9weeks

Since we’ve already decided on an 80s style sound for this project, it’s only fitting that it comes with authentic synthetic flavor. Much as I would love to throw away thousands of dollars on eBay for vintage synthesizers, my budget only allows for the next best thing: virtual synths. Let’s start with the basics:

Muon Tau: a simple 303-style tone generator, complete with knobs. The original 303 was intended as a bassline generator, and I find that with the cutoff all the way down, this emulator can really add some oomph to a bassline from another synth. It’s also handy for those authentic acid lines, and the “glide” makes for some super-sweet portamentos!

Cheeze Machine, from Big Tick Audio. Possibly the best free VST instrument I’ve ever found, this thing can be tweaked for everything from pads to bells to basslines, and those “ensemble” knobs create some massive stereo depth.

EP Station, also from Big Tick. Good for all sorts of electric pianos, from the organic Rhodes style to the more digital DX7. Lots of settings to tweak, albeit a little harder as most of them are not knobs, but lines of text. Still, a very versitile and authentic-sounding vsynth.

PlastiCZ! from reFX. This is one of my favorite synths. Based on the old Casio CZ series, with a load more options and on-board effects of its own, this virtual synth is quite the everyman. On top of that, it’s also unbelievably resource friendly; even on my measly 1.2 GHz Athlon, I can run ten of these at once!

Slayer, another reFX plugin. This one now comes with Fruityloops, but in the old days it was a standalone instrument. I kept the old version around because I rather like being able to port it around more easily. Anyway, when you need grungey faux-guitar, Slayer sounds damn near like the real thing with the right settings.

Now we’re getting into the meaty synths: this is impOSCar by GMedia. Just lookit all those knobs! This is one seriously complex device by anyone’s standards. Good for wide pads, complex arpeggios and thick basslines, there’s not much this synth can’t do.

And now for the grandaddy of all synths: the Arturia MiniMoog V. This vsynth is a real hog; not only does it take up most of your screen, but it uses an absurd amount of processor power! It’s worth it, though, because you won’t find a warmer virtual synth on the market. Chock full of presets for just about anything that ails you, with onboard effects and all the knobs you’d expect on a real Moog, this synth is an important addition to any retro array.

Next week: drum patterns!

I started this audio path with the 80s in mind, and also important milestones that came after the 80s. This project, to me, is about searching for a way to combine the aesthetics of two musical paradigms. If 80s music was future music, this music is their future’s future.

I made sure to use synthesis forms that were pioneered in the this time period, such as FM. I also used samples from drum kits of that era.

I chose 118 bpm as well, because it is an awesome tempo, nuff said.

The melody and progression is a tad cheeky. I don’t know how I feel about this. The sappy but super-catchy melodies of that time period weren’t always the best trait of the time.

After a lot of talk in the comments of the previous post, I decided to finally get started. Hopefully others will take a cue and follow the same timetable.

To recap: in this iteration of the 9weeks project, I hope to create a song which is stylistically similar to the other songs that will be contributed, and expect the same of those songs by concurrent mechanism. Additionally, in keeping with the theme of “image to sound” I will examine the various ways that visual and psychovisual cues affect our interpretations of music.

In the comments I talked a lot about how music in the 1980s had a very specific range of tempos and was therefore audibly similar even when the styles of that music were radically different. I think this is why we can group such disparate artists as A Flock Of Seagulls, The Time and Eddie Money under the umbrella term of “80s”, although having a time period for these artists certainly provides an easy denomer. Even so, take some copies of “I Ran”, “777-9311″ and “Take Me Home Tonight” and see how easy it is to mix them together. You barely need to adjust the pitch!

The 80s are often seen as a benchmark era due to the fact that they represent the turning point from the industrial age to the information age. This was evoked in popular music of the time by using mechanism as a metaphor for relationships and sexuality. There are many examples: Dazz Band’s “Joystick,” Zapp and Roger’s “Computerlove,” Parliament’s Computer Games album and the song “Flashlight,” Midnight Star’s “Operator” and “Freak-A-Zoid,” and virtually everything by Kraftwerk.

In contrast, the recent retro revival in modern music today, which references that era of music, are almost completely devoid of lyrical abstraction and in fact offer unusually concrete lyrics. Gwen Stefani is a good example, as is the lesser known Chromeo.

Images are, themselves, not concrete things; you can’t drive a picture of a Ferrari or swim in a river on a map. By definition, lyrical imagery follows the same rules. Therefore I intended start out to write lyrics for this song that would evoke a metaphorical imagery similar to the songs I noted above. Following the same general rule as those bands, I picked a piece of technology from the modern age and created a story around it which can be interpreted either literally or figuratively.

