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who is this then? - the music that is
Latest tracks by d&d

Sitar Sessions 2 by Oxynucid

Sitar Sessions 1 by Oxynucid

interested at all in hearing the results?

heres a track i did with the beautiful and talented iAM9, who is currently working on a full length with the equally beautiful and talented Mrs Jynx.



visit back later on tomorrow for (hopefully) some live videos and pics of FREELECTRONICA

peas

i am playing at this tomorrow with some other droogies in London

in the process of deciding whether or not to take the MS10 with me

i do want a curry though

well for the next month i have to do my best not to play too much minecraft and spend some time writing to you.

Surprise! I've decided to merge the Rotation(s) blog with the normal site, so from now on all you'll find all of that content here on www.gravityhalo.com.  The old posts are being imported, so those should be up soon.

This month we've got Dominick Schofield a.k.a. Oxynucid taking the helm for all of August, so get ready for some knowledge!


Schofield has been on a steady roll for the last few years, producing albums and EPs under the Oxynucid alias as well as teaming up with Vertical67 to record as Moth Conk Midi. He played keys in the indie-electro band Turncoat for 10 years before leaving to pursue his own brand of playful, melody-driven, acid-fused techno IDM for the likes of The Centrifuge, Complex Sound Sagacity and Caoutchou Records.

"Vault 13" is his next release, coming soon on C.S.S., and you can listen to a preview mix of the record below in preparation for his residency here on the blog.  Check it out and enjoy!

Following on from my last post.... if you can think that far back. I'd thought to dig out and post a song from the Split EP I did for Zaftig Research about 8 years ago. It was probably my first attempt at taking a more technique based approach to writing a song. It was when I'd first got my Juno 6 and I was taken by the idea of writing a song using only that and a patch for my Nord Micromodular that was an emulation of the Juno 6. In my own way I was laughing up my cuff about the fact that the elements of the track which sounded more typically "analogue" were generally coming from the Nord and the more abstract and digital components were cut and processed out of recordings from the Juno.

Ah, what a merry japester I was.

Anyway, this all ended in tears when I discovered that my copy of the Split EP is gubbed. Zaftig was a CDr label and it seems that the quality of the CDr's used weren't all that great as when I now play it (or listen to tracks that have been ripped to WAV from it) there is a layer of digital distortion and bit rate weirdness. I think that I'll have back-ups of the old song files somewhere on an old CDr but I'm now wondering whether they'll even read given that they'll be of a similar vintage and are data.

I'm sure there is a lesson to be learned here about backup regimes and such like but I can't put my finger on it. In the meantime, I guess that I can have a trawl through the CDr as it is for some Oval style sample harvesting.

I've recently been starting to pull together some songs with a vague notion about what my next release might be. As I've been going through songs, parts of songs and simple sketches that might be worth expanding on I've noticed that the songs can fall into a few different categories. Which in turn makes me wonder what drives other people to write music... maybe most musicians are more focused and as such more productive?? I'm not sure.

I'd say there are probably three categories: emotive, technique based and little vignettes. By emotive, I mean that the song starts out as an attempt to capture an emotional response perhaps in the way that vocal based song-writers do every day. But it seems moot, because when it's predominately instrumental who's to say I'm not just writing a track about withered prunes. The technique based songs (perhaps these are tracks?!?) are extrapolations of ideas in sound that interest me. Just really looking to come up with something interesting on an aesthetic level. The techniques? Anything from when I'm continuing to explore my home-knitted ideas of music theory to an exploration of specific synthesis methods. Lastly, the vignettes I mention are where there is an event that leave a strong visual impression that I want to describe in sound. I'm trying my best to dodge past the usual cliché's of electronic music being a soundtrack for a film that doesn't exist but perhaps there is a small kernel of truth in there. A good example of this would be the song Thick Accents And Red Leaves from my EP that just came out on Gravity Halo which was about a banal situation involving a Ukranian fellow in autumn.

I suppose one things that marries all of the above together is that I can't write anything when I've an instrument in my hand or I'm in the "studio". I can come up with ideas and "jam" to an extent, but I always find that I write my music away from it as I'm ambling about my daily business when ideas are just percolating away. Harmonic percolating maybe?

But enough for just now. I'll try to get back onto less indulgent footing for next time.

It dawned on me that getting into a millimetre by millimetre account of what synthesisers I use and why might not pan out to be the most exciting of reading. So I'll just talk about my latest acquisition for the now which is a hardware rack-mounted sampler. On the surface it might seem like an anachronism given the advances with software samplers. Perhaps doubley so as I have and use NI's Kontakt 4 on a pretty regular basis. Although I've seen signs of a rising fashion for "vintage digital" such as the clamour for classic Akai MPCs, that's not been my own reason for splashing the cash. I've a degree of skepticism about the "sound" that is attributed to this sort of gear which I often think is just hipster justification. I do agree that there is an audible difference but that is only part of the equation; the remainder being the interface, workflow and how you just use the thing. Which I think you can get from any sampler, not just the one's that the latest flash in the pan hip-hop producer suggests is their own personal magic bullet.

