I'm working toward the first Lemurian Congress album, tentatively (but with much certainty) entitled "A Storm Targets Your Childhood Home." A few rough mixes are already up on my SoundCloud account, and here's the newest, "Deep Wide Open" (with another great picture by Patrick):
I'm calling these "rough mixes" because they are unmastered, and because the mixes themselves still need some work...I've decided to do the final mixes when I've finalized everything that is going on the album, because I discovered with the Pico and Alvarado EP that remixing (and then mastering) everything in sequence was a great way to unify the songs (this may be less of an issue for those who have settled into a good production method).
I'll spare you the postmortem on this particular song, except to say it's my first real use of Five12's "Numerology 3" plugin. "Numerology 3" is a real amazing creature, but every method of applying it to a song results in some type of problem: either you can't record the MIDI, or you can't use third-party plugins with it, or you suffer sync problems. Each method will allow you to do SOME of those things, but you can't do all of them at once.
Showing posts with label Lemurian Congress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lemurian Congress. Show all posts
Monday, July 04, 2011
Saturday, April 09, 2011
"Big King Thief"
I'm going through a furious stage of musical experimentation: techniques, tricks, plugins, the world of digital audio is a huge one and I've only just scratched the surface.
Hopefully all future experiments turn out as well as "Big King Thief!"
This song was, from beginning to end, a test of iZotope's "pHATmatik PRO" plugin. I created five separate instances of it, and mutilated five bars of a George Clinton song, and the inevitable result was something that just CRIED funky.
But before we get to that, here's a quick evaluation of pHATmatik PRO: like many of iZotope's acquisitions from other software companies, it's buggy and dated and wonderful. The GUI obviously hasn't been touched since 2002 and the simple movement of MIDI items can result in all your samples being transposed in pitch. It's also easy to find yourself with sample-clicks that cannot be easily removed; the volume envelopes and the filters are coarse and clumsy, which highlights a basic shortcoming of the plugin: it's for extreme sample mangling, not for subtle effects.
Also, WARNING: pHATmatik is NOT fully compatible with Logic 8. You can't drag MIDI information out of the plugin and into Logic (though you can drag the MIDI to your desktop and import it from there), and -- more damning -- you cannot instantiate a multi-output pHATmatik under any circumstances, which is TERRIBLE and is not mentioned ANYWHERE on the iZotope site. You need to create a multi-instance in a version of Logic 7, then save it as a channel strip which you can use in Logic 8.
If you don't have a copy of Logic 7 around, here's a multi pHATmatik channel strip I made myself...it allows the plugin to actually live up to its "Pro" name!
All that said, you can hear the results in this song. Other than a simple Ultrabeat kick/snare and some recurring iDrum hats (and cowbell!), the spectacular beats are all courtesy of pHATmatik. It's an amazing plugin...it just needs to be updated (or price-reduced to compensate for the migraines it might cause).
Here's the "Big King Thief" project (click for a larger version):
So what else is going on in the song? Some string machine from the awesome Loomer String, a Moog-style bassline from IKMultimedia's SampleMoog (a patch I find myself using over and over in these songs), a lead and a pulse from Logic's own ES1 and ES2, a funky bassline that is really a funk piano run through CamelPhat and a bass amp, a bit of Nusofting's daHornet for the deliberately sparse bridge...
...and a lot of samples (including an oboe) that I'll leave for trivia buffs to figure out. I can't get over my love of tremolo!
This was also the first time I've worked really strategically with compression. I put sidechain compression across the pads to allow the samples to cut through, and also used a tip from a recent copy of Computer Music: a copy of Audio Damage's free RoughRider compressor on an effects send, with all the drums sent to it...it dramatically increased the "sludgy" sound of the beat (though maybe too much?)
Then I was ready to mix it and master it...and everything went to hell. All sort of melodic conflicts started showing up in the second verse, and in desperation I began shuffling bits and pieces around until I was hopelessly confused. I eventually tracked the problem down to my IKMultimedia SampleTank plugin, which had deauthorized itself FOR THE SECOND TIME and was behaving in mono mode, playing only the highest note in every chord. I've spent a week with their tech support and they still haven't resolved the issue, but I worked around the problem by recreating the patch in SampleMoog.
