-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 11:34:26PM -0400, Chris McCormick wrote: Very nice! What do you use to get those crazy breakbeats? Is that Hydrogen? Some custom PD/SC/CSound/ChucK stuff? - -ken _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user

On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 02:33:17PM -0700, Ken Restivo wrote: Cheers! The beats themselves are 'classic breaks' which you can source just about anywhere, but one great place that has a whole list of them in one spot is <http://www.junglebreaks.co.uk/>. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break> is an absolute classic which you can hear everywhere. Once you know it well it starts to jump out at you in advertisements and all kinds of music, but I digress. Once I've selected the break I want for the particular tune I am working on, I load up a tracker program (Soundtracker, Cheesetracker, or ModPlug under Wine) and get it playing at the right pitch/speed for the track. For jungle/drum and bass this is about 180 BPM, and for breaksbeat, big-beat, etc. this is often about 140 to 160 BPM. You can also pitch shift, time shift, add distortion, clipping, compression, whatever to give it more life. There's something about the sample-accuracy of trackers that gives this kind of music an exactitude that I've found missing when using midi sequencers. Next I chop it up into bits by hand. This really depends on the break, and on the song. One way to chop it is into a section starting with the bass drum, a section starting with the first snare drum, and a section starting with a snare drum that leads into a fill. This gives you an arsenal of 'rolling' sounds that you can string together into various interesting phrases. Which is basically what I do next - I put together an interesting base phrase using the pieces, and then from there I spend many hours (sometimes days) writing variations on that phrase for different bits of the tune. I like to make it so that no two bars sound exactly the same, and this gives the tune an improvised, 'jazzy' feel (though I use that word extremely na??vely since I have had no jazz training whatsoever). One way to ensure that no two bars sound the same is to re-write the phrase by hand each time instead of copying and pasting and doing a kind of 'chinese whispers' in your head so that the beat changes each time you write it. In Pd I have actually come up with some algorithms for shifting breakbeats around so that they make interesting sounding fills. Basically this entails playing each 16th of the breakbeat separately in time with your tune (so that the beat is re-constituted) and then shifting those sixteenths forward and backward from the position they are supposed to be at, in time with the beat. It's kind of complicated to explain, but if anyone wants I could dig up a Pd patch to do it. The algorithm just tries to codify, and attach to a midi knob, what I do manually in a tracker so that it can be done live in realtime. sound to get that intesely sequenced feel like chopping samples short, looping bits, putting delay on, and other effects. One great thing about ModPlug is that you have very fine grained control over effects which you can program to change parameters every single tick. So you can make your effects as exact as the beats and have them changing in time in response to what is going on in the song. Sorry about this long email; I hope I answered your question!

Ken Restivo wrote: That's because digital control interfaces aren't as rich as analog control interfaces. Compare the expressiveness of a good violinist playing a real violin vs a synthesized violin played through a MIDI keyboard.

I continue to be amazed by the lengths that we-all electronic musicians go thorugh, in terms of painstaking sequencing and editing, or long hours of programming and algorithm tweaking, in order to approximate the things that a well-rehearsed band does when performing in real time.

I, on the other hand, think that live is the "real thing" and studio recordings the "fake". The musician can spend days endlessly recording and recording, until they've got every single note exactly right, and splice all the "right" notes together into the "right" phrase.

Eh, no matter how well-rehearsed, a live band's sound can never sparkle as much as a recording agonized over by a practiced electronic musician, producer or engineer. The best they can do is try to approximate it and play a little faster to make up for the shortcomings of live sound. Conversely, I would question whether electronic musicians are really trying to approximate that live sound; I know that when I've used a sampled break, for example, it was because I wanted it to sound like a sampled break. Live bands might have more "energy" or whatever it is that caused people to follow bands like the Dead and Phish around slavishly, but even in those cases I've always found their live performances lacking compared to their comparatively primitive studio releases with their well-defined stereo images, carefully chosen effects and precisely mixed vocals. Compare a studio recording of "Terrapin Station" or "Reba" to the live equivalent, and I really think anyone with an ear would be hard pressed to say the live one sounds as good.

On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 02:33:17PM -0700, Ken Restivo wrote: Cheers! The beats themselves are 'classic breaks' which you can source just about anywhere, but one great place that has a whole list of them in one spot is <http://www.junglebreaks.co.uk/>. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break> is an absolute classic which you can hear everywhere. Once you know it well it starts to jump out at you in advertisements and all kinds of music, but I digress.

Once I've selected the break I want for the particular tune I am working on, I load up a tracker program (Soundtracker, Cheesetracker, or ModPlug under Wine) and get it playing at the right pitch/speed for the track. For jungle/drum and bass this is about 180 BPM, and for breaksbeat, big-beat, etc. this is often about 140 to 160 BPM. You can also pitch shift, time shift, add distortion, clipping, compression, whatever to give it more life. There's something about the sample-accuracy of trackers that gives this kind of music an exactitude that I've found missing when using midi sequencers. Next I chop it up into bits by hand. This really depends on the break, and on the song. One way to chop it is into a section starting with the bass drum, a section starting with the first snare drum, and a section starting with a snare drum that leads into a fill. This gives you an arsenal of 'rolling' sounds that you can string together into various interesting phrases. Which is basically what I do next - I put together an interesting base phrase using the pieces, and then from there I spend many hours (sometimes days) writing variations on that phrase for different bits of the tune. I like to make it so that no two bars sound exactly the same, and this gives the tune an improvised, 'jazzy' feel (though I use that word extremely na??vely since I have had no jazz training whatsoever). One way to ensure that no two bars sound the same is to re-write the phrase by hand each time instead of copying and pasting and doing a kind of 'chinese whispers' in your head so that the beat changes each time you write it. In Pd I have actually come up with some algorithms for shifting breakbeats around so that they make interesting sounding fills. Basically this entails playing each 16th of the breakbeat separately in time with your tune (so that the beat is re-constituted) and then shifting those sixteenths forward and backward from the position they are supposed to be at, in time with the beat. It's kind of complicated to explain, but if anyone wants I could dig up a Pd patch to do it. The algorithm just tries to codify, and attach to a midi knob, what I do manually in a tracker so that it can be done live in realtime. sound to get that intesely sequenced feel like chopping samples short, looping bits, putting delay on, and other effects. One great thing about ModPlug is that you have very fine grained control over effects which you can program to change parameters every single tick. So you can make your effects as exact as the beats and have them changing in time in response to what is going on in the song. Sorry about this long email; I hope I answered your question! Best, Chris. http://mccormick.cx _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user

On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 08:01:45PM +0100, james(a)dis-dot-dat.net wrote: Oooh, way to make me blush. :)