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Comments
@ChrisG Too Much Time On Your Clean Hands. Lucky man....
@xen and Matt....
Awesome discussion. This, or any forum, at its best. 'How I did it/what I was thinking' posts are great, almost irrespective of the music involved (or if it suits our own taste etc). Defy anyone who's more than half awake to not learn or think something new from the exchange....
@ChrisG - I wasn't expecting that! You gonna get it cooking next?
@JohnnyGoodyear
I had a choice this afternoon. Write about making tunes or clear a load of jobs round the house. I think I got it right.
And then I jammed some guitar chords for the next Abu adventure, only to find myself spending hours trying to get clean chops out of Cubasis. It was my own fault. A chord progression with 12 beats (either 4 bars of 3/4 or 3 bars of 4/4) was never going to pay nice with a loop slicer that cuts the pattern into 16.
I've got 9 three bar loops to import and I'm just not getting there at the moment. Micro fades would make this a doddle. Of course the real problem is the sloppy timing from my guitar playing!!
A bit different this one. Acoustic guitar jammed into Cubasis via the built-in mike for a couple of minutes, playing slight variations of a simple chord progression. Picked out 9 three bar sections and chopped them in Cubasis and imported to 9 instances of Abu.
Mixed and matched them, including a bit of re-ordering of the slices in a few places. Got some real problems with clicks on this one. So I went through Final Touch and into Master Record, where some vinyl noise was added. This does an ok job of making the clicks seem more authentic. We really need micro fades, as playing with the attack and decay wasn't working.
Added some Gadgets (Helsinki, Bilbao, London and Marseille) and mixed the master bus directly into Final Touch.
Really liking the acoustic guitar playin and melodies in there. The clicks could be seen as some added glitchin spice
I actually finished that dishwasher musicvideo track above lol. No idea what genres to put it in really tho (Glitch, Breakbeats and similar I guess).
2 Abu's (drums and glitch), 1 Bilbao (drums), 1 Dublin (bass), 1 Wolfsburg (pad), 1 Chiangmai (lead/bell). Totally smashed, mashed and messed up in Gadget.
You've got a cracking sound going there, really crisp. Like the variation on the lead bell in the middle and solid bass.
Cheers for the comment on mine. I've just remixed it actually and changed the file on SoundCloud. I was on it until dawn and my ears were tired. Played it back this morning on different headphones and the guitar was too boomy. Also felt like there was more reverb on the right channel, as I had layered different sections of the guitar and panned. I think it is better balanced now and I have brought the drums up a bit in the mix to give it a bit more punch.
@ChrisG. Nice beat. Interesting sounds. Definitely glitchy.
@JohnnyGoodyear - thanks. I'm enjoying this thread too. Nothing beats proper details on how people are making stuff.
@zen. Thanks for the info on Modes. Really useful and clearly explained.
To check I understand is the following true to say:
You can stay in an overall scale/key throughout a track
Assuming you have a say 4 bar chord progression throughout that track, say I, IV, VII, V
Sorry...
you can use each chord to define the mode for each of the 4 bars.
the root note of the chord for that bar becomes the tonic of the mode and the other notes in the 'master key/scale' up from the new mode tonic become the II to VII of the mode
during that bar, for the melody over the chord, you think of the mode's scale notes as I to VII rather than the tracks 'master key/scale' with all the same principles of the V adding tension, the IV or the I resolution etc.. Etc...
but if fact you never deviate from the master scale notes, you just shift your thinking in terms of what the tonic and the IV and V etc etc. for each phrase of melody depending on what the chord is
Is that roughly right?
Does it work in minor scales (I've only ever seen it explained for major scales)?
Does it particularly matter what the actual mode is, what's it's called? Presumably the principle is simply that you are temporarily shifting the assignment of what you think of as the I to VII notes during that particular part of the chord progression?
And finally @zen.
Love the new guitar based track. Really chilled out mood.
Pity about the clicks. Did you try moving the Abu slices (fiddly I know) / getting rid of most of them?
