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Looper's Delight
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On Jun 26, 2005, at 22:34, Tim Nelson wrote: > > I know Rick Walker has mentioned building an acoustic > drumkit which simulates the timbres of electronica. Is > anyone else out there being intentionally > anachronistic with their equipment, either using new > tech to simulate the sound of old stuff or getting > modern tones out of vintage gear? > > -t- A key point in this issue is the fact that you can not (at least not without a huge load of experience) hear from only monitoring one sound how that sound later will blend in an orchestration together with other sounds. If you will continue to try "solo sounds" you will never learn that ability and probable will never find that great instrument sound that will receive its true blessing only when heard in a full context. One particular example of this rule is a crappy sounding reverb I like to use in Ableton Live. It sounds crappy when played solo but as soon as you start building up loops the reverb starts sounding really sweet as a background foundation. Not too sharp to get in the way for the instruments, just smoothing and polishing each note that floats. And to my ears the lowest, most CPU-friendly, algorithm is the best sounding. In the past, before hard disk recording was available, I was using cassette decks, a Tascam reel to reel mastering machine and an early Yamaha digital delay to "degrade" the signal in a way that I found more pleasant for my ears. Today I find that a cheap soundcard I'm using on my laptop (Echo Indigo i/o) has a certain sound that I like. So I record the analog outputs of the laptop rig into a more "pro" sound card instead of recording digitally. Only to catch that coloring of the sound. Another example is using distortion, noise and hiss as part of the instrument sound. This is much more prosperous when looping compared to when playing traditionally, since you only punch in what you play into the loops - not the silence where noise would otherwise sound bad. To my ears this gives a kind of "mellotronishness" to the sound. I play a lot these days directly though a TC FireworX and since this unit used as a guitar pre-amp won't let me fade in notes with the guitar volume knobs - as I'm used to - I have learned to use a foot volume pedal instead. The upside with that technique is that all the noise from the FireworX is also cut out by the volume pedal (I put it second last, just keeping delay or reverb after the pedal). This setting also makes sense when looping flute, I discovered, because the volume pedal makes it possible to play flute with a distorted sound without loosing it all into nasty (acoustic) feedback. A smooth gate/expander after noise inducing effects can also create a "mellotronish" instrument sound by blending noise with the instruments sound. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.looproom.com (international) www.boysen.se (Swedish) ---> iTunes Music Store (digital) www.cdbaby.com/perboysen