More Tempest Stuff...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
Richard Devine put up a video the other day that got me all bummed out because (through complete coincidence) I was working on one showing exactly the same thing, the fun to be had with the quantized pattern switching and ribbon controllers. Richard is necessarily better at this sort of thing than I am, and once I saw his video, which went up right as mine was rendering, I was all “DAMN YOU RICHARD DEVINE! DAMN YOU TO HELL!”
Then I planned to do a different video.
Then I thought “fuck it” and whacked the Upload button. So here you go. Essentially the same sort of thing Richard was demoing, the quantized pattern switching in Tempest which allows you to switch patterns in the middle of a measure and maintain the measure position, along with some ribbon controller fun. The left ribbon is assigned to decay of all voices, and the right ribbon is assigned to relative pitch of all voices. I’m also using a MeeBlip (the sorta-bass-sound-thing) and a DSI TETR4 (the melody thing). The result is what I feel is a reasonable example of the Crunkstepno genre. Enjoy.
(PS: I did get one ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!!! on this bitch, though. I’ll lay money this is the first time a Tempest hit analog tape. What do I win?)
27 comments
I'd play this if you released it as a high resolution audio file. In the world of dubcrunkbassfunkystep -- i.e. the world of what blackdown calls the breakbeat continuum -- I'd say this is a weird offshoot of neo-two step. The only thing I'd change is it needs to be closer to 130bpm to fit in with that sort of stuff, though there's a lot of activity in the sub-125BPM world now. The new sweet spot seems to be around 118BPM. WE ALL BE DANCING JUST A BIT SLOWER NOW INNIT?
With respect to the Tempest, is it possible to have different parts have different swing? I use the hell out of that trick in Live.
I'm not entirely sure how swing is recorded; perhaps Pym (Chris Hector) can address that. The hierarchy is Sound -> Beat -> Project, where a Beat is a collection of Sounds, and a Project is a collection of Beats. It seems that when you record with swing, the actual note positions are recorded. However, if you crank the Swing knob while in the 16 Beats view, it'll override anything in the Beat itself.
So to answer your question, I have no idea.
-CR
Nice.
Can you tell us a bit about the MIDI implementation for externals. How integrated into the workflow is it, and how are CC's assigned?
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Funky!
@lazenbleep: There ain't none at this point. I have Live running as a MIDI slave from the Tempest (you can just see the corner of my laptop in the left side of the frame). Live is sequencing the MeeBlip and TETR4.
I had originally tried to do this with the Genome MIDI sequencer running on the iPad (for extra credit, of course), but the Genome can't slave to MIDI clock very well, or at least the version I have can't. As a result, the tempo was drifting so wildly that the synced stuff in the TETR4 and TimeFactor was really going ape-shit.
In any event, I can't speak to whether the Tempest will be able to act as a MIDI sequencer.
-CR
The break at the end launches that track in the realm of fuckawesome.
I'm with takokichi.
@chaircrusher Yes. There are global parameters for beat or project level bpm, swing, distortion and compression. If the swing is on source beat, then each beat will load it's own swing when you switch to it. If it's on project then it just stays the same as you switch between beats. There's also a source of 'pot position' for compression and distortion if you just want the knobs to control those params directly at all times
I don't think this video is even comparable to the one Richard Devine posted, and I mean that in a good way. Richard's video showed all the weird glitchy possibilities of it but your video showed the musically useful side of the Tempest, which is what I have been waiting to see. Nice work!
i read somewhere that you can only have 16 different patterns per song/project. is that the case?
can you switch pattern 'banks' while playing to pull in other patterns?
curious how the patterns/pattern banks work when it comes to jamming... the machinedrum is super easy in that regard.
Dont cry Richard Devine.
CR does do it better than you even though he thinks he doesnt.
His cat can step on a bunch of buttons but cant build a quality electro perc line like that.
Release that shit CR, so just you can claim "FIRST".
"I'll lay money this is the first time a Tempest hit analog tape. What do I win?"
The Internet, my friend. YOU WIN TEH INTERNET!!!!!
..all jokin aside..
Can you have squeezed that bassline out of the tetra while it played the melody alongside inside itself eliminating meeblip all together ?
and Great tune dude...
That break that comes in hard at the end..reminds me of the outro to Rakims Microphone Fiend.
Either the Tempest or TETR4 could easily have done that bassline, but I like to have different boxes doing different sounds. I don't really care to fuck with multiple sounds coming out of the same shit. Messes with my flow.
-CR
Oh, and: I ran the tracks out for that song individually, time-corrected all of them (not as easy as it sounds), and did a proper mix. It'll go on L/P/E 2.
-CR
great stuff chris. further validation that pre-ordering just based of the rep of Linn and Smith was the right way to go.
I still really want one of these even though there's no way in anyone's imagination I could justify a $2k drum machine.
It's my deep attraction to well designed, well built products.
bb
I'm with bongo_x. I'm gonna go drink some more Devil's Cut and start pumping samples into my SP-505 and pretend.
re: video content: I'm with ZombieStomper
I'm reminded daily just how different today is from the 80s each time I describe life in the 80s to my eight-year-old son.
I'm amazed we continue to use old-fashioned terms like electronic music. Did people in the 50s still refer to movies as the talkies?
why wouldn't you call it electronic music? isn't the overarching genre? no different then rock or folk?
Yeah the word you want to get rid of is "electronica".
All music is electronic music, is what Steve is saying, I think.
-CR
Yes, what Chris said. It's so pervasive that the term no longer says much about the music.
Besides the ethics of adding AutoTune surreptitiously, there's the issue that the overuse of AutoTune has led to people becoming VERY sensitive to the artifacts of it. Just because the musicians couldn't hear that it was in use, doesn't mean that it wouldn't be audible to some listeners.
And I suspect that the audience for a roots/folk/bluegrass group are the type of people who would object to the use of AutoTune, as it presents an "inauthentic" picture of a performance. So the presence of AutoTune artifacts in a bluegrass performance could cause the audience to turn against the band, for a decision that they didn't make and was unexpectedly foisted upon the band by an engineer who thought he was being clever.
bongo_x & beauty pill & seancostello -
Agree with you all totally on the ethics and genre-appropriateness of surreptitious auto-tuning ... The comment was really intended to give an example how "electronic music" processes are crossing over into even acoustic genres where people value "purism" and "authenticity".
My brother gave them mixes that were both non-autotuned and autotuned and let the client choose (the ethical lapse was not telling them the difference). The part that was interesting to me was that the musicians themselves made the choice of the autotuned tracks based on what they -heard-, but if they had known that the tracks were being autotuned, they would have chosen the non-autotuned tracks based on "authenticity".
As I said in a previous comment, all recorded music is artifice. The concept of "authentic performance" starts flying out the window as soon as you set up a microphone. In this context, the only authentic performance would have been real-time and acoustic. But even in the given roots/folk music context, the musicians had chosen to overdub many of their parts rather than perform as an ensemble, etc. So autotune was just one part of a process that was quite different than a live acoustic performance which arguably would be the only "authentic" performance of music in that genre.
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