The sampler in question is a Yamaha A5000 which you could say is one of the last hurrahs of the hardware sampler along with the Akai Z series. It's amazing to think that in the 10 years since it was released it's gone from costing £1500 down to the level where I scored one that has nestled unused in someones rack for less than £200. Naturally, I've only just scratched the surface of it in the few weeks I've had it but I'm already seeing loads of potential. Once I get myself sorted with an internal hard disk for it I think the first port of call will be to use it in conjunction with a hardware sequencer for further experiments where I'm not using the computer at all.

If I get time before my rotation is up, I'll try to pull together some audio examples of some of the more unique features such as the expand/detune functions or the loop remix/divide functions. Loop remix/divide strikes me as an interesting alternative to combining Beat Repeat and Slice-to-Midi within Ableton Live which, given the scarcity of the A5000 in comparison to Live, will hopefully not sound so "familiar".

As a final note, I'd recommend the page at Sealed's Deep Synthesis site on the A4000 as a great source of information. Reading that was one of the main things which turned me onto the idea of tracking one down.

Thanks to Chris for the intro, hopefully my ramblings will have some form of structure and sense to them. I was thinking about kicking things off with a bit about how I came to be writing music and what I've been doing over the years but as you'll have guessed from the intro I've been at this a while. Not just doing stuff by myself as Jeye but also in a variety of bands over the course... but I don't really want to kick the arse out of things and go over the score right from the get-go.

What might be a better start would be to talk about my setup for writing music. I'll talk generally first and say that I have no real preference over a hardware or software setup. When I first started writing music it was purely with software but started buying hardware because I felt limited at that time by what could be achieved with software only. Actually, when I first started writing music I didn't have a soundcard in my computer and I used to take files around to a friends house on floppy disk to listen to beats/song ideas on his Amiga. Beyond ambivalence to hardware and software as an approach I'm also fairly relaxed about what specifically is used. I usually find I get frustrated with gear snobs of any description. I think Chris expressed it well in his previous post here about ghetto production.

I'll maybe break out the camera now and go take some photos and then I can talk specifics. Until next time....

Scottish producer Jeye has an EP titled "Hatch End Dot" coming out on Gravity Halo next week and he's kindly agreed to grace the Rotation(s) blog with some knowledge over the course of June.


Jeye, better known as John Muir, has been creating melodically focused soundscapes for 10+ years, performing gigs around his native Scotland as well as releasing a few EPs on the independent circuit.  His style blends atmospheric ambiance, live instrumentation, field recordings, haunting melodies, chilly, evolving beat work and progressive song structures.  The following track "So It Goes" is taken from his upcoming release on Gravity Halo.

So It Goes by jeye_musik

After a mostly dark month in May (thanks to Fluorescent Grey for filling the void a bit), we're psyched to have the Rotation(s) back in effect, so give Jeye some love and stay tuned!

Anarchy FX


This is the newest software I'll be talking about in this series. Coming out around 2000 Leighton Hargreaves designed this plugin pack for Windows that had many unique ideas packed inside of it. To say this is an understatement, together they make up probably the most unique plugin pack ever created.


The Corkscrew filter was a multiband pitchshifter that utilizes the Shepard tone (or Risset tone) technique to create an infinitely rising/falling audio illusion effect. The harmonic adder put glowing, crystalline upper order harmonics to the sound, but not in an apex aural exciter sort of way. It would add rich synthesizer textures to whatever sound you were running through it, spectrally built off of that source material. The spectral Convolve was an interesting spin on the bit crushing effect: tnstead of using bit depths and sampling rates, it would spectrally detect the 'noise' and the 'tones' in the sound and let you fade between both extremes. Where both extremes sounded like totally different flavors of very degraded low quality mp3s. I never could get 'length separator' to do anything too compelling, but the concept description here sounds pretty fascinating if one could get it set right:
"Bisects the input signal according to the lengths of its component frequencies. Short sounds become the 'transient' part, long sounds become the 'stable' part. These parts can be isolated (ie the other part removed), or assigned different pan positions to create stereo movement."




Bonus: from my email correspondence with Leighton Hargreaves:

Reflecting on sound: “As I've become older and wiser, I've had to re-evaluate the idea that "there must be sounds that could exist, which no one has ever heard, waiting for someone to invent a way to make them" - now I think this is a tad naive. Reductively speaking, the vast majority of possible sounds will never be heard by anyone. If you pick 12 notes at random from an 88-key piano, the number of possible combinations is greater than the number of stars in the universe (and amazingly, after a vst plugin has output five frames of audio - just over a tenth of a millisecond - there have been the potential for more unique output possibilities than the number of stars in the universe).....