I have found fewer clicks sticking things back together in Bilbao actually. Abu seems to do weird things at the start and end of slices irrespective of how you set the attack and decay. Bilbao seems more predictable.
Swing might also have effected it if you had any swing on the tack tempo in Gadget.
Cheers. Glad the guitar stuff is going down well. I have a few short bits I've been jamming for a while that I'm going to bring into Gadget. Yeah, the clicks are a shame. I'm a bit surprised, cos when I import sequenced loops they are nowhere near as bad. Now, if I was importing clean synth notes, slightly shorter than a 16th, that would make sense. But the loops I'd been using had delays, verbs and chorus, so there was no silence between notes. Also, no swing in that one.
Using the guitar loop it was just really messy. I did try playing around with the marker regions, maybe a bit more effort I'd have got there. That said it was the first attempt with guitar loops, so with practice it should get better. Good suggestion on Bilbao. I haven't done much with it beyond import a few drum shots, so I'll try some loops later this week.
The next one will be using Sector to develop the import loop. I programmed the Amen break pattern into iMPC Pro last night, playing some of the Akai DnB samples. Added some reverb and delay and exported the sequence to Sector. I'll come with a few variations in Sector and will try chopping them in iMPC and bringing them into Bilbao.
Modes.
Again, I have a basic understanding, I'm sure there are people on here with a deeper knowledge, but I'll try to answer your questions as best I can. I learnt about modes from my guitar teacher years ago. It was in the context of learning scale patterns at all positions on the guitar, so you can play up and down the neck and stay in key. So if you are playing a solo from the high notes back down the neck you keep changing mode to stay in key. Eg, D Dorian, A Aeolian and E Phrygian will take you from around the 12th fret back up to the open strings in the key of C Major (or A minor). You start with the tonic on the D on the 10th fret, move to A as the tonic on the 5th fret and finish with E as the tonic on the open 6th string.
So, basically yes to each of your bullet points above.
With reference to the minor scales. Don't forget that each natural minor scale is relative to a corresponding major scale, and is built from the sixth note of the major scale. So the Aeolian mode is also the natural minor scale. In the same way, the Ionian mode is the major scale.
So if you are playing in A minor, and want to use modes, the are the same as for the C Major scale.
I don't know how much you know about chords, so this next bit may be obvious...
If you harmonise the major scale you get a pattern of major and minor chords that corresponds to the intervals between notes in the major scale. A chord (or scale) is major or minor depending on the interval between the second and third note of the scale. If the interval is a whole tone - major. If the interval is a semitone - minor.
So if we look at the pattern of majors and minors in the C major scale:
C Major
D Minor
E Minor
F Major
G Major
A Minor
B Diminished
Now, each of these chords are built from the notes of the C Major scale. So, using E Minor as an example, what scale do we know that starts on E and contains the notes of the C Major scale?
Yep, my favourite, the E Phrygian mode. From this we can see that the E Phrygian mode must be a minor mode, as you build the E minor chord from the I - III - V notes within it. This pattern holds true for them all so we see that:
Ionian - Major
Dorian - Minor
Phrygian - Minor
Lydian - Major
Mixolydian - Major
Aeolian - Minor
Locrian - Minor (a diminished chord is a minor chord with a flattened fifth)
So, you can play a minor mode over a major chord (and vice versa) to play with the simplistic associations of major being upbeat and happy and minor being melancholic and sad.
Regarding the naming of things, I guess it only matters in as much it matters for the naming of anything. We do it so we can organise the world into a sensible structure we can work within and so we can communicate and collaborate with others. The solo producer wouldn't really need to get hung up about the mode their 16 bar acid loop is in compared to their bass line. The session musician who works with different musicians needs to speak the lingo fluently to share verbally the musical framework and understand the requirements of the job.
In essence, their are 12 notes in the western classical model. Between those 12 notes are relationships. Music theory is just a language structure through which we can understand and work with these relationships. (IMO)
You damn theorists with all your damn, you know, theory knowledge
Makes a fella feel like he's relying on deaf ears only...may have to go get me some of that there glitchin spice (™ @ChrisG)....
