From Gong’s Guitarist to Blu-Ray Music Extraction Processes to the NewestOld ios Application for IDevices…

Posted by pureambient on November 19, 2016

I am becoming acquainted with the first five albums by Steve Hillage, beginning with his band “Uriel” and their album “Arzachel” in 1969 and moving up to 1976’s BBC Radio 1 In Concert – which is playing now in my headphones – the announcer letting us know that only 8 percent of BBC listeners are currently listening in stereo – and they’d like to get that number up as soon as possible!

On almost a whim, I decided that if I was ever going to get caught up on what I had missed in the solo canon of Steve Hillage, outside of his work in Gong, with which I am very familiar, would be to shell out for the remarkable new 22 disc box set, “Searching For The Spark”. It arrived a few weeks ago, I then spent a few days ripping discs, and I’ve since spent a very, very enjoyable morning indeed, listening to all five of the discs currently on my IPod – and – Hillage is a remarkable person – and, along with his life partner Miquette, he fronts a band with ever-growing confidence – especially when we get to “that” guitar solo.

I was quite amazed at the jump in guitar playing quality between the first two albums that feature Hillage, the above mentioned Arzachel from 1969, and then, 1972 brought us “Khan” with their album “Sea Shanty” – and in the three years that had passed, Hillage’s guitar prowess had increased by a significant amount – but nothing like what was about to come – in the form of his first two solo records, the first that bore the name “Steve Hillage” – “Fish Rising”, followed by what is probably his best-known work (and, produced with Todd Rundgren, using Todd’s new Utopia – Roger Powell, Kasim Sulton, and Willie Wilcox – as Hillage’s backing band on the record) “L” – these two releases are where you can really hear the confidence and power of his playing – and I would heartily recommend them to anyone!

I did own a cassette with “L” on it, years ago, so I was familiar with that one album, but never had a chance – until today – to hear Fish Rising, the two early albums, and the first of many, many live CDs that are in the box – this wonderful BBC Radio 1 In Concert 1976 that is playing – in glorious stereo, I might add (after a lovely across the kit drum roll – which just went across my brain in lovely carefully-drum-miked stereo).

I think I will leave the task of a full review to someone who knows more about this, for me, this was just a “way in”, a way to hear the development of this incredibly talented guitarist – who I was really, really fortunate to see both the Steve Hillage Band and Gong, during a very brief UK tour in 2008 – and he was remarkable in both bands – the perfect musical foil for the late Daevid Allen – and it was a unique opportunity, to first hear Steve and Miquette play solo Hillage material (which was unfortunately at the time, besides the obvious cover of “Hurdy Gurdy Man”, unknown to me) as well as, play as an integral part of Gong – this was a remarkable performance featuring most of the main figures in Gong history, including his long time partner Miquette Giraudy, Hillage and Mike Howlett as well.

So that is my most recent listening, previous to that, however, I’ve been revisiting my catalogue of XTC releases, trying to get caught up with capturing all of the additional music hidden away on the Blu-Ray discs included in each of these amazing “Steven Wilson” re-masters – and I guess I can say that I definitely am collecting Steven Wilson re-masters – starting with the King Crimson re-masters – the ultimate – King Crimson in 5.1 sounds absolutely astonishing – it’s so worth it just for that alone – but, there is always a lot of additional music buried on the DVD or Blu-Ray portion, and I’ve developed a unique way to capture this additional material

In assessing my XTC discs, I now have four Steven Wilson XTC re-masters: Drums & Wires, Skylarking, Oranges & Lemons, and Nonsuch. I realised that I had only partially done the work on capturing the extra tracks from three of them, so I set out to “right” this wrong.

I also have the same issue with my Gentle Giant, and Yes “Steven Wilson” re-masters – again, I have ripped the ordinary CDs, which contain some of the additional material – but, the additional music on the Blu-Ray has remained accessible only on the 5.1 system – which I can’t take out with me on my iPods.

So – I have developed a process, which includes templates of blank folders, and a template in SONAR Platinum for capturing the music from the discs. I was wondering if anyone else uses a similar process to this:

ACQUIRE BLU-RAY AUDIO CONTENT WITH HIGHEST QUALITY POSSIBLE:

Set up your blank folders using the template, which prepares you to “receive” WAV files of the tracks you are capturing, and then later, converting them into MP3 files for your portable device.

Those folders look something like this (after conversion from the dummy template folders):

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc01-SWMix-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc01-SWMix-WAV (Note: These are from the CD, which is just ripped normally – not related to this Blu-Ray process)

Sometimes there might be two, or even three, CDs (which of course, are all ripped normally) in which case, those would eat up the Disc01, 02 and 03 slots, and your Blu-Ray material would then start with “Disc04” rather than “Disc02” – you just have to adjust as necessary depending on the contents of the set. Then, follows your DVD or Blu-Ray ONLY Content:

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-OriginalMasterMix-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-OriginalMasterMix-WAV

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc03-AlbumInDemo&WorkTapeForm-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc03-AlbumInDemo&WorkTapeForm-WAV

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc04-ExtraDemos&WorkTapes-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc04-ExtraDemos&WorkTapes-WAV

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc05-RehearsalsAtLeedsStudiosLA-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc05-RehearsalsAtLeedsStudiosLA-WAV

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc06-Videos-Mono-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc06-Videos-Mono-WAV

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc07-StereoInstrumental-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc07-StereoInstrumental-WAV

These folders are only one arrangement, of course, the folder set I come up with, ultimately, just reflects what music is available to me to extract from the Blu-Ray in question. The set of folders above, is probably suitable, with possible minor alterations, for any XTC album. Of course, something like “Drums & Wires” has many, many more folders that this example, because there are several different Rehearsal sections on that disc – hence, many more folders (12 in total I believe, or 24 if you count the WAV versions).

For King Crimson or Yes, it would be similar, but perhaps, instead of “Videos-Mono” you would probably get “OriginalVinylUK” and “OriginalVinylUS” and so on – so basically – anything that needs captured, you build a folder for.

Then, you take a copy of your SONAR Template session (.cwp file) (or equivalent in whatever DAW you use), which is set up with many, many Audio channels – one of my recent efforts ended up at 98 channels – and these are pre-set to use the special S-PDIF “pure digital” input of my sound card – so the S-PDIF outputs of my Blu-Ray player are fed to a pair of inputs on the Sound Card – and all Blu-Ray recording is done via this “pure digital” route – directly from the disc, to the sound card, to SONAR – where I capture them as 48K 24 bit WAV files – the best I can do. The SONAR CWP should be in the root of your work folder, so you can view it and work with it, AND see the folder set shown above.

Arm for recording, a single track, which will have a title such as

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-OriginalMasterMix-UNTOUCHEDORIGINAL

Put the Blu-Ray into the machine, and queue up the Original Master Mix (the Flat Transfer of the original CD with the original Mix) from the EXTRAS section of the Blu-Ray.
Press RECORD on the armed channel in SONAR, and once you see the transport moving, then start the Blu-Ray playing.

