Italians conspire and shush politics with their wife-birds, bedraggled, bluntly confused. They are Europe's ambassadors to this crass continent of progress and cannibalism; we are the ones who fall the fastest, but our huge gravity will pull them down with us, all those staring dark-eyed peasants and pilgrims and artists. They would declare us guilty if we believed in their gods but their quaint piety is antichrist to our admittedly divided forces.
"You have broken the rules and wandered too far from us!" they scream at the back-ends of our boats, and we respond: "Denial of your beloved elder statesmen! They are too fat on food that took them too long to cook and eat! We, here, eat only the quick things, which we have invented ourselves, the burgers, the beans! Our fat is made of proteins alien to your history, and therefore we are brand new men and women!"
Monday, August 01, 2011
Watch Your Husband!
It's really an advertisement for a cruise (eg. if you notice your husband getting stressed, take him on a cruise), but you'd be excused for seeing something more sinister.
(The New Yorker, November 15, 1930, when everybody was running off to warmer climes, the French and Germans were rumbling about war, and backgammon was the game of choice)
Monday, July 04, 2011
Deep Wide Open (Rough Mix)
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.
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.
Sunday, July 03, 2011
Hot!
Our city is a sinkhole, falling under the weight of industry and families and new steel buildings. Our gravity pulls us so deep that we can only fill our skies with smog...it has to go somewhere! We want it gone but it won't go away!
Two city's worth of blacktop and pollution broils us in our clothes. We have sore shoulders from hugging the shady spots, and when those places reach critical mass, we fight or we retreat to our fridges. The sun has made us needy, every citizen is a gatekeeper of boats, curtains, private routes to heaven. Instead of love we have our own burning weight; we will not be tricked into embraces which only make us sweat. Sweet nothings are lost in the whir of fans and patio stereos. There is no room in our brains for sex or tipsiness when everything about us is pain.
Two city's worth of blacktop and pollution broils us in our clothes. We have sore shoulders from hugging the shady spots, and when those places reach critical mass, we fight or we retreat to our fridges. The sun has made us needy, every citizen is a gatekeeper of boats, curtains, private routes to heaven. Instead of love we have our own burning weight; we will not be tricked into embraces which only make us sweat. Sweet nothings are lost in the whir of fans and patio stereos. There is no room in our brains for sex or tipsiness when everything about us is pain.
Friday, July 01, 2011
Canada Day!
Flowers are entirely Canadian on Canada Day; nobody in any other nation has these yellow flowers pollinated by RGB finches who wear spotless feather-robes! We've owned these flowers since we arrived in this country. Before that they were untamed and savage...their water came from streams bounded by beavers and soil and sparse human excrement. But then we came in ships with our rats, and we imposed order on savagery, and today these flowers bloom in coordination with us, fed by nutrients and liquids that we have previously inspected (or at least touched gently with smokestacks), and when these flowers bloom for us they shout "CANADA DAY!"
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
"Interfering Waves" for Download!
The EP that Kevin Cogliano and I have been working on (as "Pico and Alvarado") is available for download from Bandcamp! It's $2 for 25 minutes, and if you think you've already heard most of the songs, I've got news for you: they've been thoroughly remixed and remastered. Plus there's an extended remix in the style of the typical '80s twelve-inch dance mix...I think you'll like it!
Oh, and about those figures on the cover...they are -- you guessed it -- Pico and Alvarado themselves. Knit-vixens Annissa and Lydia have spent the last two months destroying their fingers to make those things. I wish we could give you a free pair with every album because they're terrific!
Oh, and about those figures on the cover...they are -- you guessed it -- Pico and Alvarado themselves. Knit-vixens Annissa and Lydia have spent the last two months destroying their fingers to make those things. I wish we could give you a free pair with every album because they're terrific!
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, April 07, 2011
"Against the Day" by Thomas Pynchon
I've spent over a month reading Thomas Pynchon's massive novel "Against the Day." I have lugged it from home, to work, to lunch counter, with little regard to the damage it was causing to my shoulder. I've gotten lost in it and become frustrated with it, I've gone back and forth to reread parts that I'd missed, I've visited Wikipedia to learn about Iceland Spar and the quaternions, I have struggled to stay awake and I have struggled to put it down, and I have thought "I am spending far too much effort on this goddamn book."
