Out Of The Office Open Thread...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
After that last epic conversation, I’m busy congratulating myself for having created a blog that, after years of tuning, can have such a high level of completely bullshit-free discourse. The previous post didn’t have a single comment deleted (I only have to delete maybe one a month now) nor a single ad spam, nor a single instance of anyone calling anyone else a Nazi, nor a single “LOL +1” jumping smily face. This is a rare thing on the internet, and I’m pleased to have had a role, however minor, in its genesis.
In any event, the missus and I are rolling to Los Angeles today. We’re hitting the MOCA tomorrow for the Art In The Streets exhibit, and going to the JPL Open House on Saturday. A little mini-vacation, if you will. I may or may not post, depending on available time and inspiration.
In the meantime, as a conversation starter, I propose this article that Eno wrote for Wired some 12 years ago. I assume, from the context and time frame, the console in question is a Neve Capricorn, one that I have a similar experience with. Anyhow, here’s the keys. Don’t break anything.
22 comments
Interesting, this week I've been musing on a similar observation by Rupert Neve from about 12 years ago. He was pointing to research about the lack of musical frequencies above 20kHz in CDs as causing negative emotions in a listener, see http://showcasejase.blogspot.com/2011/05/seeing-through-cds.html
I was nearly overwhelmed by the temptation to go to the last post and add a comment along the lines of "LOL, go to this link to buy the pill that nazis use to make their dicks bigger.". I persevered though.
that's a great little read CR. funnily enough, i recently bought Renoise (after spending some time with the demo) and having never used a tracker before i'm pretty fascinated by it and especially the fact that it's all controlled by key commands and has minimal mouse usage aside for some drag and drop things and FX parameters.
it's definitely not a typical sequencer, as anyone who's used a tracker knows, and i'm digging the tactile interface that requires you to press keys (buttons) to make things happen.
also, i used a neve capricorn briefly in 1996 and though the idea of 'building' your own console by telling each knob/channel strip what to be (aux send/eq/pan?) was kind of fascinating when it actually came time to do something with it i just wanted to smash it. and what is typical/funny is that after a couple years it seemed out dated, intrinsically less valuable like an old computer or last years ipod... simply by the nature of it being a giant digital device..
Hey, one other comment after reading boobs.
Mike Stavrou has written about how different studio tasks require left or right brain dominance, they mention it near the end of this review http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug04/articles/studioessentials.htm
That process Eno recalls fits right in with how Stav describes having to switch focus between hemispheres.
I'll be at the JPL open house on sat as well! My 3yr old space nut is gonna go bezerkers. And my wife wants a rocket scientist to sign her tits...
Pasadena dope food spots:
Saladang Song, Yuejean Kang, La Luna Negra and Pie 'N Burger
@bassling: nice link; also fits the 21st-century multitasking musician idea that CR brought up last topic.
Interesting to see how other musicians divide their time when producing tunes. And how (specialist) engineers manage their time. It does seem like people take to one or the other side more naturally.
For the plugin makers: is it all left-brain? Am I mixing brain-sides up? I can see where things like Eos or Room are pretty utilitarian and arise out of a need for a good reverb or whatever.
But like seancostello was asking yesterday, what about things like Replicant or other AD plugs that sort of have their own personality, or an "implicit message"?
Seems like the the nicely crafted tool or instrument, especially one that seems to play itself, can be a piece of art on its own.
That JPL open house is 2 miles from my house. I probably should go. I can practically walk it.
@Carlos-Serrano: I should point out that Eos (and probably most of the stuff I have worked on and Chris and Adam have worked on) has a very distinctive personality. Chris and Adam were very clear what types of sounds they wanted out of Eos. And they weren't neutral.
To tie this into the Eno link, one thing that distinguishes Eos from some other reverbs out there is that it doesn't provide you with choice overload. Most of the choices have been made for you. Seriously, if you exposed every parameter under the hood to the user, you would have several hundred sliders and knobs to work with. Which would be the greatest thing in the world for a few dozen people, and a huge pain the ass for the vast majority of users, and about 99% of the possible settings would suck.
In the past, restricting the number of parameters in a musical tool was simply economic necessity. The Marshall amp Eno cites consists of a fair number of highpass, lowpass and shelving filters, and several nonlinear gain stages. All of these sections could be brought to the front panel for tuning, assuming that you wanted to have 30 knobs on the front. But knobs and pots cost money. It is much cheaper to hardwire most of these settings by using fixed resistors, which cost a few cents as opposed to a few dollars for pots.
