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rpm challenge: tripping at the start
By svc | February 1, 2008
Fresh from the daily work-grind this evening, I hit the studio running… I started Live and patched in a set of VSTi plugins in efforts to start building a wall of noise. Unfortunately, after a few minutes of noodling, I found that three of the keys on my M-Audio Oxygen 8 magically stopped working at some time within the last 72 hours. Great.
Everything I program directly into a MIDI grid using a mouse always sounds awkward to me, so in a mad rush, I ran out to the local music store to find some kind of replacement MIDI controller, and ended up with a used (but thankfully very inexpensive) Akai MPD16 pad controller. Unfortunately, upon getting home and installing the MPD16, the USB drivers immediately crashed my XP system, so I ended up disabling the device drivers and hooking the MPD16 up via MIDI cable, which works fine. I reprogrammed the MIDI note and control information into the MPD16′s banks in about 10 minutes, and started dropping drum samples into Live’s Drum Rack instrument, and all of a sudden I’m working a poor man’s MPC2000. Tweaking the drum rack to make a drum kit that responds well is going to take a chunk of time, but once it’s done it should bear repeated reuse.
Over the course of the day, I’ve been meditating on the parameters of this project, and what constraints I should utilize to try to keep myself from going off on a tangent and wasting a lot of precious time. Here are a few notes-to-self in that category:
- Use multiple noise creation techniques (electronic/acoustic), switch stations often, and record everything.
- Rough out the entire album structure first if possible, as generally as possible, and then refine in waves… ideology, then flow, then impact and cadence. Move, warp and scramble sections if necessary for continuity.
- Listen to the whole construction at least once every two days and note what works and what needs changing.
- Utilize flexible song construction techniques as much as possible. On-the-fly instrumentation with tweakable parameters should take precedence over static audio tracks.
I’m also going to take a few minutes tonight and select an audio CD’s worth of songs with elements that I think this project should embody… and then comb through it for techniques, inspiration, and themes to distill and utilize.
OK, back to building the drum kit. More tomorrow.
Topics: Music | 1 Comment »
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Always remember, grasshopper: a waveform of a thousand modulations begins with a single sine.
I leave you with a koan: Does a Britney Spears song become music when mangled and distorted?