......But most of these combinations wouldn't be musically meaningful, which is why it's hard to write an original melody. So the objective must be to invent a good sound, not just a new sound! This takes us deep into the subjective realm of human cognition - it's a mistake to even think of 'sound' we perceive (as opposed to the measurable physical vibrations) as a distinct input channel, or as separate from our other senses or our internal mental state, as beautifully shown with in McGurk effect. “



regarding his plugin work: “a few months ago my AnarchySoundSoftware web server crashed, I lost my online shop setup, and all my old plugins disappeared off the web. Until yesterday that is. Inspired by your email, and a few other recent emails from AnarchySoundSoftware users, I've quickly thrown up a new site, over which I'm publishing everything.” All of his plugins are now free of charge on his website including many new curious goodies like 'Geosynth'


I hope that this was an interesting look back at a plugin that has been all but lost to the shifting sands of new technology, and I hope that you check out Mr. Hargreaves’ site.

Next time: Hyperprism Stand-alone

Cooledit Pro 2.0 (now Adobe Audition 3.0)
In the mid-1990s, two former Microsoft employees started a company called Syntrillium Software that became known for two products -- a psychedelic screen saver called Snoqualmie, and Cooledit.
Ignored during its heyday, Cooledit’s spotlight was stolen by other programs at the time like Soundforge, Protools, even Peak.

In August 2003, software company Adobe purchased Cooledit Pro for 16.5 million dollars. They changed the name to 'Adobe Audition' but kept things mostly identical until May 2004.
Whereas the early versions were a skinned Cooledit with newer features, the newer versions (i.e., Windows/Mac iteration 4) are stunted by the drastic new limitations. Additionally, Audition replaces a lot of the original algorithms with Izotope's. The original Cooledit Pro was miraculous. The power of the effects suite alone rivals most contemporary plugins. Cooledit Pro lets you type in numerical values going to the 5th decimal place, and in some circumstances (Phaser rate comes to mind), you can get away with typing in negative values for really interesting results. Unlike most plugins of today, you can actually nearly freeze cool edit for typing in a rate or voice amount too fast (try this in the Chorus feature).
I had a very depressing hard drive headcrash experience back in 1997 and lost a lot of my best Cooledit work. I swear, I have been trying ever since to recreate some of the magic in those original sessions. Some of it managed to escape the erasure here, which i later used in the track 'Telelogical Attractor' on Gaseous Opal Orbs

secret hint: Try playing with the Time Stretch algorithm's stretch ‘rate’ typing in values like 222 or 999 for very strange results. The pitch shift mode also reacts strangely with the same values

One of these days, I'd like to try what Markus Popp
set out to do in 'O' and start by isolating myself back down to using only Cooledit. I know that it is not just my work (or the memory of my teenage experimenting) that proves how far one can get in Cooledit. Judging by an ambient album my friend Powmod made using 80% Cooledit Pro. I don't think he used preexisting samples, but rather the source tones and white noise that you can generate inside the program. Listen to the opening track generated entirely on Cooledit here , you can check out the full album here

You have to be careful when experimenting around in Cooledit, but it can give you the
freedom to try extremely surgical but maximal effects. Even if you aren't a programmer, you can still feel how much knowledge of DSP and love was put into these effects by the quality of the output.
I have friends who swear by Adobe Audition 3.0, and I do believe that there is little reason not to (save for the annoying interface redesign). While Adobe Audition 3.0 is still a PC-only program that maintains the same algorithms that Cooledit 2.0 had (plus some new effects, of course), by the time you get to the version 4 (the first available for Mac), you have a crippled interface that frankly annoys the hell out of me. But for all the grief that Adobe’s cannibalizing of Cooledit has given me, I will admit that there are benefits to using it. One of the nicest features of Audition 3.0 is the ability to use Photoshop-like selection tools on the spectral view, and once you select only a portion of the spectrum you can use most of the effects just on that spectral selection. It's great for doing manual dub delay inserts or anywhere from extremely subtle (if you keep it on only a high-pitched spectral range) to very drastic psychedelic effects.
We tried to get in contact with the infamous Peter Quistgard while writing this article, unfortunately our search grew cold. You will find his name as the 'registered user' on practically every cracked copy of Cooledit out there.



ps: Powmod also had some fun with the default 'Cooledit Pro 2.0' anthem that would load by default in the multitrack session. The Cooledit Rap can be found here

Availability: Cooledit 2.0 still floating around, Adobe Audition sold here
Practicality: Very light weight and fully functional wave editor, crash recovery
and loads faster/reacts faster than Adobe Audition’s reskinned version.

Next installment: Anarchy FX & Rhythms by Leighton Hargreaves