Here, then, are the lyrics for my proposed 118 BPM pop song, “Laptop”:

She’s got beautiful design
Turning heads wherever she goes
But it’s much more than skin deep
She displays a bright and gorgeous glow

And right before your eyes
She can do the same things as the girls at home
A little slower for the same price
But she’s optimized for on-the-go

And when we’re movin’ together
To the rhythm of the city beat
We’re a steadfast team whose growth will never slow
‘Cause when that train hits the station
And I’m back up on my feet
I can bring her anywhere I want to go
She’s my laptop

And all my people say hey (hey) hey (hey)
Aren’t you worried that you’ll lose the girl
In the hotel rooms and cafes
See you drag her all around the world

Then you give her lots of sensitive data
‘Till there ain’t no secrets left
She could be long gone tomorrow
Then you’ll suffer from identity theft

‘Cause when she asks for the password
And I whisper to her in her ear
I know my information is secure
‘Cause she’s got secret encryption
‘Cause my info’s near and dear
And that’s how I know I’m the one for her
She’s my laptop

(On a side note, many of these lyrics were taken verbatim from adverts for the new Apple MacBook and the WikiPedia entry on laptops.)

Next week: assessing production: Virtual analog synths and classic drum machine samples!

Ok, heres to another round of 9 weeks.

First we need to solidify the guidelines, and we also need to gather some more support. We’ve deduced that the best way to engage people is through collaboration, so this round will be the end of “i’m going to do my thing in this corner, and you go over there with your thing” . IMO we should have at least 8 people involved to get a good dynamic.
We’ve also decided that it should involve combinations of images and sound, as it is an area with untapped potential, and an area where we can all sharpen our skills.

From there, its all open to discussion.

Visual artists can supply content and the audio peeps design an environment from there, or it can go the other way around. Additionally, for the people who have knowledge of both realms, there doesn’t need to be a clear-cut distinction. Both parties can contribute both types of media.

I think this project would expand our understanding of the relationship between images and sound and improve our ability to cross-over, or unify, the experience, even when there are separate people contributing each component.

lets get some thoughts going about how we can work this.

OK, tomorrow is the day to celebrate my indepdendance of any obligation or work, so tonight i am going to upload this and be done with it, whether i think its done or not.

Because this is a 10 and a half minute song, I’ve decided to split it into 2 parts. I was considering not even uploading part one because i don’t think it is where it should be, but hey, this project is about sharing what one is able to do during the week, so im not going to hold it back, even if it is of questionable value.

If you don’t want to put up with 10 minutes of gobbledeegooking, listen to the second part first. then if you’re up for more you can try the first part.

I went into this week having a good idea of what I wanted from it. I wanted it to be longer than previous week. I wanted the song to travel in many directions, weaving in and out of different styles, sometimes in a very predictable repetitive way, and sometimes in a very unorthodox way. I wanted it to feel like a continuum, as if it is continually on the brink of resolving but only occasionally actually fully resolves.

I used a lot of techniques, some new to the project, other that I had already used. The theme for this week is recursive recycling, as i resampled the bits i had created during other weeks to save time building up assets.

One of these examples is a metallic drone created in week 1 used as the basis of an impulse pattern for a convolution reverb which i then applied to other pieces of audio that had been created in previous weeks, resulting in that metallic resonant drum sound that starts and ends off the song.
Another technique I wielded was real-time performance. I set up a performance file that included a huge chain of plugins and programmed various parameters to midi controllers. I then fed audio through it, generally a combination of previous weeks’ rhythm sequences. I tweaked it out while it looped and recorded. “Instant music maker” is basically what that file does. This technique afforded me the ability to appreciate a condensed production cycle without sacrificing the desired level of complexity and variation.

In conclusion, I think this project is a good example of the 9 weeks objective, as it is great exercise for any electronic musician, but god i am tired of this 10 freakin seconds of sound. I even alluded to this frustration 1:30 minutes into part 2, utilizing the words of the girl to express my feelings for the project.

part 1 (4:00)

part 2 (5:38)

i’m going to sleep.

I had to start from scratch 3 times this week. Finally, on the 3rd attempt, I went into the desired direction. The first 2 attempts failed 2-fold: they lacked any standards for coherency, and they did not deviate enough from previous attempts. Overall I think I spent a good 8 hours this week; the last half of that time was spent directly working on the final piece.