EDIT: As regards the Dishwasher Set, l like it, just needs some sub-Thom Yorke yodelling.
@JohnnyGoodyear
Theory is just theory, it can help or hinder. A good track is a good track, regardless of whether or not the artist knows how to describe it in some abstract classical sense. Beyond counting intervals on my fingers to work out keys and chords I don't get too hung up on it all.
A close friend of mine, who is way ahead of me as a performing musician (and was a genius at this stuff at school twenty five years ago) told me back then that music theory was best forgotten if you want to really enjoy music...but that you had to learn it first in order to be able to forget it!
Thanks @Zen. Really useful as always. Really appreciate your detailed posts.
That all makes sense. Something I didn't know was the way you explained how to work out if the different modes are major or minor. That's really useful.
Funny that your next track involves Sector and the Amen break. That's exactly what I've been playing with for my next track (which might take a while). Look forward hearing what you come up with.
@xen no worries. I believe in good schooling if you can get it. You can only break the rules if you know what they are/only color outside the lines if you can see them in the first place and so on and so on and into the sea.
Sorry I mean @xen. Of course
.
@matt,
No probs. look forward to hearing where you take the amen break.
I put my loop through Sector and brought it into Abu last night. Came in really clean with no clicks. Just trying to come up with a suitable bass sound now.
Yep. I suspect playing out a sequence and recording in Sector will add microfades. So theortically that should do all your micro fading for you and cure the problem in Abu.
Guess you could have tried that with your guitar bars?
That makes a lot of sense, I hadn't thought of that. I went back earlier and resampled a clean break from iMPC and took it straight from AudioShare. It was a bit clicky, but, I then reimported to Abu and the clicks were gone... So the taking it through Sector first works, and also it seems reimporting can help.
But yeah, I'll try guitar through sector as well tomorrow and post if that is better.
Interested in your results on this...
@JohnnyGoodyear
Did you end up getting Abu or Bilbao in the end?
After working with them over the last few weeks, I think they are worthwhile - still crying out for fx on the mixer channels though. I just came up with a nice bass line in Dublin (patching one mg to osc shape and then patching the second mg to the frequency of mg1 gives good results) and found myself missing easy access to a compressor
I just tried 4 bars of a soprano (sopranotron) direct into Abu compared with via sector into Abu. Sector definitely adds obvious microfades (which you can see on the sound wave in audio share.).
Via sector version sounds slightly better - although neither were too bad because I was playing perfect quater notes from StepPolyArp. You can hear the fades if you listen carefully though.
Be interesting to see if it cures anything really clicky. The nice thing with Sector is you can actually define the degree of micro fade. It's such a great app! Be useful for processing slices for Bilboa too I expect.
Yeah, I'm really warming to Sector, great tool. Now I've got my head around it I can see myself getting a lot of use from it.
I recorded my Gibson Les Paul "flood" edition into Audioshare, then sampled in Abu Dhabi (three samples in three Abu Dhabis) then used Bilbao for drums and Phoenix for bass. A little mixing in Auria, and added Nave for two mini-solos.
Found this a bit disjointed to start with, but just let it play and found myself bobbing along (technical term). Pinball soundtrack for a half-built underworld.
Ha thanks, JohnnyGoodyear. Disjointed is a good word, although you could have said "cubist"! I sometimes throw the notes onto the piano roll, then move 'em around until they lock in a bit. It is just a work in progress though.
I liked it. Disjointed is right.
Wish I had a guitar and wish I could play it
. It sounded great.
@xen - I've been trying similar Sector tricks in Effectrix. Do you know/have it? You'd like it...
@juanconcho well he wasn't a cubist but your comment reminded me of a Rothko quote I was reading this morning and while he was referring to murals what he brought to mind was my own (disjointed) outlook on music as a still young punk in the middle/late seventies:
"I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room," (he said of his commissioned works for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building).
OK. I've mellowed a little since, but then Rothko's dead already also. Murals are still there I believe...