Leave that entire disk worth of music to play, while of course, SONAR is recording it in the highest quality possible – Input = S-PDIF and SONAR = 48K 24 Bit.

Normally, I do not have to adjust the levels at all – for S-PDIF, they seem to be pre-set, and they always make a clean, but never too “hot” recording – it’s ideal. They just approach 0 db, but never surpass it – so, loud and clean.

Once the Blu-Ray has ended, and you have your recording of the entire CD captured as a SINGLE large WAV file, you can now move onto the next piece of music, and repeat the above process on the next target disc (in this case, it’s Disc03, “Album In Demo & Work Tape Form”).

When completed, you then move onto the PROCESSING part of the process, which is probably the most time-consuming and patience-testing.

PROCESSING THE FILES:

In your SONAR .cwp file, you now have a series of large wav files, each one representing a disk full of music. Using the back of the box set or it’s booklet as a guide, I then create a single AUDIO track just below the main, large WAV. That is set up quite simply, you won’t be recording on it, but you need to set it up so it is playing to Master, and thence out to your headphones or speakers, as you need to monitor this process (I use headphones to be the most precise possible). Once you are happy with your new empty, Audio track, before we work on any music processing – count the individual tracks that are in this large WAV file, and use TRACK CLONE to make the appropriate number of copies of your new, empty Audio track. If it’s a 15 track album, then I would create 14 more of these, by adjusting the Count of Clones in the Cloning Window. Push the button, and SONAR (or your DAW) adds 14 empty audio tracks – and now you have 15 empty spaces for tracks. Which already have their name template ready for a track number at the end – then, go back – and put in your track number and names:

Return now to your single large wav track, and before you do anything, take a COPY of it, and PASTE it into your new first audio track – TRACK 01 – which will be labelled something like XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-01-GardenOfEarthlyDelights-OriginalMasterMix, and first, clean up the lead in – there will be extra space there, so you want to reduce that to a very short lead in, and make sure it starts fairly quickly – usually in under a second, so it starts like a normal CD would – immediately.

Then, find the end of Track 1. Determine the best spot to SPLIT the tracks, so that Track 1 has a proper ending, and that Track 2 will end up with the SPLIT quite close to its first sound. Once you are happy with this transition point, go ahead and SPLIT the track (leaving the first long recording UNTOUCHED – as the name implies!) always do your first splitting, on the SECOND one – the COPY!!!

Once split, REMOVE the large chunk of remaining audio, which contains tracks 2 through 15, and MOVE them into the next track.

Repeat the split, each time, leaving the remainder (of your large wav file copy, which gets smaller and smaller each time you split and move it down) and moving it into the next track.

Once done, you need to clean up the end of the final track, just to make sure there are no surprises.

At this point, you should be done with PROCESSING, and ready for OUTPUT.

OUTPUTTING THE FILES:

Ensure that all tracks except your Track 01, “Garden Of Earthly Delights” are MUTED. This is crucial, if you leave anything with sound on it unmuted except for the ONE TRACK you are outputting, it’s sound WILL MIX with your track – thus, ruining it.

Select the track with your mouse, then, EXPORT – and point the output to your pre-made WAV folder:

OUTPUT FOLDER: XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-OriginalMasterMix-WAV

Once the output has completed, check the folder for the presence of the file, make sure it’s there, and, named to your satisfaction.

Repeat with each track, making sure that you MUTE the previous track, and unmute the one you are working on (or you get a SILENT output file!) – and that ALL tracks except the one you are currently working on, are always MUTED.

Once the WAV files have all been output, for each Disc – save and back up the .cwp file, save and back up all Audio files created during the session (your large WAV files).

At this point, you have the best quality, 48K, 24 bit WAV files of the individual tracks, SPLIT out perfectly in the steps above, ready to now transform into MP3 files so you can load them onto your iPod or other portable device.

FINAL PROCESSING:

Using DVDSoft tool “Audio Converter” (or any decent utility that Converts WAV files to high quality MP3 files), set the type to your desired quality (I use “Lame Insane Quality 320 kbps Frauhofen MP3” myself) and point the output to the root folder above your WAV and MP3 folders:

OUTPUT FOLDER: XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-WAV&MP3 (or whatever YOUR project folder is called – the idea being, we want the tool to output ALL of the MP3s, from ALL of the WAVs, back into the root of your Project, so you can then assign their internal names BEFORE they are finally split up, by you dragging them into their individual, pre-made “MP3” folders.

Once your type and target folder are set in the Audio Converter tool, you can now drag the files you want to have converted, into the area at the top of the application where it says “DRAG AUDIO FILES HERE” or similar.

Open your XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-OriginalMasterMix-WAV folder, and select all 15 / however many you have of your WAV files with your mouse by using SHIFT-mouse, and then DRAG them across into the top part of the DVDSoft Audio Converter Application. I usually just do all of the WAV files as one giant conversion, so after I drag over the Disc02-OriginalMasterMix files, I then carry on, opening each WAV file folder next would be Disc03, then 04, etc., and dragging their contents into the DVDSoft Audio Conversion tool.

Once you have the entire set of WAV files in place in the Audio Converter, re-check that your output type is correct (for me, that’s always highest quality, 320 kbps MP3), and that your target folder is just the root folder you are working in – and then press “Convert”. The tool starts working, taking each WAV file, and converting it into an MP3 file. This can take quite some time, depending on how many hours’ worth of WAV files you have loaded into the tool – be patient, it will eventually tell you that the Process Is Complete. NOTE: When it converts, it adds a “Comment” into each MP3 file – in the field “Comments” it puts its little advert “DVDSoft.com”.

It’s harmless, but I don’t want it in my file, so the first thing I do, is select all items, while they are all still in the main folder, and I DELETE this “comment”, leaving the Comments field empty as it should be.

While the MP3s are still in the main, root directory of your project, you should go ahead and add in your “Internal File Data” – I start out, by doing a few bulk updates – I select ALL of the MP3s, right click and select “Properties”, select the Details tab, and then, under “Album Artist” and “Contributing Artists”, I add in the band’s name (unless it’s already there). I also do a bulk update on any other fields that are the same for ALL of the files, such as “Genre” IF they are all the same Genre.

After that, you can highlight each album, or each file, and make whatever adjustments you need to make the INNER NAMES meet your own personal Standards – I have very particular standards, which includes an Album Name that is preceded by a Year and Counter, so, “Oranges & Lemons” is actually called

“1989-1 Oranges & Lemons – Remaster – Expanded – Disc 02 – Original Master Mix – The Surround Sound Series” in my collection.