This week I decided to strip about 300ms from the beginning of the sample and only those frequencies above 10,000Hz. These would be the frequencies just at the top of the spectrum–you know the ones that almost hurt your ears. I spent quite a lot of time stretching the audio and pushing and pulling it around the spectrum. Eventually I managed to have it slide into somewhere close to the C4 range, and all of a sudden this jazz-like “melody” appeared. So i began sequencing the bare formants/partials themselves.

I’m finding that I’m working on this project, that my process is more and more about timbre and texture than melody. Although this is a step in the right direction in moving towards melodic ideas, it’s still more of a soundscape than the makings of a “song.”

If anyone doesn’t believe me that this was all extrapolated from my 10 second clip, I am willing to share my FL Studio work file for anyone who wants to peek at the process.

I spent longer on this week than the others (almost an hour and a half!). I was very enthusiastic going into it considering my realization last week that there are no limits to this. The process becomes the instrument, and the only limit is one’s approach to the process.
I started with the same file i had last week because I liked my new synth sounds. This week was meant to take the next step in creating a fully functional sonic universe that appears to be without the limits of the 10 second source audio.

There are still artifacts i suppose, and it is still somewhat sloppy (i.e., uncontrolled) in certain aspects,but i am getting closer to extracting ‘pure sound’ and removing it completely from any indication that it used to be a noisy digitally compressed ambient drone with a laughing whore.

you can d/l the files at http://www.vstk.org/music/9weeks

About the source

i ripped it from a crappy overcompressed porn video in which the guy filming was interviewing the slut. I grabbed it for 3 reasons: the ambient drone in the background, the sound of the slut laughing, and the slut saying “i like to fuck, what can i say?”

the first iteration was quick and dirty. threw it into granulizer and scrubbed it for 60 seconds. Added a couple effects and called it a day. All in all i was done in 10 minutes.

The second iteration focused on seeing what i could do with resequencing. I threw it into Recycle and ended up with 2 major components: A bank of individual slices (about 80) and a soundfont which contained all of the sliced mapped out to note values. i spent about 45 minutes getting heady over oddball rhythm sequences. nothing new, but it was a nice revisit of some familiar rhythm techniques.

For the third iteration I kept the same tempo but instead of raw sequencing, I had 2 intentions. One was to try to use a combination of envelopes and filters to create a really nice ‘kick’, ’snare’ and ‘hi hat’ sound. The other goal was to utilize chaotic sequencing (randomize function) to produce a wide array of spectral and rhythmic content with the flick of a wrist.

I quickly tired of the chaotic element, but i was happy with the results of my sound shaping approach, so for number 4 i wanted to continue on this path. i slowed down the tempo to open up some space and focused on creating some more refined percussive sounds. i kept the kick drum as the only artifact from the previous experiment.

Iteration 5: tiring of highly controlled rhythmic experiments i went back to the first approach: straight granular scrubbing, expect this time i had the intent of creating more of an ambient drone texture.

Iteration 6: i know i’m starting to get a little bit ahead of the actual weeks, but hey, i felt inspired to try something new. This experiment was a proof of concept in creating pure (i.e. pleasant) tones that can be used for harmony and melody. For this I went into my favorite audio editor, cool edit pro, and zoomed down to the sample level and looked for places where there were anywhere between 2-8 oscillations of a wave that didn’t have too much variance. i used a freqency analyzer to see which one had interesting harmonic overtones when looped. i then exported these (i had about 12 microloops in total) and inserted them in sampler channels within fruityloops, using the loop feature. I then played them like regular keybaord patches. once i had made the microloops the rest of the creation process took just a few minutes.

average time spent on each iteration: 30 minutes. I plan on spending more time on the last 4 rounds, as i really begin to delve deep into the frequency components of my material and spend more time coaxing completely different sounds out of the source. I could have spent more time on these first tries to get a more polished and actualized sound, but i ultimately said ‘fuck it, i have real songs to work on!’

Sferics (short for “atmospherics”) are impulsive signals emitted by lightning which can be picked up within 1000 miles of a VLF receiver. My first stab at reproducing this phenomenon involved using SPEAR to resynthesize the audio sample, and pulling out certain frequency bands. It was possible to grab several bands at a time (beginning with frequencies between 50-100Hz), and then timestretch and pitch shift them in different directions. Taking these as a base, I then revised this process further in SPEAR, sometimes copying and pasting the strongest frequencies represented in the stream to blank space in the file to later be spliced in Recycle.

What I’m finding most difficult is to get the non-rhytmical timing of the lightning bursts. I’d like to explore trying to reproduce the actual storm that produced this sferic sample. At this point, this 60 second section shows a more elaborate intensification and teasing out of the original fequencies, and lacks some of the original grittiness of the NASA sample.