Now that I've finished it, I can sum it up by saying...well, it's certainly "Pynchonesque," and it's as complicated and annoying as everybody says it is -- an endless parade of major characters, diversions into dozens of apparently unrelated topics, too much movement from place to place, no real thread to hold it all together -- but it also has a greater proportion of Pynchon-gentleness and enlightenment than I've come to expect. The payoffs -- oblique as they can be -- are so bittersweet and human that you don't mind the coldly scientific obsessions so much.
Unfortunately, these "human" moments are all bundled together during the last 150 pages, and the more interesting and clear-headed moments are in the first 500. The 400 middle pages are somewhat tiresome, when you realize that MORE subplots are being introduced, one of which -- the onset of the first world war -- is a non-stop machine-gun of politics, places, and personages. It's simply too much to handle after the mathematics, strikebreaking, and empire-busting that you've already been through. The characters start to seem like bits of leaves thrown into world events and just blowing around, to Venice and back, to Venice and back, to Venice and back again.
All these criticisms could perhaps be applied to "Gravity's Rainbow," and I'm not sure if my less enthusiastic reception of "Against the Day" is due to the fact that Pynchon "already did it once before," or that "Against the Day" feels like a "Gravity's Rainbow" in which everything -- the paranoia, the dark-mystery-which-cannot-be-comprehended, the sexual escapades, the slapstick -- has been duplicated several times over to fill out an excessive page length, with all these things happening to multiple characters in sequence instead of just to Tyrone Slothrop.
Basically, my impression is that "Against the Day" is five or six novels that Pynchon started writing years ago, all subsequently linked together by unions, WWI, the drift from Victorianism to modernism, explosions, light, and the Tunguska event.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "Against the Day" is FULL of wonderful detail and characterization, and -- as I said earlier -- there's a growing gentleness to Pynchon's writing that is absolutely welcome. Whereas "Gravity's Rainbow" culminated in uncertainty and confusion, the characters in "Against the Day" seem to find comfort in companionship, children, and purpose, and the novel doesn't judge them; they did wild things and struggled for noble causes when they were young, and now they're settled down and are raising their children and getting a bit mellower. And that's pretty much The End.
When I was wallowing through 400 Pages of People Just Running Around Europe, I felt like I was reading a really crappy book. Now that I've finished it, however, I look forward to reading it again someday, so I can get a feel for what REALLY matters in the novel: the little moments like Cyprian's trajectory from hedonist to (I won't spoil it for you), the complex interweaving of the Webb and Rideout families, and -- floating high above it all -- the aging airship children who are struggling to find meaning when the "Boys Adventure Story" days are gone.
Now that I've finished it, I can sum it up by saying...well, it's certainly "Pynchonesque," and it's as complicated and annoying as everybody says it is -- an endless parade of major characters, diversions into dozens of apparently unrelated topics, too much movement from place to place, no real thread to hold it all together -- but it also has a greater proportion of Pynchon-gentleness and enlightenment than I've come to expect. The payoffs -- oblique as they can be -- are so bittersweet and human that you don't mind the coldly scientific obsessions so much.
Unfortunately, these "human" moments are all bundled together during the last 150 pages, and the more interesting and clear-headed moments are in the first 500. The 400 middle pages are somewhat tiresome, when you realize that MORE subplots are being introduced, one of which -- the onset of the first world war -- is a non-stop machine-gun of politics, places, and personages. It's simply too much to handle after the mathematics, strikebreaking, and empire-busting that you've already been through. The characters start to seem like bits of leaves thrown into world events and just blowing around, to Venice and back, to Venice and back, to Venice and back again.
All these criticisms could perhaps be applied to "Gravity's Rainbow," and I'm not sure if my less enthusiastic reception of "Against the Day" is due to the fact that Pynchon "already did it once before," or that "Against the Day" feels like a "Gravity's Rainbow" in which everything -- the paranoia, the dark-mystery-which-cannot-be-comprehended, the sexual escapades, the slapstick -- has been duplicated several times over to fill out an excessive page length, with all these things happening to multiple characters in sequence instead of just to Tyrone Slothrop.