…or something like that – by dating these (using this YYYY-Counter template), I can force them to sort into Chronological order, based on the Album title – it works pretty well, but I did start out with that Standard some 9 years ago, so it would take anyone else a long time to institute – but a very good percentage of my existing MP3 collection does contain these dates. I have even recently, been converting posthumous live CDs back to their performance date, rather than their more current release date – because let’s face it, there were not that many Gentle Giant live shows in 2006 or 2012. But there are a LOT of shows from 1975, released in the last 30 years – well, I have managed to get them into chronological order with just a few exceptions where no data exists for the date of a concert. Oh well – it’s the best I could do.

From here, you would then rename each MP3 folder to match your MP3 collection – to whatever Standard you use there – and then copy them to your individual folders on your drive or drives. I am currently keeping seven copies of the MP3 on seven separate hard drives, and four copies of the WAV masters (because I sweated blood and time extracting these tracks!) on four separate drives – that’s my backup at the moment. Because I am always short on disc space, I am going to reduce the MP3s down to four soon, to recover a lot of space – but, it was set up as seven and that’s how it was for the longest time…a lot of redundancy!

Finally, once the MP3s are added to your collection – you can add them to ITunes and sync your device, or, put them on your non-ios device by drag and drop or whatever methodology you use – your MP3 files of rare Blu-Ray content, are NOW FINALLY READY for your listening pleasure – ENJOY!

So – back to reality – how’s THAT for a Process? Since I had to do the content of Skylarking and Oranges & Lemons during the last week or so, I used those experiences to build the Templates and work out exactly how the process should work, getting it down to a science – but not a quick one. I recently used the new process on XTC “Nonsuch” – and it worked beautifully – it’s much better to have a consistent process for this, because it is pretty complex – as well as three of my four Steven Wilson Yes albums that still need the process done to them. And one or two of my Steven Wilson Gentle Giant albums. And ALL of my Steven Wilson Jethro Tull albums…including the brand new Stand Up – The Elevated Edition which sounds awesome, I might add!

I’ve got it down from days to hours now, but it can still eat up most of a day, just doing one “album” – because they usually pack a LOT of amazing music onto those Blu-Rays. It’s quite amazing, to have a 20 disc version of “Drums and Wires” by XTC !!! Lots of choice there…

The only catalogue that is actually done – is King Crimson – that was my first Steven Wilson remix, the giant DVD release of In The Court of The Crimson King in about 2008 – hard to believe it (my obsession with the quality recordings that are any and all “Steven Wilson Mixes”) goes back that far, six years!

The problem is, to do this PROPERLY, takes a huge amount of time. OK, ripping the music off of the disc, you can just start it and walk away, and do other work while it’s copying the content to that WAV file. Repeat as necessary. Sometimes, I just let three or four discs worth play into a HUGE WAV file, then, split it by album, and move them to their appropriate channel. But once that easy step of transferring the music over is gone – well, then you are back to that horrible processing section, and cutting up different versions of the same album, or, massive quantities of Andy Partridge demos – it is very, very time consuming – and, I am a perfectionist, so if it isn’t perfect – I do it again – but, I am getting better at it…slowly. It took me two full days to process all of the content on Yes’ “Tales From Topographic Oceans” – 2 whole days! That seems to be what it takes, although maybe I could do one in a single day under the right circumstances.

I do want to get on with the Yes and Gentle Giant in particular, because both of those sport Stereo Instrumentals, which I absolutely love. I’ve been listening to the Instrumental versions of Yes’ “Tales From Topographic Oceans” and they are fascinating and beautiful – you hear all kinds of things that the vocals hide – and I played “Ritual – Stereo Instrumental” yesterday on the 5.1 system – wow – it sounded fantastic! Weird without any vocals – but, fascinating, especially hearing what Steve, Rick and in the case of Ritual, Chris are really doing – how it sounded before any vocals arrived – it’s just astonishing.

Now that I have finished XTC “Nonsuch”, so that’s all four of my SW XTC Discs done – and then, eventually, to Yes and Gentle Giant – as for the Steve Hillage CDs that I just ripped – thank GOD it’s just all audio CDs in this set – no DVD or Blu-Ray content – so, that makes it so easy!

Until just now, I’ve never written down this process, and now that I see it in black and white, it just seems like going to extraordinary lengths to be able to hear rare music on your portable device – but, I have it streamlined now, so it does go a LOT faster using the templates, and my experience and skill at cutting up tracks, has gotten much, much better lately, so – it’s not quite as bad as it was. But it is a LONG process by gumbo!

OK then, onto pastures new, now that you have learned one way, probably NOT the fastest way (I just know someone will come back to me with a tool that rips all audio from a Blu-ray or DVD with one button push) and it can even split up your tracks for you while cooking you a delicious breakfast – but I don’t know, mine does guarantee consistent, high quality, MP3s, built from the best possible, super high quality WAV file – for the level of technology that I have, it’s not too bad – it could be a lot worse!

For me, it’s just for the chance to hear this remarkable music, these musicological gems that Steven Wilson finds on these master tapes, and brings to us all – some amazing music has been unearthed just by his standard processes of “re-mixing” classic prog and pop albums.

Speaking of music, well, despite spending SOME time on Blu-Ray content – I have actually also been working on new music – in the studio, I have a new track, which I started a couple of weeks ago, called “On The Cusp Of Yesterday” which I am currently having a titanic struggle with. The basic track has been done for some time, and, for some weird reason, the last one-minute guitar solo is also done. So I needed to add guitars, from the beginning to the beginning of this existing solo, which is a bit challenging.

I spent an entire day (a few weeks ago on a Sunday, I think) adding some new parts, using a lot of truly beautiful H9 patches, a nice, ordinary clean delay into a hall reverb, not too ostentatious, but just nice – and then some other more strident patches – doing guitar over dubs. All day, and, I wasn’t happy with the last…two or three overdubs. Maybe the first one was OK, or maybe it’s just the second one…

I was so dissatisfied, because it just had not come out how I heard it in my head, which I didn’t even bother to make a rough mix of it with these new hard-fought overdubs, which were technically ok, but weren’t doing the job for me.

So the next time I got some free time to work on it, “On The Cusp Of Yesterday” got a new makeover – I actually decided to go ALL THE WAY BACK to the backing track, hiding all of my previous guitar bits, including the good ones – and I would try again, with that lovely clean delay to start – but this time, a clean delay into a beautiful SpaceTime patch.

I did several takes, some involving harmonics, others, strange chords, others, melodies and lead guitar. Saved everything, but listened to nothing. Now, I am waiting for another chance to go back and hear what I did – and I know that some certain bits – like the very end – came out REALLY well, there is some viable music there, and possibly, enough to flesh out part of the track, perhaps leaving some spaces for me to populate.