Today, there is no cost on GUI knobs and sliders, apart from development time. If you wanted to create a fully tweakable Marshall amp model, all of the coupling frequencies and gain stages could be fully adjustable. However, the majority of the settings would no longer sound like a Marshall. By using fixed values for these settings, the Marshall designers made the choices for the user. This imposes a particular personality on the amp. Which allows the user to spend less time fiddling with the knob settings, and more time figuring out what notes to play on the guitar. Restricting choices = a tool with character, and a tool that encourages creativity.
Well said Sean. This is exactly why I find I'm more productive on hardware, and also why I have no interest in that new DMG compressor. The funny thing is, I'm a tweaker at heart. I love digging into the minutiae of how things work. But it's like a never ending addiction, and highly unproductive. A DAW is my worst enemy. I have to impose all kind of artificial restrictions just to keep from getting distracted. It's so much easier to work within real boundaries. It then becomes a conversation between a bunch of devices with real personalities, and the results are so much more creative and inspiring for me.
What Sean said about Eos is basically my argument I make in defense of Apple's design choices. They try to make shit easy for the way 95% of people want to work and know that the 5% will figure it out for themselves. If you need a 3 button trackball and real f-keys on your keyboard you probably know where to get them. Many, if not most, electronics companies put all the stuff the 5% wants in there because the guys that design it are part of the 5%.
Most of the greatest recording engineers in the world like big boxes full of tubes with 2 big knobs on them that have one great sound. That's why those things go for a fortune.
@boobs> I'm also fascinated by Renoise, just because it makes me think about things differently, but I can't totally get a handle on it. Mostly because I like to tweak rhythm a lot manually and fractions of bars doesn't compute in my head. I think in milliseconds.
That article was interesting, maybe I should quit ignoring that Eno guy.
bb
For people interested about Eno, I can suggest you to see several websites :
http://www.erictamm.com/books.html (a free book of Eric Tamm about Brian Eno)
http://www.enoweb.co.uk/
http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/
"Restricting choices = a tool with character, and a tool that encourages creativity" : I agree totally with that. Nowadays, it's crazy how the standard computer tools for music creation encourage the laziness, the "black-out" of the mind, by giving too much freedom...
But for me the problem is not only freedom versus limits. I think there are several other problems :
- The sources of distraction in general. And the computer is the worst of all ! Instead of working on your music, you can do so much other things with a computer, answering to your mails, going to the internet, playing with a game...
- The interaction between the piece of music and the human is different with computers and hardware devices only. Everybody knows how much it is more fun to move real knobs instead of digital ones.
- And finally, I think DAWs, are really great for the "production", I mean recording creations, mixing, mastering etc., but not that good at all for composing.
@seancostello I wanted to reply to your post on the previous thread to say basically what you've said here: it compels my curiosity about an instrument (or a box, or a plug) when it projects a sensibility - you could call it 'a philosophy', if you really wanted to. Like a Stratotone H44 says 'I don't think you actually need a bridge pickup, pal,', an AD plug says 'If you absolutely insist on it I can fuck stuff up good, but you get limited amounts of say over how I do it.'
Eno talks approvingly in his diary book about the quality of the Eventide H3000 in having a multi-layered UI that will expose more tweakery to you if you insist on going looking for it, but otherwise gives you a superficial view of the controls so you can get things done. (caveat: I'm pretty sure I'm remembering this right - I've never personally used an H3000.)
Being confident in your knowledge of what a tool can do is vital. Recently I've gone back to computer science studies, and - because I need that confidence - I'm making myself refresh math from the ground up. As an early result, I can do long division on paper for the first time in my life. I'm 29.
Or: I'm attached to a v3 Reaktor Library ensemble called Weedwacker. It's almost completely unusable for anything except the one thing that it does well: which is to be a cranky, queasy piece of crap that barfs fuzzy harmonics at the least provocation. It also has this highly discretionary attitude to keyboard tracking. So, good luck playing 'Lucky Man' on it -- but when I want to introduce a particular sort of instability to a piece, I know EXACTLY what I can use to do so.
