable recorder to the PC. the ancient vs1680 recorder i use is cheap, solid and sounds good, but getting the raw audio out of it onto the computer requires screwdrivers and lots of time and weird software and usually i have to shout at it a bit as well. but eventually i end up with the session loaded up in reaper, ready for edits.
there’s usually a bunch of takes of each song. sometimes one is just perfect the whole way through, but usually each one will have bits of inspiration hit at different times. this is where that martini comes in handy. i usually just map out the song on paper, then mark each take with ticks or crosses depending on how awesome or hideous each part is:
once i’ve mapped it out, i hack the best bits together, get a rough mix up, and start thinking about another martini. and overdubs.
with a quickie mix and some keys, it’s sounding a little like this: [audio:blog1b.mp3]
in other news… where the hell is that plumber?
next up: percussion. in a week or two. with any luck.
i gave up on the whole pedal dsp idea. it’s just going to be too much work and i don’t have the cash for a devkit at the moment anyway.
but… i’ve been working on some more JS effects and these ones might actually work
i was also doing a little bit of dev work on the DS stuff but the development environment is a total pain in the ass (in that the core platform keeps getting updates that break compatibility with all the other 3rd party tools). i still have my old dev environment in a virtual machine somewhere so i can get back to that one day but really, it’s just so much damn effort. and bliptracker already does everything i need. so that’s all a bit ugh. i really need to put out that updated beta of dsmcu one day though, i just need to package it up…
i’ve been mucking about with the XNA XB360 dev environment. it looks very interesting. i have two separate ideas – one for a 2d puzzle/action game that doesn’t have gems or tiles and one for an experimental art game.
also i want to get a JLM preamp kit and get some soldering happening.