At the moment, I am just avoiding it, I am not sure where it’s going, the backing track is exceptional – drums, odd bass, really odd “keyboards” courtesy of “REV”, and a lovely violin. A good solid track, and I really like it – but, for some inexplicable reason, I am not sure what belongs on top of it. I am tending towards something quite ambient at the moment, rather than “normal” guitar parts (which is what I did the first time around, where I REALLY didn’t like the outcome) – I am liking ambient guitar parts at the moment, so that might be the way – time will tell.

Update: another session, I was able to take the recordings made the second time around, and produce a nice mix of “on the cusp of yesterday” from those – it’s come out really well. Probably ready to be uploaded…which I still haven’t done, because I still haven’t decided about it…

Next – is something a bit unexpected, I am now at this very moment, revealing my plans for my next new “Eternal Album” which has turned out to be something I really did not expect AT ALL: “Garage Band” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How did that start? I had read somewhere on the Interweb, that Garage Band had had a really good makeover, and was a really cool way to make music now – and I can remember seeing Garage Band years ago on a friends Mac – and I myself have used it, I have a few songs made with it on an old Ipad, that I’ve never published – and possibly won’t, they were very early experiments, before I really had working with Apps down to a Science.

I decided to try out this new, improved Garage band, and wow – I was very, very surprised indeed! It really has a lot of great features, and I think it could become my go-to place for working with samples – and that is what sets it apart, is the “Apple Loops” which are professionally-recorded bits of music, 2 bars of this, 4 bars of that, 8 bars of something really strange. A lot of grooves, drum grooves, bass grooves, a lot of it is rhythmic in nature, including ethnic sounds from India, Afghanistan and even Egypt – and, a nice batch of African sounds, mostly drums – I have to admit, they have supplied a LOT of great, ready-made content, that you can fit together into tracks in a very easy, intuitive way.

I have thoroughly enjoy my Garage Band Renaissance or GBR, and I immediately started producing strange and wonderful hybrid piece of music beginning in mid-September and continuing to the present day. And I finally did upload the first five complete tracks, to the new album, a few days ago. I am also nearly finished with a sixth track, working title “preponderance”. So the Garage Band Renaissance has been a real hit with me – here are the tracks:

Start Date Title Containing

20160919 Hare Rama Buys A Llama Drum Samples, Manually Played Bass, Grand Piano, Synth, Raucous Rhythm and Lead Guitars, Bizarre Guitar FX, and Bass Samples, Strings Samples

20160926 Opposites Attract Wonderful Pastiches of African Drum Samples, Ever Changing,

Manually Played Bass, Cello Samples, Afghanistani Melodic Instrument Samples, Sub-Bass Samples, Dub-Step Bass Samples, Bass Synth, Melody Synth, Reversed Melody Synth, Drum Kit Samples, String Section Samples.

20160926 Metal Crisis (Altered version of abandoned track “Cuban Crises”) Drum Kit

(Metal) Sample, Metal Chug Rhythm Guitar Sample, Metal

(Metal) Sample, Metal Chug /Blues Lead Guitar Sample, Funky Clean Wah-Wah Guitar Sample, Beautiful Female Voice Singing “Oohs & Aahs” Vocal Sample, Funky Fender Rhodes Electric Piano Sample, Synth Sample, Additional Drum Kit Sample, Manually Played Bass.

20161014 Nambutamba Rain Shower African Drum Samples (Many Different Ones), African Percussion

Samples, Mysterious Electric Piano Riff Sample, Mysterious Guitar Riff Sample, Mysterious Synth Chords, Additional Conga Sample, Rock Bass Guitar Sample, Drum Break Sample, Crash Cymbal Sample (Note: In the end, I actually did not play a single actual note on this, it’s entirely composed of samples – and also, it’s probably the first ever Ambient African piece of music ever made!)

20161017 Ten Seventeen (Aka “Nine Nine”) Drum Kit Samples (Three Different Funked Out Drum Kit Samples, Manually Played Bass Guitar, Sarod Sample, Indian Drum Samples (Khol and Pakawaj Drums), Transport Stop Synth Sample, Voyager 1 Synth Sample, Vocalised Synth Bass Sample, Boogie Right Vox Synth Sample, Vigilante All Sample (String Section & Timpani Samples).

Update: after several more sessions, I FINALLY got the manually played bass guitar part how I wanted it.

I am very excited about working with Garage Band again, now that it has had such a brilliant face-lift, and I love how very simple it is to create very intriguing and interesting music, using mainly samples – something I’ve not done much of outside of Komplete – but that’s a very different world of sampling – the Native Instruments world – and I am afraid that Garage Band is not quite up to that standard yet :-). But – it’s not bad for Apple!

I had a blast recording these tracks, the first where I used an IPhone instead of an Ipad – it’s not bad at all – I found it easy enough to do. I do like the samples that Apple has provided, and the temptation to just sit and create, is overwhelming – they have a lot of great-sounding samples (and, some terribly bad or terribly cheesy ones, too) which make composing a dream – they even “theme” them together, so for example, you can put a bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and lead guitar “together” and they play back a chunk of an imaginary song by an imaginary band. Of course, I like to manually force them to match up with the wrong track, cross-breeding them rather than putting them all together as intended – intentionally misusing the pre-matched loops…but that’s just me.

I have already used that technique twice during the last five weeks of Garage Band work, myself; once on “Hare Rama Buys A Llama” and again on “Metal Crisis” – it works well, and I like it. For the latter track, though, I brought in additional bluesy lead guitars, and purposely “mismatched” those over the other, patterned rhythm guitars – and it worked fine, because the musicianship of this unknown guitarist, was of a high calibre, and his beautiful blues riffs could have “fit” almost anywhere….by purposefully mis-placing them, I created some impossible and very musical moments in this metal / beautiful vocals track – a strange experience, but well worth it – I like this track!

So really, I am right back where I started, with music on an Ipad, often, Garage Band is the first thing you learn, and in my case, I am no exception, I did work with it for quite a while, until ambient apps came along and distracted me – once I had Scape, and Mixtikl, and Drone FX – that was me, away from “normal” apps like Garage Band, and when I did use normal apps, I favoured Nanostudio (and I still do!) as well as learning how to sample from the Fairlight, and so on – I began a long journey of discovery, that has now, in 2016…led me right back to the beginning, to where I started in 2011 – back to Garage Band. Who would have thought?

Not me.

Now that the new Garage Band Eternal Album is loaded up at last, I am off to work on the guitar system which is undergoing yet another massive upgrade…as usual. A game-changing upgrade I hope, including Pedalboard Mark 68, I can’t wait till it’s all sorted out…

Happy listening!

