Re: [LAU] Chris McCormick

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On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 10:01:29PM -0400, Chris McCormick wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 02:33:17PM -0700, Ken Restivo wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 11:34:26PM -0400, Chris McCormick wrote:
> > > I've been sitting on this one for a very (very) long
> > > time, but today is as good a day as any to release it:
> > > <http://sciencegirlrecords.com/chr15m/music/CD005/Chris%20McCormick%20-%20Escape%20Velocity%20Mouse.mp3>
> >
> > Very nice!
>
> Cheers!
>
> > What do you use to get those crazy breakbeats? Is that Hydrogen? Some custom PD/SC/CSound/ChucK stuff?
>
> 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.
>
> >From there, there are lots of little tricks to making variations in the
> 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!
>

Thanks! That was very, very helpful.

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.

- -ken
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Received on Thu Aug 23 08:15:06 2007