Why would I want my music to sound like I made it 30 years ago?

Da un’intervista a DJ Stingray

“We’re in the 21st century, why would I want my music to sound like I made it 30 years ago, what sense does that make? I like using effects. Say I’ve got 32 inputs in my digital workstation, if I have enough RAM then I can put up to eight effects on every single channel. Each of these effects I can automate, I can manipulate their parameters down to micro units. It’s only limited by your imagination, the power there is phenomenal.”

“Don’t recreate Kraftwerk,” he continues. “That’s what the future sounded like 30 years ago. You wanna recreate that energy, recreate that same awe and fascination as when they first heard that music. You should be pushing for new sounds with each and every release.”

Rough and direct live sets are more enjoyable

There is an interesting difference between the computer music presenter and a live act. While the centered tape operator has perfect conditions for creating the best possible sound, for presenting a finished work in the most brilliant way (which might occasionally even include virtuoso mixing desk science rather than static adjustment to match room acoustics), the live act has to fight with situations which are far from perfect and at the same time is expected to be more lively. Given these conditions, it is no wonder that generally rough and direct live sets are more enjoyable, while the attempt to reproduce complex studio works on a stage seem more likely to fail.

A rough sounding performance simply seems to match so much more the visual information we get when watching a guy behind a laptop. Even if we have no clue about their work, there is a vague idea of how much complexity a single person can handle. The more the actions result in an effect like a screaming lead guitar, the more we feel that it is live. If we experience more detail and perfection we most likely will suspect we are listening to pre-prepared music. And most of the time we are right with this assumption.

From “Live Performance in the Age of Supercomputing” by Robert Henke

How not to do music

I spent endless hours on things like this. I learned in detail how not to do music. It was the same trap most people still fall into: focussing on irrelevant detail. Cutting one thousand snare samples, then thinking about how to name these, creating semantics that allow you to find something again quickly….a year passes just on building a sample collection and not one song gets done.

Mike Daliot, from “Presets. Digital Shortcuts to Sound” by Stefan Goldmann

Because I didn’t have a mixer

And I used to twist the cables together—I cut the ends off the cables and twisted them together to mix the sound of the keyboard with the sound of the drum machine, because I didn’t have a mixer. So I twisted them together and then just stuck them in the input of my mom and dad’s cassette recorder, their stereo. And I would record these tracks, and they’re only on one channel, they’re on the left, and yeah, we did put one of them out on Rephlex.

DMX Krew

Vado a fare una jam session, ecco cosa mi porto

Sto per uscire di casa con tutta la strumentazione – stasera faccio una jam session / workshop autogestito di macchinari elettronici musicali con alcuni amici.

Ho pensato di condividere foto ed elenco delle cose che mi sto portando dietro, anche come promemoria personale per il futuro.

Il controller e lo spettatore

Mi piace il pezzo.

Ah, e c’è qualcosa di interessante per lo spettatore. con i controller full-screen. Per chi osserva, la consequenzialità fra le azioni di chi suona e l’evoluzione del brano è come più esplicita, più facile da percepire.

Linee di basso, amplificatori e frequenze

You have to bear in mind that C2 lies at 65 Hz – lower than many smaller speakers reach – and that E2 is at a higher 82 Hz, which means a bass playing E2 will sound good on all kinds of speakers – in clubs, in bars – even home stereos. F2 (87Hz) will sound even better

da un’intervista a Olivier Giacomotto