Dave

more app magic… and there’s a last time for everything

Posted by pureambient on September 11, 2015

well, I am here again to talk about ios applications, which have become such a part of my life, that I can hardly recall the fact that four years ago, I knew absolutely nothing of them.

one of the first and most lasting of ios applications, has been the subject of a quiet revival over the past few months for me, and that would be, the remarkable scape, by brian eno and peter chilvers.

scape was one of the first applications of any kind that I downloaded (at some point in late November 2012!!), and I proceeded to work with it, following it’s “hints”, watching my tools and palettes grow organically, and recording scape after scape after scape after scape. every time a new tool arrived – I would record new scapes. a new “background” arrives – and I must records scapes, including, a scape with just that background, nothing else, in it. and – some of the most incredibly minimal and amazing scapes were created that way.

in fact, I was so incredibly excited about the app, that back in the day, the I authored no less than three blogs in a row that were mostly about…scape; scape week one, scape week two and scape week three…followed by a fast forward to week five of scape! during scape week two, I noted that in the short time of just two weeks, that I had created something like 146 scapes. most of which did not see the light of day until very recently, in early to mid 2015.

in 2012, and during early 2013, though, still feeling my way through the scape processes; I would take a new tool, and mix it up with the familiar, to see what kinds of crazy combinations of instrumentation I could come up with, mixing bells with synths with basses with just plain strange sounding samples. some times, I would work in a very, very minimal space, one or two objects, very quiet, super ambient – on other days, I would load the scapes to capacity, hmmm, let’s see, what happens if I insert 20 or 30 bass guitars into one scape? interesting!

so this went on, for a number of months, perhaps, six months – until, one day, abruptly, I stopped. I had made around 1100 scapes by then, and at the time, I did take the time to record the first 30 or so, so that the world could hear how beautiful this app truly is. I published those 30, I think I added a few more later on, and there they sat – until 2015. for some unknown reason, I got the idea into my head, sometime near the beginning of this year, that I should capture ALL 1100 scapes, record every single one of them, capture each and every scape image (and, of course, it’s that “image” that “is” the music – the shapes, generate the music)…I would record them all.

this became then, the great project in the background. I would work on my progressive rock song – still unfinished – and then, record a few dozen more scapes. I would spend a Saturday working on my data, or cleaning up my music data – and, the whole time, I would be capturing dozens more scapes. I developed tools, in SONAR, a special scape “template”, or actually, two of them – one that covered the first 50 numbers of a hundred, and the second, which covered the second 50 numbers in a hundred – which then meant, you only had to choose the appropriate template, and change the prefix from 101, to 401, or whatever you were “up to”. soon enough, my prefixes started looking like “801”, or “901” and eventually, “1001” – and I then knew the end was in sight. a few more weeks, and finally – they were all recorded.

of course – the work doesn’t stop there. each file, has to be lovingly trimmed, removing the header and the tail, and then normalised to -3 db to match all of the previously released scapes – all of which have been normalised to -3. basically, it’s the simplest mastering job in the universe, because I don’t add EQ, I don’t add reverb (tempting though THAT might be!) – I leave them untouched, exactly the way they come out when the app generates them. they sound good enough, without me tinkering with them. however, even though that’s a simple job, I still work on them file by file, one file by one file, to make sure there are no problems (a few stray “pops” have had to be removed from one or two captures – and occasionally, I may have to go and re-capture scapes if they have significant problems – try again – although thankfully, I’ve not had to do that yet…) and that they sound as perfect and as pristine as they can.

the best part of it though, exceeding all, has been HEARING them again. and looking at the images used to create them, and remembering my thought processes – for example, one thing I loved to do, was, create a “basic scape” – a scape with certain elements, and then, simply copy it over and over again, each time, just changing one aspect of it – which was almost always, the “effects” – the coloured icons on the right side of the GUI, which add flangers or tremelo or chorus or whatever. originally, that was maybe four or five different “treatments” of the same scape – but towards the end, some new effects – bright orange, and a pale blue, if I recall correctly – arrived, so towards the end, if I did a full sweep, you might get seven or eight “versions” of the same scape.

and – if it was a particularly lovely scape in it’s initial incarnation – then – you ended up with eight absolutely outstanding scapes. so it was a good technique – take something that is proven sounding good, and then “treat” it seven different ways – and then, pick your favourite of the eight, too. often, for me, that would either be the deep pink effect, or, the dark, mysterious green – and the green effect, whatever it is, is definitely my favourite.

I could “see myself” thinking up these processes, I could “see myself”, just by looking at the icons, the paintings that I did, that powered the scapes, what I was thinking – here was a section, where everything was COMPLETELY about minimalism. a single effect, with nothing else. a single background, with nothing but an effect. two backgrounds, mixed together. a single “E” yellow “note”, playing atop a single “mountain” or pyramid. I could see, that often, I was stuck in “minimalist mode” for days at a time, and then, I would go back to much louder, much crazier scape designs, especially those that contain far too many bass guitars, and yet, still, somehow, work, others, where I intentionally used the most dissonant “elements” possible, to try to create a more “index of metals” vibe, and in fact, I have made a note somewhere, that one of my scapes does sound a bit like “an index of metals” sans Fripp.

as I recorded them, I would occasionally note down the names (of course, I mean the “numbers” of the scapes, since none of them have names!!) of certain scapes that I particularly liked. then, when I moved into the mastering stage, I would do the same – so I now have a document that I’ve officially started, that is my “scapes of note” document, and once I have completed the mastering (at the rate I am going right now, that will be sometime in 2017 but who knows?) I will publish that list on the music for apps: scape eternal album on the bandcamp site – because believe you me, if you sit and listen to those “chosen” scapes in one sitting, it will blow your mind – it will be like hearing a lost, super excellent super ambient eno album that you never knew about.

for me, in the real world, it’s the equivalent of getting the remastered “neroli”, so that I could get the previously unreleased second disc – a “new”, long form eno ambient piece called “new space music” – which is right up there with “neroli” and “thursday morning” and “music for airports” in terms of being supremely beautiful and supremely ambient. hearing those chosen scapes, will be not unlike, the first time I heard “new space music” – 50 minutes of previously unheard long-form eno ambient music – it does not really get a lot better than that.

if you had a LOT of time, my recommendation would be – listen to them ALL, from the beginning. basically, I’ve just done that….listened to over a thousand scapes, and it was the most relaxing, beautiful experience…really relaxing. with the odd moment of dissonance.

why? because in my innocent, quiet way, I followed their rules – I did not jump ahead like so many scape users did – and in fact, when I found out there was a hack that allows you to expose all of the instruments, sounds and treatments in one fell swoop – I deliberately didn’t take note of it, and I have never ever done that with any scape install – I would NEVER spoil the journey of discovery that eno and chilvers worked so hard to create. that’s just me…some want to get to all the toys right away…I was happy to wait.

