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reddragdivaI've been overplaying Severed Heads. (Josh's fault.) Liz has been requesting a change of playlist.
Tom Ellard on how it's done:
"I hate the idea of people calling up 'patch 61, strings 3' and writing a song round it. It's as important to think how sounds fit vertically into their respective frequency levels as it is to progress through the notes horizontally.
"You have to spend a certain amount of compositional time not assembling things, but just listening ... look out for bargain-bin records, listen to radio shows where you think there might be something ... If there's something on TV about the mating habits of slugs, reach for your Walkman!
"... From hours and hours of material, you'll end up with three seconds - but that three seconds will be exactly what you want."
(From Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music, June 1985 - page 1, page 2.)
Does anyone use tape loops any more?
I am firmly convinced - as firmly as I am that the Sisters of Mercy fucked up goth music for everyone - that the drum machine was industrial music's greatest mistake. Twenty minutes of machine repetition is dull; twenty minutes of a human pounding out that beat is interesting.
"If you loved the first single but only on vinyl, if you thought 'they' went downhill after the first album, if your record collection is centred around the year you turned 16, congratulations - you're a Clifford. Time will change but your listening choice won't."
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 04:36 am (UTC)Fucking thank you! I was hoping there was somebody else in the world who thought "X music is great but for fuck's sake how difficult is it to get a real human to do that drum part and give it a little life?"
(Not sure about Sisters, there are a couple of songs i like but the others i just hear as rumbling, but not going to start a thread about them.)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 04:52 am (UTC)1. They took really good stuff about post-punk in black and whipped it up into a guitar-drum-machine splurge. Joy Division-lite-lite-lite. (e.g. "Marian" vs "Decades".)
2. Every other bugger since them seems to think Goth Rock = Guitar plus Drum Machine.
One thing I really liked about Dead And Buried was that they played a lot of pre-Sisters goth stuff that is all but forgotten now.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 06:50 am (UTC)Course, I tend not to like music with real drum sounds. mumble. mumble.
I agree theres a major problem with bands since, who have taken the format, but made it sound awful in nearly every instance.
Of course, whats worse is when you get the Sisters with a real drummer ie The Mission. godawful poncey racket.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 07:35 am (UTC)The problem, of course, is people who hear them and imitate it. Because they think they're supposed to. Stupid humans.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 04:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 04:55 am (UTC)Way more difficult than yu might think :)
I have many 'drummer' jokes that I will spare you now... but, there is a reason why they call drummers 'The guys who hang around with musicians' :)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 04:59 am (UTC)It's just annoying when drum machines are used as a substitute for drummers, rather than an instrument in their own right (e.g. Big Black).
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 06:25 am (UTC)Exactly. A drum-machine can churn out great stuff, just so long as you're not trying to pretend it's a drummer.
Going in the other direction, there are some bands who have tried to replace their crazy-electronic-bleep-machines with a live drummer or two for live acts, with often interesting results. (cf. astral projection, winterkaelte)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 05:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 06:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 06:20 am (UTC)*hits you over the head with my 18-inch thin crash*
I never get over how good that darling sounds :) although the 22-inch ride is better for building up noise, unusually. Guess it's the dent that does it :/ although it doesn't sound out of tune.
Incidentally the spot to make a sound an octave higher than all the frequencies on a drum head is about a third of the way out. Can't remember where i left the derivation though, probably stuck to a floor somewhere. Sounds good in intros.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 06:54 am (UTC)I think the rigidity and repetition can be a good thing, it is after all industrial, machine like. What you are probably hitting at is badly programmed drums or sounding drums. A lot of this is because people who program them are not drummers. It is possible to program a loop with feel. My personal preference would be a good drummer playing pads. You can choose whatever sound you want yet still get the feel and a well arranged part. Drum machines these days can not only inject quantising errors into a part but inject groove and give the randomness of sound a real drummer generates.
I think 20 mins of loop can be boring. I wouldnt consider 20 mins of well programmed and arranged drums to be the same. Its not the drum machine at fault but the fact that somebody hasnt been bothered or has the talent to program something interesting.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 07:37 am (UTC)What they lack is being able to pick up on the other musicians. The essence of liveness in rock music is the instrumental jam between the players. But they do get a bit of the way there.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 08:57 am (UTC)Yes, I think you have a point there, and that good things can happen because of a band being totally live, but a lot depends on your definition of industrial. Industrial covers a lot of bases and some of those just do not suit the rock format. Some industrial is meant to be absolutely fixed, absolutely quantised. Out of that I think comes a certain sense of mechanical purity. So I think to say drum machines were a mistake is just plain wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 10:19 am (UTC)Mm, yeah.
Last week was the first time I've ever played with a live drummer (and not been running one of, say, four or five synced drum machines). It was a really different way of playing...
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 07:41 am (UTC)Example: Bauhaus "Bela Lugosi's Dead". That's the same rhythm for nine minutes. With one very simple phrase played over it. Hell, that pretty much makes it industrial as far as I'm concerned.
(The Stooges' brand of repetition in rock came to some degree from consciously taking factory machinery sounds as an influence. Take "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and that single piano note running right through.)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 08:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 10:14 am (UTC)My thought with drum machines is that if you treat them as a loop, then you're not really exploiting them. The problem is, quite a lot of drum machines are set up to BE boring-- I don't even mean the sounds, but the way you set them up. You program them, hit start, and play along. That's not the right way to run a drum machine.
My favorite drum machine ever is the Roland TR606. It's a cute little box with blinky lights and silver buttons, and seems to be almost designed for live jamming. Sure, it's just a standard old 16-bar loop, but you can take that loop and edit it while it plays, creating drum tracks that change over time, evolving as you go.
http://www.gweep.net/~shifty/music/mymusic.html
...is a friend of mine. He likes to use strangely broken things. Turn off animated gifs before looking at his page, or prepare for eyeball pain.
Or, go here:
http://www.tangentaudio.com/artists/msf/
...and click on "Download Music."
I'd suggest "6996-part1" as a start. They'er ambient space jams (whoooo, spaaaaaace jaaaaammmm....), but I think we take what are usually considered very static tools and do interesting things with them...
(no subject)
Date: 2003-03-31 10:16 am (UTC)Oh, and people don't use tape loops as such, but Shifty really seems to dig these massive piles of delays and pitch-shifters... I usually have no idea what's going on. He crouches over stacks of stompboxes and rack units and patch-cords and plays with knobs, and while I'm pretty sure of what's going in, I can never predict what will come out.
Tape Loops
Date: 2003-03-31 12:28 pm (UTC)http://www.prosoundweb.com/recording/mm/week1/mm.php
Start with this, follow some of the discussions that follwo, if you really want to know.