Limits || limitless

I was almost tempted to put "scare quotes" around this oft-abused term. Big-L Limits-one of the most frustrating topics of discussion among musicians and non-musicians alike. Because you know that your favorite album X by artist Y was made with Z gear. There's this idea that artists are supposed to be Macgyvers and squeeze an entire album out of a broken drum machine from the 80's, a rubber band, and a tape machine. I think this more has to do with what you grew up doing, what you got used to. If you grew up with hardware samplers, chances are you'll think that they're the shit-and you can't really make music without them. Mutatis mutandis for digital multi-track software.

For myself, I grew up playing instruments like guitar, bass, and drums. I never touched a keyboard or synthesizer until I got a MIDI controller. I've never used a hardware sampler, and tape machines were before my time. The first piece of electronic music kit I got was a program called Renoise, a kind of sequencer and sampler software called a tracker. This was mainly due to this video:


(Apparently, this was the first track this guy made with the software. But that's after many years of using trackers, and undoubtedly the combination of genetics with powerful stimulants.)

This was before I fully realized that what I had been listening to for years, was an amen break sliced up, resampled, processed to hell and back. I just thought that the tracker was the easiest way to get those very fast drum sounds. After my second "musical awakening"-I started taking a closer look at how my favorite artists made their tracks. I found some correlations in the equipment they used: sampler, sequencer, and DSP(effects)-also mixing down on outboard gear as opposed to in a DAW was very common. Aside from vintage or expensive outboard gear and mixing desks, all of this is totally within reach for the average Joe.

So I wondered, with all this accessible, great gear &software, where's all the great music? I encountered some major cognitive dissonance when I realized my own setup is probably more limitless than the ones used by my favorite artists, to make my favorite albums. But my tracks are still non-existent or shit. Why?

Well, good music is still out there, but it's also mixed in with all the not-so-great music. Not-so-great not necessarily meaning bad, but maybe just too generic, content-less, or lacking something undefinable. Rather than rehash the old cliche about the internet and downloading ruining music, I'd rather make a parallel point. The internet undoubtedly democratized both music making and music consumption, but what people saw of themselves wasn't what they expected. In the past record labels had more control over what the artist put out, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes to ill. But they knew that to make money, they would have to give people what they want-even if their customer base is a minority. So labels would make sure people got what they want.

In the past a record label was a filter between artists and the public. The label could be expected to bring the public artists with a certain sound, and this was an institution that listeners depended on. Unfortunately for the artists, there are simply more music listeners than music producers. So pure democratization does not necessarily value the artist's raw expression. These days there is less incentive to starve yourself and hole yourself up in a studio with a shoelace and a tape deck, trying to come up with the next sub-sub genre. This is now seen for what it really is: playing a mental game with yourself.

In conclusion, in a modern world, musical limitations are harder to come by. The average computer can replace tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of 1960's-80's era recording gear-convenience at the cost of a certain amount of charm. The new landscape of the internet also makes imposing limitations on oneself, to be transcended creatively, an unattractive proposition. So what we're left with, is a very spread out and divided musical landscape. Good for some, not so good for others.

Stress and Creativity

My life has become much busier and increasingly stressful as of approximately two months ago. In this time I've been sapped of almost all desire to create. Coincidence? Probably not. While stressed, one cannot escape certain more basic mental processes, such as a feeling of fight or flight activation. This is not a creative mind-state, where one can be relaxed and connect disparate ideas into a cohesive whole. When stressed one is fragmented, dissociated from oneself, going through the motions. One is not really even there mentally for the majority of daily tasks, let alone able to go deep into the unconscious and come back with riches.

Stress increases the signal to noise ratio in the mind.

The Amen Break Revisited

I should probably talk about my favorite sample, the amen break. Here is the waveform in all it's glory:

Recently I was invited to a much more experienced producer and engineer's house/studio to watch a friend record some bass tracks. They had already recorded live drums played by an experienced drummer, but that's not what was going to be on the record. The drums were recorded, and than put those tracks through Melodyne, which is a pretty sophisticated piece of software which maps every hit that a drummer has played and turns it into MIDI. This MIDI was than used to trigger samples, from which I was told came from "pretty big sessions"-Very cool... But why?

The simple answer is: Control.

Drums are the foundation of any piece of music. But it's doubly important in rhythmic heavy types of music like heavy metal, which is what my friend was recording. A raw recording of a drummer, no matter how tight, cannot be as perfect as that recording turned into MIDI and than quantized-that is to say snapped to a grid. There's just no way. Plus when you have the drum tracks as MIDI, you can re-arrange the drums, or take the same arrangements and use different sample sets/"kits" and mix them in endless variations. Control.