the advice that the app gives you, and the way you keep receiving more and more amazing sounds, all the time, and the excitement you would feel, when you realised you had just got a truly beautiful eno fretless bass line, or, an amazing floating eno synthesizer riff – every other day, every 20 or 30 scapes – you would get another “present” – it is an amazing way to grow with the application, instead of “cheating” and going to the end…OK, for some, that’s the way, I get it – but, I can tell you – if you listen to these 1100 scapes – what you will hear, is first, a limited palette of sounds. that directly affects the sound of the resulting scapes, and for a while, it was almost impossible to create a loud or annoying scape. as you got more voices, and you had more ability to mix voices – then the chances of cacophony or dissonance, or both, increased significantly.

in the middle period, in the 400s and 500s, you get a medium to large compliment of instruments, and, the scapes get more complex, denser – although, I still go on self-imposed minimalist streaks, using the newer tools to create new minimalist scapes even right up to the very end. and of course, during the last few hundred, I am finally, using ALL of the instruments, and I was receiving no more new updates – I had at last, revealed all of the instruments, backgrounds, and treatments – and then, I kept going…until one day, I just…stopped.

and then, three or four years passed, and I thought – hmmm, I really, really wish I had recorded all of those scapes. and then that other voice, the one that thinks big, says “well, why don’t you…” and that was that.

four, five months down the road from that internal conversation – and I have them all captured and recorded.

I have, as of a few days ago, mastered 187 of them (which took me up to scape 200 – the numbers don’t match because several scapes were lost, i.e. when you erase a scape, you lose it’s auto-generated “number” – so the track number no longer matches the scape number), and as time permits, I master more and more and more and more.

Until I finish. And then, once mastered, I upload. Actually, as I master, I try to upload, because the more I upload, the clearer the decks are for more scapes, to upload later…to date, about 118 of them have been uploaded.

So the sound of scape, and the musical DNA of brian eno and peter chilvers, has been filling the studio monitors for many, many months, weeks and days, and it’s so strange, I’ve listened to well over 1000 scapes this year, all recorded in late 2012 / early 2013. and just hearing them – it was so mesmerising, it was so, so incredibly relaxing – I would have scapes playing all day long, all weekend long – as I captured them – and after a day or two of listening to scapes being captured, I would be so chilled, so relaxed – they really are like a tonic, I swear – there is something about them, they are ALL so incredibly reminiscent of brian eno’s music, no matter what weird things happen in the scape – it just sounds like eno…they ALL sound like eno. even the really strange ones – eno.

normally, it’s the ambient eno, but occasionally, you get the really strange, really dissonant eno – or other eno’s – not always pleasant. but most of the time – you get real ambient beauty – with the very occasional journey into slightly more alternative types of ambient. it’s a trip worth taking, and if you don’t mind waiting – well, the first hundred and some are up there, free to listen to, on bandcamp – so go have a listen – those top secret never-before-heard brian eno ambient albums are just there waiting – it’s uncanny, how after you hear 20 or 30 0f these scapes, that you get the uncanny feeling that you were just privy to a top secret performance of an unreleased eno ambient masterwork – they just sound great, to me, it will always be the best of the best generative music apps, and it’s difficult to believe sometimes that it IS generative – that the songs are literally created, by creating a visual input, of shapes, colours, backgrounds and effects that are colour-based. but – that is how it works – you paint a picture, or, you randomly throw shapes onto a canvas – either way, it works if you spend hours meticulously building something very visually appealing, or, if you very randomly add different shapes together, or even on top of each other – or whatever, no matter what the input – it ALWAYS sounds good.

often, I would spend time working on carefully composing and arranging the shapes, more often than not, there would be a plan, a purpose, a desire to make a beautiful visual piece of art…that also happens to generate really beautiful music.

Only very occasionally would I work randomly, when I did, I’d still get good results, but I always preferred creating something beautiful and intentional, trying to make a good piece of art. scape always rewarded me with interesting, challenging ambient music no matter what the input; I do like to think that taking time to create more meticulous art resulted in better scapes, but I can’t prove it.

and now for something completely different.

I told you last time about my frustrations with Notion. It seems to be working again now, and I have managed to salvage and finish my interrupted recording, but, I am still not going to publish it yet – as I want to move it from the iPad to the desktop, to see if I can get some better instrument sounds for it – I am just not happy with some of the sounds in Notion for IPad, and I am hoping that via some process, I will be able to create a new mix of the track, using BETTER sounding instruments – so the song is on hold, I won’t release it until I’ve had time to research this. it’s complete, it’s alternative / jazz, it’s about 8:00 long, and I’m really really happy with it – working title “abstraction distraction retraction”. though it will be delayed, I hope to have it finished one way or the other and published this year – it’s a good track.

I have started a new track in Notion, another guitar quartet, but this time, steel string guitars rather than nylon strings, as the last guitar piece I did (“fantasy no.1 in d major for four guitars”) was. it’s only a few bars long, but it’s off to a good start, it’s in 7/4 time to start, so that makes it unusual. working title (likely to be changed) is “relentless refraction of light”.

now that I think of it, I have a number of new tracks in various stages, from embryonic to complete; besides one complete Notion track and one just started, there is also a new proggy piece in Gadget, which is coming along nicely, and a very interesting piece, featuring vocoder vocals recorded in Attack, my new favourite drum machine, I love it!

so there is a lot of music in progress, but given my commitments over the next two months, most of these tracks wont appear until November or December – but, they will all get done, and they will all come out…

and of course there is my song made with real instruments, “the complete unknown” which is probably about 85% complete, that one may need more time, because I am in the middle of real guitar overdubs, which do take time.

I’m very happy though, that one of my very best works in a long time, “abstraction distraction retraction” is done, I do want to see if I can improve the instrumentation, but if I can’t better it, then I will just do the best I can with the existing tools.

in fact, I would dearly love to re-record ALL of my non-classical Notion tracks, with better instruments – I really would. But – we shall see, time will tell…and all that kind of stuff…

so setting the problem of improving the instrument sounds in Notion for a while, I want to talk about two newer apps that I’ve been playing with, that are both in their own way, quite exciting.

the first one is a free app (well, it was temporarily free anyway) called “YouCompose” and at first, I scoffed – when I realised what it’s premise was – this is it:

you record a melody using a keyboard to input it, and there are various templates you can use, I used a stock quartet of horns, so my solo instrument was a saxophone – so, I played a sax melody to the best of my ability – and then, I pushed the “harmonise” button – and, in just a second or two, literally – it produced three horn harmonies – and damned if they didn’t sound half bad !!