Next I started noticing the sample clicks...funny how you don't hear these things until they're so integrated in the song that you can't really fix them. Many of them were due to truncated samples in pHATmatik PRO, but the others -- which you can hear in the garbled speech during the bridge -- are actually from a soft ambient noise in the sample itself which turns into a harsh click when sent through a tremolo effect. By rearranging the tremolo a bit I managed to minimize it, but it's still there...I decided it was minor enough to not worry about.
Some light mastering, some agonizing, a photograph of a lusty dwarf by Patrick, and the song was done! "Big King Thief," not suitable for 17th Century workplaces.
Hopefully all future experiments turn out as well as "Big King Thief!"
This song was, from beginning to end, a test of iZotope's "pHATmatik PRO" plugin. I created five separate instances of it, and mutilated five bars of a George Clinton song, and the inevitable result was something that just CRIED funky.
But before we get to that, here's a quick evaluation of pHATmatik PRO: like many of iZotope's acquisitions from other software companies, it's buggy and dated and wonderful. The GUI obviously hasn't been touched since 2002 and the simple movement of MIDI items can result in all your samples being transposed in pitch. It's also easy to find yourself with sample-clicks that cannot be easily removed; the volume envelopes and the filters are coarse and clumsy, which highlights a basic shortcoming of the plugin: it's for extreme sample mangling, not for subtle effects.
Also, WARNING: pHATmatik is NOT fully compatible with Logic 8. You can't drag MIDI information out of the plugin and into Logic (though you can drag the MIDI to your desktop and import it from there), and -- more damning -- you cannot instantiate a multi-output pHATmatik under any circumstances, which is TERRIBLE and is not mentioned ANYWHERE on the iZotope site. You need to create a multi-instance in a version of Logic 7, then save it as a channel strip which you can use in Logic 8.
If you don't have a copy of Logic 7 around, here's a multi pHATmatik channel strip I made myself...it allows the plugin to actually live up to its "Pro" name!
All that said, you can hear the results in this song. Other than a simple Ultrabeat kick/snare and some recurring iDrum hats (and cowbell!), the spectacular beats are all courtesy of pHATmatik. It's an amazing plugin...it just needs to be updated (or price-reduced to compensate for the migraines it might cause).
Here's the "Big King Thief" project (click for a larger version):
So what else is going on in the song? Some string machine from the awesome Loomer String, a Moog-style bassline from IKMultimedia's SampleMoog (a patch I find myself using over and over in these songs), a lead and a pulse from Logic's own ES1 and ES2, a funky bassline that is really a funk piano run through CamelPhat and a bass amp, a bit of Nusofting's daHornet for the deliberately sparse bridge...
...and a lot of samples (including an oboe) that I'll leave for trivia buffs to figure out. I can't get over my love of tremolo!
This was also the first time I've worked really strategically with compression. I put sidechain compression across the pads to allow the samples to cut through, and also used a tip from a recent copy of Computer Music: a copy of Audio Damage's free RoughRider compressor on an effects send, with all the drums sent to it...it dramatically increased the "sludgy" sound of the beat (though maybe too much?)
Then I was ready to mix it and master it...and everything went to hell. All sort of melodic conflicts started showing up in the second verse, and in desperation I began shuffling bits and pieces around until I was hopelessly confused. I eventually tracked the problem down to my IKMultimedia SampleTank plugin, which had deauthorized itself FOR THE SECOND TIME and was behaving in mono mode, playing only the highest note in every chord. I've spent a week with their tech support and they still haven't resolved the issue, but I worked around the problem by recreating the patch in SampleMoog.
Next I started noticing the sample clicks...funny how you don't hear these things until they're so integrated in the song that you can't really fix them. Many of them were due to truncated samples in pHATmatik PRO, but the others -- which you can hear in the garbled speech during the bridge -- are actually from a soft ambient noise in the sample itself which turns into a harsh click when sent through a tremolo effect. By rearranging the tremolo a bit I managed to minimize it, but it's still there...I decided it was minor enough to not worry about.