So back to the amen break... Which is a six second long mono recording of drums played in 1969 by a virtually unknown drummer named Gregory C. Coleman. I want to break down the path that this sound has taken since the point it was recorded.

1. The drum solo was played in a studio sometime in 1968 to 1969.
2. Microphones in the studio picked up the sound of the drums, as well as reverberations from the room the drums were played in.
3. The mics were connected to a mixing console, which was connected to a tape machine, both of which added coloration (distortion, phasing, etc) to the already coloured sound that the microphones picked up.
4. The mixed recording was mastered and pressed to vinyl for mass consumption. The record "Color Him Father" sells a bundle, everyone is happy.

*** Approximately a decade of radio silence ***

With the advent of the sampler, someone records the drum solo and uses it as the percussion in their song. Meaning:

5. The mastered vinyl record is recorded and played back via a sampler.

Later on as sampling becomes more and more prominent, the sample gains a life of it's own, and gets repressed onto vinyl or available in CD form in the form of sample packs. Adding these additional steps to the process:

6. Recordings of the mastered vinyl record are made available and sampled. The mastered vinyl is now RE-mastered, often compressed further, and otherwise processed via DSP.
7. The re-mastered vinyl appears as a 44100khz, 16bit WAV file available for download online.

Than that's just where the fun begins! Now you can take that CD-quality file, and compress and process it any way your mind can think of! Now, of course by this point the original sound of the drums is almost completely lost, and what remains is basically a chunk of digitally processed noise. But that's itself an amazingly beautiful thing.

What has been lost along the way, other than some of the original acoustics of the room, and sound of the drums as produced in the room, is control over the sound. When using the break, you realize that all the sounds of each part of the kit are "glued" together. The kick has a ride cymbal hit over it, the snare does too, everything is covered in the wash of the cymbals. The timing also varies throughout the break. The crash at the end doesn't get to ring out to silence like it would if you were sampling it in the studio-But it's perfect.

So what's more real, recording a drummer and than making it MIDI? Or starting with the MIDI and using it to trigger a breakbeat? I don't really know anymore.

technology + interfaces

= an endless stream of filters from mind to music

I know

Nothing.

Always remember that no matter how much you think you know, you actually know nothing. Emptying the mind is the first step in learning.

Peace++

Disregard all that... I suck-

Hey all!

After painting myself into an overly-analytical, abstract, impractical corner-I have re-thought some of the stuff I've posted here over the past 8-9 months. I realized that my views are alot more subjective than I thoughts, and some of the practices I once promoted (like using ultra-high sample rates) didn't really matter as much as I thought, Here's a summary of my present views on the topics I have covered previously, sample rates, audiophilia, etc:

-44.1khz is a PERFECTLY fine sample rate for 90%+ of uses. By up-sampling 44.1khz audio, you are actually REDUCING the quality. You also end up with copies of your files that are twice as big, that consist of nothing but digitally generated silence. Remember, storage is expensive!

-It makes more sense to convert higher quality samples DOWN to 44.1khz, than to convert the CD-Q samples up. Since 44.1khz is the rate for CD masters, as well as MP3's and other compressed formats-it makes sense to monitor and mix at this rate. For a solo producer/electronic musician or project studio owner... I see little point in cluttering your disks with 48khz+ WAVs, which at 24 bit, multiplied per track, REALLY starts to add up.

-That being said, it does make sense to record any audio at 24 bits as opposed to the 16 bits, or CD quality. This goes for internal recording within the DAW too, which all happens at a 24 bit or higher resolution anyways.

-Finally, remember that as an amateur (I assume the people reading this are non-professional) any mixing and mastering you do on your tracks is simply guesswork. But this can be a beautiful thing if you want it to be. The most important thing is to do the best you can with what you have. We have great tools, amazing, incredible compared to even 10 years ago. There's no reason we can't all make great sounding music, even if it's just in Garageband or whatever other software you have... acquired online.

The biggest limitation is in your mind, not in your gear, or in your computer. Unfortunately this is also the hardest limitation to break through. This is why I've decided to start a new blog concentrating on hacking, the mind, computers, instruments, and will hopefully end in my ultimate goal of creating my own audio software. Just a heads up, I'm still assembling my thoughts.

For now, keep your headphones on.