Basically, my impression is that "Against the Day" is five or six novels that Pynchon started writing years ago, all subsequently linked together by unions, WWI, the drift from Victorianism to modernism, explosions, light, and the Tunguska event.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "Against the Day" is FULL of wonderful detail and characterization, and -- as I said earlier -- there's a growing gentleness to Pynchon's writing that is absolutely welcome. Whereas "Gravity's Rainbow" culminated in uncertainty and confusion, the characters in "Against the Day" seem to find comfort in companionship, children, and purpose, and the novel doesn't judge them; they did wild things and struggled for noble causes when they were young, and now they're settled down and are raising their children and getting a bit mellower. And that's pretty much The End.
When I was wallowing through 400 Pages of People Just Running Around Europe, I felt like I was reading a really crappy book. Now that I've finished it, however, I look forward to reading it again someday, so I can get a feel for what REALLY matters in the novel: the little moments like Cyprian's trajectory from hedonist to (I won't spoil it for you), the complex interweaving of the Webb and Rideout families, and -- floating high above it all -- the aging airship children who are struggling to find meaning when the "Boys Adventure Story" days are gone.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
"Sruel Quay" Released!
Many years in the making, "Sruel Quay" is finally here...a last scraping together of UPhold music that's been languishing during the last few years. You can get it as a free download from Bandcamp, including some beautiful cover and back artwork (photographs by Patrick, design by Dave McEwen), or you can just listen to the whole thing online if you're so inclined!
So what's the story? When I first started to use Logic Express 6 in 2003, I went through the usual learning curve of trying out a whole bunch of grand concepts that I couldn't complete at the time. As my knowledge and skill increased I started newer projects, which eventually became the "Damage" and "Roade" albums. Meanwhile, those early songs languished, getting further and further down the date-sorted list of "Multitrack" projects on my hard drive.
Then I bought a new, spiffy iMac, and while I saved money to eventually buy Logic Studio 8 for it, I decided to go back to the old eMac and finish off those songs before the hard drive disintegrated. I spent about a year dredging up 6-year-old songs and reworking them with the new experience and distance I'd acquired: "Bomb," "Devil Woman!", "Foozebox," "Humpback Forty-Four," and "The Swive (Part One)" were the results, and I planned to finish off a few more and release them as "False Memory Syndrome."
The problem was, by the time I'd finished these songs I'd finally started work with Logic 8, and I was no longer satisfied with how those dinosaurs sounded. They all relied on plugins I could no longer acquire (Pluggo and Mode) so I couldn't continue working on them with the new computer...they were frozen in time and technology. To make them even marginally better I'd need to spend more effort on them than I felt they deserved.
In the meantime I'd created some soundtracks to little video experiments ("Phonebox/Lunchbox," "Lightbox," "Boxcar," and "Caboodle"), and contributed to a compilation (a remix of "Icebox" on "Powdered Heaven Dressed in Plastic") and a split release with Infant Cycle ("Folded Memory Syndrome" and "Shut The Fuck Up Delia/Dmitri" on "Our Past Present").
In addition, I'd created a remix ("Roadbird") from the "Roade" album, and a remix of THAT remix with Chad Faragher. I also had a new song ("The Voyage of HMCS Thumpy") that I was spending so much time working on a video for that I simply got sick of it.
These were the bits and pieces I had lying around. What they all had in common was that they either couldn't be further improved due to technological limitations (both "Roadbird (Metal Mix)" and "Voyage of HMCS Thumpy" had ham-fisted mastering attempts so burned into their original tracks that they'd be very difficult to rescue) or had appeared on CDs from other venues (eg. "Shut the Fuck Up Delia/Dmitri," which I think is probably the best thing I've ever done...I wouldn't change a note).
In short: they were good enough to release, but generally fell short of what I'd expect people to PAY for. Like I said, I COULD improve them if I spent a lot of time and effort, but the improvement would be so marginal that it wouldn't justify the work.
With all that in mind, I hope you enjoy these oddities! They're a farewell to "UPhold" and the old ways of doing things. They sum up six years of my life: a time of personal exploration, sudden world experience, half-assed notoriety, and -- most obvious in many of the songs -- a degree of self-destructive too-much-fun behaviour that peaked and then subsided.