Some light mastering, some agonizing, a photograph of a lusty dwarf by Patrick, and the song was done! "Big King Thief," not suitable for 17th Century workplaces.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
"The Mortal Enemies of Rock and Roll" by Lemurian Congress
Another solo Lemurian Congress song, this one has been in the pipes for a while.
This began as an experiment with Camel Audio's Alchemy, using one of the basic exercises in the manual. I put the closing bars of "Somebody Super Like You" from "The Phantom of the Paradise" into Alchemy, modulated its "location" setting with a Ramp Up LFO, and then modulated that LFO with a bunch of other LFOs to make the playback slide around in a bunch of different ways...
...then, I sent the output through all of my effects processors sequentially, tweaking them as I went along. The result was eleven minutes of howling "DONG!" noises.
I've learned over the years that eleven minutes of howling "DONG!"s does not necessarily become an interesting audio composition. Granted there's value in chill-out ambient or extreme "deep listening," but the flipside is downright tedium.
When I first started making music I was happy to -- literally -- load up two samples into my sampler and then put a lead ingot on one of the keys and let them just play, to find out what sorts of convolutions the samples would get up to. While working with Eli McIlveen at CKMS, however, I became intrigued by his more disciplined approach of cutting longer pieces together to make a single MORE INTERESTING piece.
That's why in "The Mortal Enemies of Rock and Roll" you get a six-minute composition with only NINETY SECONDS of howling dongs, and everything looking like this.
At the same time I was working on the music video for "Sandbar," and I had a bunch of film clips with audio recordings made near a local wastewater facility: crickets, cataracts...and some kids who stumbled upon me crouched in the weeds. Just before the "breakdown" you can hear the kids, a girl who is laughing at a South Park joke her brother just told, then notices me there with my tripod, then yells "Let's GO!" in some sort of complex human response to embarrassment and surprise (afterward one of the kids said "I didn't think old people came down here.")
The source recordings were the hardest to deal with because they were never intended to be used. They were recorded by my crappy little camera and contained a devious bunch of clicks and hums which I struggled to remove...particularly bad were the clicks in the "Let's GO!" sample, which -- typically -- didn't manifest until the project was finished and bounced...I couldn't bring myself to lose the sample but I was unable to get rid of the brain-exploding clicks (like I said, I need a spectral editor), so at the last minute I performed some clumsy level changes. Sigh.
The "Choir" at the beginning was from IK Multimedia's Miroslav Philharmonik, and the high pitch noise was from TAL-U-NO-62's Juno synth emulator, with a notch filter sliding around to make it more interesting.
There are a lot of other odds and ends integrated into the piece, but the most prominent are a series of samples culled with my SP-404 SX sampler. The middle "beat" section is a sample from a Beloved song mutilated with the SP's DJFX looper, and the entire "rock and roll" ending is a bunch of similarly-triggered samples (among them Tim Fuller and Santana) sent through a bunch of filtered auxiliary channels and an auto-wah.
To glue it all together there are some improvised ESQ-1 additions on the last few tracks: the "bomb" noises, the little mouse noises, the "wooooom" noises, and the final guitar-ish accents.
The hardest part of this track by far was the mastering...not so much the ACTUAL mastering, but the WORRYING about the EVENTUAL mastering. I was paralyzed with fear, wondering if an experimental piece like this NEEDED to be mastered. Might the mastering process only be useful for more conventional songs?
My conclusion: no, it's useful for any sort of track, but in a different way. Stereo widening and low-frequency compression can help any song, I think, but loudness processing and harmonic excitation must be used even MORE sparingly than usual.
This began as an experiment with Camel Audio's Alchemy, using one of the basic exercises in the manual. I put the closing bars of "Somebody Super Like You" from "The Phantom of the Paradise" into Alchemy, modulated its "location" setting with a Ramp Up LFO, and then modulated that LFO with a bunch of other LFOs to make the playback slide around in a bunch of different ways...
...then, I sent the output through all of my effects processors sequentially, tweaking them as I went along. The result was eleven minutes of howling "DONG!" noises.