Whereas the more _overtly_ complex an instrument gets - I'm thinking of those massively architectured performance ensembles, or even just one of the "every possibile waveform at once! every kind of filter! 15 kinds of oscillator sync!" VA ensembles - the harder it becomes to fit into a comfortable conception of what the thing is actually good for. Anybody with enough time and money on their hands can make something that does everything. I think the craft largely applies to what gets taken away - the number of controls, their naming, their range. Exhibit A: Tattoo.
Most of my favorite plugs have fewer parameters (eos and dubstation, to name a few) and I feel like I can understand them completely and therefore dial in better sounds quicker and easier. Having said that, I've become pretty attached to FabFilter software lately, especially the creative ones (Twin, Volcano, Timeless) because they can be as simple or as complex as you want depending on your needs. I don't always need 40 knobs for a delay, but every once in a while, that might be a good time.
Speaking of distractions getting in the way of composing I really should just disable my web browsers on my production computer. What a time suck.
For me, it's about speed. I have an idea or sound in my head that I need to get out and recorded/sequenced as soon as possible before it is gone. Too many knobs and gunk and I will lose the momentum I've got going. I'm eventually going to buy the DMG comp. It looks like the last software compressor I'll ever really need. But it also looks like it would take me longer to get the sound I want out of it than I'd be happy with most of the time.
When it comes to compression in the box, I almost always use the free version of RoughRider, even though it has that high end roll off. It has only five knobs, and I generally only twist two or three of them. I dial in a bit of compression to get a track to lay nice in the mix and then I'm onto the next task.
As far as reverb, I haven't tweaked Eos or ADverb in I can't remember how long. I have a preset that is the sound that I want them to make. If I'm working on a piece of music, I might think "this synth really needs the Eos verb slapped on it". The closest I get to "tweaking" is deciding "insert" or "send". I have a few presets for ValhallaShimmer, but not many. ValhallaRoom is the only one that I still actively tweak, but It also has a lot of options in the way that it sounds. Not as limited in options as the others.
Limited parameters in a plugin is a very good thing 98.5% of the time. From a design standpoint, digitalfishphones fish filets and Sonalksis TBK stuff is perfection. One are two knobs on the front. Load them up and go. If you really need to mess around with parameters, open up the "panel" and mess around with the guts.
-William
And where are the tunes on all of this mayhem?
Off topic, but hopefully of interest to most folks here:
Any one tried / own the Dynamic Spectrum Mapper pluggin ( http://www.proaudiodsp.com/products/dsm/ )
sorta like a multi-band compressor on a massive FFT - watch the video to see it in action - pretty impressive.
I am not so much interested in cloning a particular vintage tone, as I am in it as a way to do some creative sound shaping ....
I would have purchased it already, but i am annoyed at that iLok requirement ...
thoughts ? other plugs that do the same thing ?
- djp
@dpirone -check soundhack spectral shapers. no ilok + waaayyyyyy more reasonable price and excellent sound quality. and there's some freebies there as well and he has more on the way.
http://www.soundhack.com/
and for free check michael norris' spectral plug in suite.
http://www.michaelnorris.info/soundmagicspectral/
also, these wouldn't be a direct replacement for the plug in you linked to but awesome DSP and sound shaping
@boobs> those are good recommendations, but I don't think they are anything like DSM. Those plugins make weird sounds, DSM is hard to make sound bad. I've only played with the demo (the ilok thing also put me off even though I own and use one sparingly) and I wasn't sure what I thought of it. It works really well but I'm not sure how much I'd use it.
bb
@bongo_x - the soundhack spectral shapers are interesting and unique. the interfaces are different and it takes a bit to figure out whats going on there and get used to them but the spectral gate/compander/filter can do some really amazing things.. a lot more than "weird sounds" but you have to go through some tutorials so you know what's happening.. there's some really shaping there... but yeah.. it's easy to make sound bad and screw things up. there is a different design ethos at work but the end results can be fantastic for eqing/filtering/compressing/expanding etc.
the michael norris bundle is most definitely for serious audio mangling
@boobs, thanks for the the soundhack tip... looking forward to trying these. I've been using the Michael Norris stuff for a while with some great results. Following dpirone, has anyone here embraced the Vectorial Volterra Kernels Technology in the Nebula Pro 3 environment in seeking the perfect 'bread and butter' sound shaping?
Am I out of line suggesting that perhaps next time Eno hire an engineer that knows how to operate a Neve Capricorn before agreeing to pay $2000 a day?
I realize that this is kind of beside the point, but it would have solved a serious problem.
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