Day: June 15, 2011
"Quadruple Carbon"
"Quadruple Carbon" [mp3 removed]
Am interested in analog gear mostly for sampling fodder. Sounds that can't be made digitally (due to the inherent unpredictability of voltages) that are ultimately captured digitally and used as seasoning for a stew of 1s and 0s.
Some of the gritty quasi-vocal sounds in the background here are made with a random analog patch that was sampled, sliced up and EQd. (The LFO signal "out" to the VCA control voltage "in" seemed to be the catalyst for these bizarre noises but I doubt I can repeat them.) The bouncy FM-ed bass note is also analog and gives some punch and randomness that a digital drum synth might not have, or maybe that's just an article of faith with me. Most of the "lead" synth tunes (heard under the pianos) were made with the Reaktor Carbon softsynth.
The "latin" electric pianos give this piece some structure but they do drown out some of the electronic subtleties, which is why I am posting the backing track separately.
"Quadruple Carbon (Backing Track)"
"Quadruple Carbon (Backing Track)" [mp3 removed]
What the next track sounds like sans electric piano parts.
aging rockabilly dudes of the present
people making music with analog synths are the 2k11 versions of the sad aging rockabilly dudes we used to make fun of in high school
quoth WIZARDISHUNGRY on his twitter, and let's add that at least aging rockabilly dudes did some work. Am referring here to the YouTube microgenre where analog synth owners show off their gear with "demos" where they set a sequencer going and press various buttons in real time. The human performer is reduced to a pair of disembodied hands (invariably male) entering the frame to "tweak" sound. The fetishization is so extreme that in one video, a YouTuber films himself opening the package of some component he has received in the mail and proudly waggling it in front of the camera.
One watches these things if one is interested in how the gear sounds but for many users the "demo" appears to be an end in itself. Where once you had a geek in chain mail indulging himself with blorts and hums on his modules before a live, corporeal audience now music is reduced to the simple, minimal acts of (i) selection and purchase of gear and (ii) demonstration of what each switch does for an imagined audience of websurfers.
You could say this is a "tribe" of musicians with its own codes and mores and suspend critical judgment about items like the lack of pacing, terrible camerawork, and overall sameness of the sound within each individual demo. You could defend the genre as a new form of music of the relational or "weak universal gesture" variety, where ultimately the watcher has the power to shorten, mix, match, and aggregate passive vignettes. You could comment on the sociology of the players' attempts to validate their own consumer purchases and miserable existences through obligatory communal video documentation (music being one of many fungible categories of YouTube activity including jet skiing or vacuum cleaning). You could...