I've learned over the years that eleven minutes of howling "DONG!"s does not necessarily become an interesting audio composition. Granted there's value in chill-out ambient or extreme "deep listening," but the flipside is downright tedium.
When I first started making music I was happy to -- literally -- load up two samples into my sampler and then put a lead ingot on one of the keys and let them just play, to find out what sorts of convolutions the samples would get up to. While working with Eli McIlveen at CKMS, however, I became intrigued by his more disciplined approach of cutting longer pieces together to make a single MORE INTERESTING piece.
That's why in "The Mortal Enemies of Rock and Roll" you get a six-minute composition with only NINETY SECONDS of howling dongs, and everything looking like this.
At the same time I was working on the music video for "Sandbar," and I had a bunch of film clips with audio recordings made near a local wastewater facility: crickets, cataracts...and some kids who stumbled upon me crouched in the weeds. Just before the "breakdown" you can hear the kids, a girl who is laughing at a South Park joke her brother just told, then notices me there with my tripod, then yells "Let's GO!" in some sort of complex human response to embarrassment and surprise (afterward one of the kids said "I didn't think old people came down here.")
The source recordings were the hardest to deal with because they were never intended to be used. They were recorded by my crappy little camera and contained a devious bunch of clicks and hums which I struggled to remove...particularly bad were the clicks in the "Let's GO!" sample, which -- typically -- didn't manifest until the project was finished and bounced...I couldn't bring myself to lose the sample but I was unable to get rid of the brain-exploding clicks (like I said, I need a spectral editor), so at the last minute I performed some clumsy level changes. Sigh.
The "Choir" at the beginning was from IK Multimedia's Miroslav Philharmonik, and the high pitch noise was from TAL-U-NO-62's Juno synth emulator, with a notch filter sliding around to make it more interesting.
There are a lot of other odds and ends integrated into the piece, but the most prominent are a series of samples culled with my SP-404 SX sampler. The middle "beat" section is a sample from a Beloved song mutilated with the SP's DJFX looper, and the entire "rock and roll" ending is a bunch of similarly-triggered samples (among them Tim Fuller and Santana) sent through a bunch of filtered auxiliary channels and an auto-wah.
To glue it all together there are some improvised ESQ-1 additions on the last few tracks: the "bomb" noises, the little mouse noises, the "wooooom" noises, and the final guitar-ish accents.
The hardest part of this track by far was the mastering...not so much the ACTUAL mastering, but the WORRYING about the EVENTUAL mastering. I was paralyzed with fear, wondering if an experimental piece like this NEEDED to be mastered. Might the mastering process only be useful for more conventional songs?
My conclusion: no, it's useful for any sort of track, but in a different way. Stereo widening and low-frequency compression can help any song, I think, but loudness processing and harmonic excitation must be used even MORE sparingly than usual.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
"Scrubland" by Lemurian Congress
I haven't been blogging lately for two reasons: I'm trying to write some previews for the upcoming Open Ears festival, and I've been working on "Scrubland." It's the first thing I've finished under the "Lemurian Congress" name!
(Thanks to Justin Mathews for the photograph, which I have shamefully cropped)
This started as an experiment in sidechain gating. I'm frequently reading articles about the endless power of a well-chosen sidechain gate, but obviously I didn't choose mine well because you can't even hear it in the song. By the time I'd added a pair of looped drum tracks (one from Front 242, another from EZ Drummer), sent them through some parallel auxiliaries with odd effects preceded by bandpass filters, and tapped out the first few chords with Camel Audio Alchemy, I was already in love. The sidechain stuff wasn't necessary. Something more interesting was taking shape: a minimal trance journey from somewhere to somewhere else.
Two other things inspired this track, and they were both new plugins: Replicant from Audio Damage (which is most obviously used to stutter the drum loops, but is more subtly used elsewhere for various glitchiness) and Melodyne from Celemony. I mostly bought it to correct vocals (hopefully performed by other people) but its "Direct Note Access" feature allows you to meticulously alter (or completely remove) the sensible elements WITHIN a sample.