I'm surprised at how well "Sruel Quay" holds together as an album, and I look forward to what the first "Lemurian Congress" release will sound like!
So what's the story? When I first started to use Logic Express 6 in 2003, I went through the usual learning curve of trying out a whole bunch of grand concepts that I couldn't complete at the time. As my knowledge and skill increased I started newer projects, which eventually became the "Damage" and "Roade" albums. Meanwhile, those early songs languished, getting further and further down the date-sorted list of "Multitrack" projects on my hard drive.
Then I bought a new, spiffy iMac, and while I saved money to eventually buy Logic Studio 8 for it, I decided to go back to the old eMac and finish off those songs before the hard drive disintegrated. I spent about a year dredging up 6-year-old songs and reworking them with the new experience and distance I'd acquired: "Bomb," "Devil Woman!", "Foozebox," "Humpback Forty-Four," and "The Swive (Part One)" were the results, and I planned to finish off a few more and release them as "False Memory Syndrome."
The problem was, by the time I'd finished these songs I'd finally started work with Logic 8, and I was no longer satisfied with how those dinosaurs sounded. They all relied on plugins I could no longer acquire (Pluggo and Mode) so I couldn't continue working on them with the new computer...they were frozen in time and technology. To make them even marginally better I'd need to spend more effort on them than I felt they deserved.
In the meantime I'd created some soundtracks to little video experiments ("Phonebox/Lunchbox," "Lightbox," "Boxcar," and "Caboodle"), and contributed to a compilation (a remix of "Icebox" on "Powdered Heaven Dressed in Plastic") and a split release with Infant Cycle ("Folded Memory Syndrome" and "Shut The Fuck Up Delia/Dmitri" on "Our Past Present").
In addition, I'd created a remix ("Roadbird") from the "Roade" album, and a remix of THAT remix with Chad Faragher. I also had a new song ("The Voyage of HMCS Thumpy") that I was spending so much time working on a video for that I simply got sick of it.
These were the bits and pieces I had lying around. What they all had in common was that they either couldn't be further improved due to technological limitations (both "Roadbird (Metal Mix)" and "Voyage of HMCS Thumpy" had ham-fisted mastering attempts so burned into their original tracks that they'd be very difficult to rescue) or had appeared on CDs from other venues (eg. "Shut the Fuck Up Delia/Dmitri," which I think is probably the best thing I've ever done...I wouldn't change a note).
In short: they were good enough to release, but generally fell short of what I'd expect people to PAY for. Like I said, I COULD improve them if I spent a lot of time and effort, but the improvement would be so marginal that it wouldn't justify the work.
With all that in mind, I hope you enjoy these oddities! They're a farewell to "UPhold" and the old ways of doing things. They sum up six years of my life: a time of personal exploration, sudden world experience, half-assed notoriety, and -- most obvious in many of the songs -- a degree of self-destructive too-much-fun behaviour that peaked and then subsided.
I'm surprised at how well "Sruel Quay" holds together as an album, and I look forward to what the first "Lemurian Congress" release will sound like!
Monday, March 07, 2011
"Kaffe Katt" by Pico & Alvarado
Several months ago, Kevin Cogliano -- the "Alvarado" in "Pico & Alvarado" -- sent me a demo titled something like "That's What I Call 80s!"
And he was right. It was a perfect distillation of the fun pop songs we'd grown up with, all jangly and bouncy and downright carefree.
My task -- as I saw it -- was to maintain that feeling while simultaneously beefing up the song and over complicating it, adding enough twists and turns to make even the most ADD listener happy. One reason I wanted to do this was because I felt that "Style Kitchen" had never gotten the loving care it had deserved (an opinion -- I realize now -- more to do with overexposure to the song than to any actual defects), but also because I know I shy from experimentation...I don't like throwing in big changes, moving things around a timeline, or trying anything new.
So consider the final result -- "Kaffe Katt" -- as a journey outside my comfort zone. And while I'm still too close to it to give it an honest evaluation, I think it's pretty darn good.
(Photograph "Awning" by Patrick!)