I tried again, with a longer, more complex melody – and again, the almost instant four part harmony – well, three part harmony to your input melody – came out quite well – almost palatable. With some difficulty, you are able to edit the parts, you can erase bad notes, change notes with the wrong durations, and so on – it’s not too bad, although it’s no Notion when it comes to editing !

today then, I had a second session with it, and I did a session with guitar harmonics, bass guitar, clean electric guitar, and distorted guitar 2. I did the harmonics part first, and let the rest be created by the master of harmony, YouCompose. this time, it was quite a flop – it couldn’t seem to really figure out what to do with just harmonics for input.

so – to give it a better chance – I took command of Distorted Guitar 2 – and recorded a fake “lead solo” with no accompaniment. pushed the magic “harmonize” button again – and this time, it produced the goods – bass, guitar and harmonics, that accompanied the lead solo really quite well.

it’s fine for free, but it does leave a lot to be desired – I tried to copy my harmonics clip into the bass slot, and it refused to paste it where I placed the cursor – it would only paste it AFTER the two existing clips of harmonics – not alongside or on top of them, as I was wanting to do (I wanted to create some counterpoint, by having the bass “follow” the harmonics – but the app simply would not let me.

so until it’s a bit more flexible with editing, moving, copying, and manipulating clips, I will continue to view it as a fascinating toy – sometimes, it does an AMAZING job of harmonising, but, there is an equal or better chance, that it will produce something quite plodding, or quite inappropriate, that does NOT sound good – and I found that I tended to delete more of it’s harmonisations than I ever saved – I only saved a few, where it had worked particularly well. And even then – I would probably go into every clip, and make changes, to make it a bit more…human?

It is, however, an amazing experience – to play a series of notes, a melody, on your own, and then, literally two or three seconds later, you have a fully notated set of complex harmonies. The rules for this thing must have been an absolute bastard to write, and it does operate in different keys and time signatures, as well as having some basic tempo controls (I kept selecting “lethargic” – the slowest tempo – which resulted in some dire and terrible four part harmonies, going by at dirge pace – yuick!) but I do admire the sheer bravado of it – it is hit or miss, but for me, it’s just fun, it’s kinda like spinning the wheel of fortune – will it come out beautiful, plain, or awful? will it be OK, but flawed in places? will it, and this is very rare – will it be achingly beautiful? maybe, once every 100th attempt.

I don’t think that ANY computer can make up harmonies as well as a human computer, but – it can sure do it FASTER. And if you don’t like the “detail” work of having to write out harmonies for your melodies – well then, this may be the tool for you.

I do find myself gravitating towards it when I don’t feel like working on serious music – hoping, I guess, that the magic three second harmony creator button, might create something truly amazing…and very occasionally – it does.

now, to my final recent discovery, I ran across this last night on the old app ticker – it’s called, I kid you not, “play the golden gate bridge” – and again, at first, I thought – this must be a joke – but it’s not, it’s actually a project by the San Francisco Synthesizer Ensemble (which you can buy on CD) where they have literally, sampled the bridge (and, the app has a special page with nine of the original samples, which are simply amazing) and then there is the actual app, which allows you to play the cables of the golden gate bridge in the manner of a harp – but, using a selection of more than a dozen possible sounds, including “fog horn” (my personal favourite), “waves”. “railing”, “lamp post”, “cable thock”, “cable click”, “south tower”, and another favourite “reverse hit” – you can select any of these amazing voices, which are developed from the original samples – and that sound becomes the sound you play on the “harp” – which is of course, the golden gate bridge, set against a cloudy sunset sky – a lovely image, and it makes beautiful, beautiful sounds.

it also allows for recording, and in fact, it has a little second page where you can record up to four different parts – so it’s like having a four channel TEAC tape deck or something, right there in your app, to overdub parts with – I think that is really excellent, and I can see myself writing pieces for this odd “instrument”, and doing videos of performances with it, too, because it is an absolutely unique way of performing (the only other app I have that is anything like this, is “VOSIS”, where you “play” a marble statue) and it’s actually a lot of fun to play.

also, some of the sounds are so beautiful, really ambient, really natural, strangely – even the metallics, all of them have a wonderful, organic feeling to them – and to me, this is such a beautifully made app – you can just about feel the love that went into it’s making – and, it’s apparently a long-standing tradition with this ensemble – their CD, celebrates the 50th anniversary of playing the bridge, while the app, celebrates the 75th anniversary – so these samples are clearly, in their blood, but also as clearly – in their minds and hearts. there is also a beautiful art film of the bridge featuring the Ensemble’s music.

this app gets my vote, beautiful, useful sounds coupled with excellent design and playability, I can see myself performing and recording with this app for many years to come – it will especially be great for live performances.

what a wonderful sounding app, and so much fun to play, too!

studio diary 20150501: back into the world of scape…

Posted by pureambient on May 1, 2015

suddenly, I found myself there again, after a long, long pause – a two year pause – I’d acquired the “Scape” application very, very early on, worked with it over a very, very intense but quite short period of months, and just as suddenly, stopped creating scapes when I reached about 1100 in total approximately – I found myself listening to “scapes” again, every day. In 2015.

back to 2012 for a moment, then – after the fairlight and scape, I moved on to learn about, and explore other ambient, generative and synth apps, from the wonderful mixtikl to the equally fabulous drone fx (huge news – drone fx for the desktop – awesome news!) and on and upwards and on to some of the truly strange apps, the VOSIS and the TC-11 (huge news – TC-11 is at V2 now – MORE awesome news!!) and so many weird and wonderful apps to learn about, attempt to master, make recordings of…

“Scape” was my second “long session” with an app, my first “long session” was with the fairlight, or what is now known as the peter vogel cmi – but to me, it will always be “the fairlight” – “the fairlight” of peter gabriel – [this link is to a pretty interesting video of Peter and The Fairlight, and how he used it on the song “The Rhythm Of The Heat”] – and kate bush fame [and this link it to a very rough but very interesting Kate Bush and The Fairlight clip] .

but “Scape” was the first ambient app I worked with – and what a great place to start – an ambient app, where BRIAN ENO was one half of the design team, and, where he played some of the samples and worked with his app-making partner musician PETER CHILVERS to design, produce, and market scape – a device that has a wonderful simplicity to it, you have an empty palette, and you have tools – which you can drag out onto the canvas, and when you do – music begins. each tool is a different sound, or background, or filter for the whole piece. there are bass sounds, synth sounds, melodic sounds, dissonant sounds, buzzing sounds, just your general sound palette that you might find on many a BRIAN ENO album.

in other words, sonic heaven in an app. the app reveals itself to you slowly, so, you start with a few instruments, a few backgrounds, a few filters. as you make and save more scapes, the app then present new tools to you, which you can then use to create “scapes” with new sounds in them, or, use them in conjunction with the older sounds that you are already familiar with. OK, yes, it is very, very simple, but, once you work with it for a while, at least, for me, I began to approach working with it more compositionally. sometimes, I would draw scenes, you know, mountains and clouds and bushes just to see what a “painting” would sound like. then, I began trying symmetry, then, asymmetry – to see what results that brought.