You see, originally the "Oooooooo" sound was part of the "Doo-doo-doo" vocals that you hear at the end of the track (from a Lyda Husik song, by the way). While using Melodyne to remove the guitar elements from the vocals, I also stripped out the "Oooooooo" and made it another element altogether. I had to timestretch it in Logic (because Melodyne's timestretch is inexcusably bad) but the implications are pretty amazing. You can turn a sample into something totally different if you're willing to play with it enough, which lends itself to the sort of endless possibilities that paralyze me with choice.
Anyway, some of the other samples were taken from quiet bits of Jane Siberry's "The Bird in the Gravel, with the looped oboe going through the DOD effects processor for human-style tweaking. The choir at the end (from IK Multimedia's Miroslav Philharmonic) was a totally unsubtle touch but seemed necessary.
The problem was that something ELSE seemed necessary: a payoff. Transitioning from floaty ambience to the grounded nature of the "Doo-doo-doo" vocals required the song to get off its butt at some point. I dipped my toe into Logic's Ultrabeat for the drums (why did I never explore this before?), added an Alchemy arpeggio...and then had a hell of a time with the bass.
Bass is difficult, especially for those of us without a subwoofer. Some bass sounds have a nice low-mid grunt to them, and some have a punchy sub to them, but few have both. You often need to mix the two together...but WHICH two?
For the "grunty" part of the bass I mixed Taurus I and Minimoog samples (with IK Multimedia's amazing SampleMoog), then -- at a loss for a matching sub -- I bought the Alchemy "Electronic Bass" expansion. Some overdrive and compression and I was there. And incidentally, the recurring echo keyboard notes are from Logic's ES2 synth.
I've had enough mastering experience to know that a GOOD MIX is essential before mastering can even begin. This means stuff like getting your levels and your frequency usage to a pleasant spot, but a really PRACTICAL step is to remove sample-pops before mastering turns them into painful "TICK!" noises. Fade, crossfade, notch filters, and waveform editing (to BOTH stereo channels) can save you lots of grief before harmonic enhancement turns your beautiful mix into the sound of celophane getting hit with a bubble-wrap hammer.
The "Doo-doo-doo" stuff was particularly bad for this, especially because it dwelled in the same frequency that sample-pops tend to so I couldn't just add a highpass filter.
A quick pass through iZotrope's Ozone 4 for loudness, stereo enhancement, and final EQ...and voila! To me, the song is about the day in the life of a bunch of scrubwomen...gearing up for work, washing down, relaxing, listening to the sound of the mudbath (or wherever it is they work), then really getting to it at the end. "The Bird in the Gravel" had this sort of approach as well and I think I adopted it subconsciously.
Oh, and the drips and drops in the middle portion? Not actually drips or drops, but that's a secret for another post.
(Thanks to Justin Mathews for the photograph, which I have shamefully cropped)
This started as an experiment in sidechain gating. I'm frequently reading articles about the endless power of a well-chosen sidechain gate, but obviously I didn't choose mine well because you can't even hear it in the song. By the time I'd added a pair of looped drum tracks (one from Front 242, another from EZ Drummer), sent them through some parallel auxiliaries with odd effects preceded by bandpass filters, and tapped out the first few chords with Camel Audio Alchemy, I was already in love. The sidechain stuff wasn't necessary. Something more interesting was taking shape: a minimal trance journey from somewhere to somewhere else.
Two other things inspired this track, and they were both new plugins: Replicant from Audio Damage (which is most obviously used to stutter the drum loops, but is more subtly used elsewhere for various glitchiness) and Melodyne from Celemony. I mostly bought it to correct vocals (hopefully performed by other people) but its "Direct Note Access" feature allows you to meticulously alter (or completely remove) the sensible elements WITHIN a sample.
You see, originally the "Oooooooo" sound was part of the "Doo-doo-doo" vocals that you hear at the end of the track (from a Lyda Husik song, by the way). While using Melodyne to remove the guitar elements from the vocals, I also stripped out the "Oooooooo" and made it another element altogether. I had to timestretch it in Logic (because Melodyne's timestretch is inexcusably bad) but the implications are pretty amazing. You can turn a sample into something totally different if you're willing to play with it enough, which lends itself to the sort of endless possibilities that paralyze me with choice.