Want to know more? Here's the finished timeline:
You'll notice a LOT of guitar tracks this time. The first track is the ongoing "cha-cha-chung" with a nice flange, and many of the rest are Kevin's experiments with doubling. The final four guitar tracks are more recent versions that he sent along during the course of the project, but I loved the rougher ones in the original batch...the cleaner tracks (including a nice delayed guitar) provide a good gentle conclusion.
My first real bombastic addition was the "G Blast" guitar, which coincides with a hyperactive series of crashes at the end of every verse. Kevin's guitar was already going manic during those segments but I really wanted to bash them out...so "G Blast" gets the "Modern UK Stack" treatment with Guitar Amp Pro, and the "crashes" are just a re-routed track from EZDrummer boosted all the way to heaven.
EZDrummer provides the main beat, while Ultrabeat provides a non-stop 4/4 kick and iDrum adds a snare and -- during the high point -- all those cheap drum effects. Lots and lots of drums in here, but I think it works.
Kevin's original tracks had included a Hammond-ish organ and a synth bassline...I kept the organ (augmented with the EVB plugin) but used his MIDI files with the same Minimoog/Taurus IK Multimedia "SampleMoog" preset I'd created for an earlier song. Also from IK Multimedia is the choir in the third section and the recurring pizzicato violin that I hope is "interesting" instead of "annoying."
This song's big additional experiment: Loomer's brilliant "String" instrument, which emulates 70s string machines WITHOUT eating all your CPU (and all your money). I'm totally in love with Loomer String and I highly recommend it.
The really abrasive portamento synth is Tal-Elek7ro, based off the "LD Club Saw XS" preset. There's also some Ensoniq ESQ in there with the organ stabs and the bells, and some really inconsequential DOD pitch/echo modulation on the plucky violins.
And there you have it!
And he was right. It was a perfect distillation of the fun pop songs we'd grown up with, all jangly and bouncy and downright carefree.
My task -- as I saw it -- was to maintain that feeling while simultaneously beefing up the song and over complicating it, adding enough twists and turns to make even the most ADD listener happy. One reason I wanted to do this was because I felt that "Style Kitchen" had never gotten the loving care it had deserved (an opinion -- I realize now -- more to do with overexposure to the song than to any actual defects), but also because I know I shy from experimentation...I don't like throwing in big changes, moving things around a timeline, or trying anything new.
So consider the final result -- "Kaffe Katt" -- as a journey outside my comfort zone. And while I'm still too close to it to give it an honest evaluation, I think it's pretty darn good.
(Photograph "Awning" by Patrick!)
Want to know more? Here's the finished timeline:
You'll notice a LOT of guitar tracks this time. The first track is the ongoing "cha-cha-chung" with a nice flange, and many of the rest are Kevin's experiments with doubling. The final four guitar tracks are more recent versions that he sent along during the course of the project, but I loved the rougher ones in the original batch...the cleaner tracks (including a nice delayed guitar) provide a good gentle conclusion.
My first real bombastic addition was the "G Blast" guitar, which coincides with a hyperactive series of crashes at the end of every verse. Kevin's guitar was already going manic during those segments but I really wanted to bash them out...so "G Blast" gets the "Modern UK Stack" treatment with Guitar Amp Pro, and the "crashes" are just a re-routed track from EZDrummer boosted all the way to heaven.
EZDrummer provides the main beat, while Ultrabeat provides a non-stop 4/4 kick and iDrum adds a snare and -- during the high point -- all those cheap drum effects. Lots and lots of drums in here, but I think it works.
Kevin's original tracks had included a Hammond-ish organ and a synth bassline...I kept the organ (augmented with the EVB plugin) but used his MIDI files with the same Minimoog/Taurus IK Multimedia "SampleMoog" preset I'd created for an earlier song. Also from IK Multimedia is the choir in the third section and the recurring pizzicato violin that I hope is "interesting" instead of "annoying."
This song's big additional experiment: Loomer's brilliant "String" instrument, which emulates 70s string machines WITHOUT eating all your CPU (and all your money). I'm totally in love with Loomer String and I highly recommend it.
The really abrasive portamento synth is Tal-Elek7ro, based off the "LD Club Saw XS" preset. There's also some Ensoniq ESQ in there with the organ stabs and the bells, and some really inconsequential DOD pitch/echo modulation on the plucky violins.
And there you have it!
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