Anyway, some of the other samples were taken from quiet bits of Jane Siberry's "The Bird in the Gravel, with the looped oboe going through the DOD effects processor for human-style tweaking. The choir at the end (from IK Multimedia's Miroslav Philharmonic) was a totally unsubtle touch but seemed necessary.
The problem was that something ELSE seemed necessary: a payoff. Transitioning from floaty ambience to the grounded nature of the "Doo-doo-doo" vocals required the song to get off its butt at some point. I dipped my toe into Logic's Ultrabeat for the drums (why did I never explore this before?), added an Alchemy arpeggio...and then had a hell of a time with the bass.
Bass is difficult, especially for those of us without a subwoofer. Some bass sounds have a nice low-mid grunt to them, and some have a punchy sub to them, but few have both. You often need to mix the two together...but WHICH two?
For the "grunty" part of the bass I mixed Taurus I and Minimoog samples (with IK Multimedia's amazing SampleMoog), then -- at a loss for a matching sub -- I bought the Alchemy "Electronic Bass" expansion. Some overdrive and compression and I was there. And incidentally, the recurring echo keyboard notes are from Logic's ES2 synth.
I've had enough mastering experience to know that a GOOD MIX is essential before mastering can even begin. This means stuff like getting your levels and your frequency usage to a pleasant spot, but a really PRACTICAL step is to remove sample-pops before mastering turns them into painful "TICK!" noises. Fade, crossfade, notch filters, and waveform editing (to BOTH stereo channels) can save you lots of grief before harmonic enhancement turns your beautiful mix into the sound of celophane getting hit with a bubble-wrap hammer.
The "Doo-doo-doo" stuff was particularly bad for this, especially because it dwelled in the same frequency that sample-pops tend to so I couldn't just add a highpass filter.
A quick pass through iZotrope's Ozone 4 for loudness, stereo enhancement, and final EQ...and voila! To me, the song is about the day in the life of a bunch of scrubwomen...gearing up for work, washing down, relaxing, listening to the sound of the mudbath (or wherever it is they work), then really getting to it at the end. "The Bird in the Gravel" had this sort of approach as well and I think I adopted it subconsciously.
Oh, and the drips and drops in the middle portion? Not actually drips or drops, but that's a secret for another post.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Welcome Back!
Things have changed here!
For regular readers of the blog, the first thing you'll notice is that I'm posting under my real name; after years of humming and hawing I have decided to put Muffy St. Bernard to rest, at least temporarily. There are a lot of reasons for this (and I've discussed many of them before) but the upshot is that I can redirect my energies: instead of spending time, energy, and money (not to mention razors) on doing drag, I can focus more on making music instead.
Hence the new title of the blog: "Lemurian Congress." Ten years of "UPhold" were enough, and the name change signifies a somewhat more polished direction. I've been collaborating with other musicians recently and we're doing some great stuff...stay tuned for samples.
Third: less New Yorker articles. For whatever reason I don't find myself reading the back issues at the moment. Hopefully my own original writing will be a suitable replacement.
I hope you'll stick around and that you'll find the blog as interesting and diverse as it always was. So welcome back!
For regular readers of the blog, the first thing you'll notice is that I'm posting under my real name; after years of humming and hawing I have decided to put Muffy St. Bernard to rest, at least temporarily. There are a lot of reasons for this (and I've discussed many of them before) but the upshot is that I can redirect my energies: instead of spending time, energy, and money (not to mention razors) on doing drag, I can focus more on making music instead.
Hence the new title of the blog: "Lemurian Congress." Ten years of "UPhold" were enough, and the name change signifies a somewhat more polished direction. I've been collaborating with other musicians recently and we're doing some great stuff...stay tuned for samples.
Third: less New Yorker articles. For whatever reason I don't find myself reading the back issues at the moment. Hopefully my own original writing will be a suitable replacement.
I hope you'll stick around and that you'll find the blog as interesting and diverse as it always was. So welcome back!
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