later on, I tried minimalism – just one background, say, and no instruments. I also developed certain techniques of my own, my favourite of which, was to create a scape I liked with one filter, and then copy it over to the next “slot” and change just the filter, then do it again, so I would have the orange version, and the green version and the blue version – the same basic “scape” – but through completely different filters. I would often record these one after the other, and it’s truly interesting to hear the differences between the filters (those being the tools on the right hand side of the palette, that seem to control what is done to the whole piece, so I call them “filters” – and that’s another wonderful thing about scape, there is no standard terminology, therefore, everyone calls the objects by different names! which is fantastic, I think. awesome.

working with “scape”, for the three or four months that I did, was a remarkable time. to have produced 1100 “scapes”, I would never have dreamed of – but, that is what I did – and I was quietly amazed, privately amazed, at how incredibly complex and wonderful some of the later creations became, when there were perhaps, double the tools that you start out with – when you have, finally, the full selection of tools, and there are, no more new tools – then, you can combine things in amazing combinations of the old and the new, the new, the middle period, and the earliest – whatever your heart desires. want dissonance? bring in one of the “crosses” – they all sound horrible! wonderfully horrible. want a nice sounding scape? use a lot of the “letter shapes” “E” “H” “I” etc., the yellow melodic shapes, and use the green or dark pink backgrounds. green is the nicest background of all. dark pink, a wonderful second. some of the other backgrounds are a bit more active, including some quite “jittery” ones, so it really does make a difference which background you run your “scapes” through.

but that is all getting a bit into the history, I wanted to recount to you the events that lead up to this sudden re-surgence.

at the time I began working with scape, in late, 2012, I had a decent enough home studio. I worked out a reasonable way to record a scape, and to this day, that is the single-most asked question that I get “Dave, how do you record the scapes”? It wasn’t easy to figure out. But it wasn’t hard, either!

I later on learned, that Eno and Chilvers intentionally didn’t leave a method for scape to be recorded (which also explains why it’s one of the few apps that is NOT Audiobus-compatible) – in fact, I learned, they didn’t mean for people to even “keep” “scapes” – but of course, many of us crazy musicians, wanted to keep them anyway. I don’t want to let Brian and Peter down here, and I always feel like I have disappointed them, by not just enjoying the “scapes”, and then throwing them away – but I will tell you know, why I can’t do that. Because they are so incredibly beautiful.

It’s that simple. These scapes are such unique, precious pieces of music, and to me, they are amazing in so many ways, because of the high, high quality of the samples, because of the brilliance of sample selection, because of the genius programming of the app – I could go on. No matter what – it boils down to this – even the strangest, most dissonant of “scapes” – is a unique thing of beauty. For a very, very intense several months, I experienced from one to several of these amazingly lovely songs almost every single day. And I was mesmerised. I wanted people to HEAR this beautiful music, to hear what I had heard, to be able to experience my four month trip with “Scape”, for themselves.

I set out boldly, to record and upload as many “scapes” as I could. at the time, that turned out to be just 41. at first, I made videos for each one. very quickly, as I reached the 800s or something, I realised, I was not going to be able to make 850 videos. I really enjoyed making those videos, and I used the single screen shot of the art for each scape, as the starting point of each video. So then I worked on audio only, but I soon ran into space issues, I didn’t really have the set up or the disk space, to record unlimited numbers of “scapes”.

Until 2015, that is.

Now, with larger, faster, better hard drives, a much better client, SONAR X3, and a good, fast system – I can record scapes en masse.

I hadn’t really thought about it, but for some reason, a few weeks ago, I started to think – I would really, really like to recover, and record properly, the “rest” of the 1100 “scapes” that I had recorded all on my first decent ipad, an ipad 2. so one evening, I set up a 24 track session, recording 24 bit 48K audio, and began recording.

It takes time; “scapes” run anywhere from 3 to 4 t0 close to 9 minutes, and what I tend to do is, the moment I get in, I set up the session, and start recording, while I am going about other business. and when I can, I stop by, stop a recording, and start the next recording.

Every few weeks, I sit down, and trim, master and produce the tracks, and then, as time permits, I upload them to the dave stafford “music for apps: scape – an eternal album” eternal album. I recently uploaded a handful of these “newly recorded old scapes”, and I think it’s lovely to finally, be able to hear the work I was doing in 2012 / 2013, now, in 2015 – it’s about time.

Over the next several weeks and probably months, I will continue to upload as many of these as I can master, and if we are all lucky, I will actually make it to the end this time – maybe. We shall see…

If I can stay the course, and, to be honest, I do not know at this point, if I can – then, eventually, I should think, maybe I might actually “finish” the job. I would love that, because if I actually could finish – well, two things would come out of that: you would get to hear a thousand plus scapes done at all different stages of app “growth”, from simple to more complex to most complex and back again, and, I would be free, after discharging my duty to myself to complete the work I began, I would be free to make NEW “scapes” in real time, in 2015, to add to the collection.

And I think that might be the most interesting thing of all – to start all over, and go through the process again, and see what happens “this time around”.

But right now, well, it’s early days yet – at this moment, I am recording “scape” 138, which is an impossible construction that has 18 bass players and 13 yellow letter melodic events – and it’s a cacophonous mess, but oh, so incredibly unique! some of the scapes I’ve heard over the past couple weeks of recording, have blown me away – they are either so strange, so weird, so unique, so powerful, but often, just so, so intensely beautiful, usually in an ambient way, but sometimes, in a fairly active way, too. This particular scape is ever so slightly overloaded, and I know the app has protection against this (if you reach the max number of instruments, it begins to remove the earliest instrument as you add the latest) but I actually managed to create a “bass overload” in this case, one of the few times where I beat the system – my poor JBL monitors are baffled because they have never had 18 eno or chilvers fretless bass riffs all starting within microseconds of each other, and it’s overwhelming for the poor speakers!

but it’s an utterly unique “scape”, and I can’t wait to see if I can even make a usable master with that much bass content…we shall see, that one will be a test of my skill, it truly will. terrifying bass overload! power, power, power – and you just don’t expect a piece like this, it’s truly out there, but – ANYTHING can, and does happen, when you are “scaping” – trust me. I’ve been there. what an incredibly strange piece of music, which is now receding gracefully into the land of fade out…

so for the past two weeks and a few days, I’ve been hearing “scapes” again for the first time really, since 2013, when I actually uploaded the 39 existing scapes many months after they had been recorded in late 2012 and early 2013 – the scapes came before the bandcamp pages did. but now we are somewhat caught up, we can now return to this arena, and see what we can see, or – hear what we can hear, rather.

I’d like to talk for a moment, though, about the visual aspect of “scapes”, which isn’t something that many folk speak about, for me, when I was heavily into this process, how I constructed a “scape” visually was very much an art, I tried to use the skills I had as a musician, to “compose” my “scapes”, and I was particularly enamoured of using symmetry, or putting instruments in long, diagonal rows (as in the next “scape”, “scape” 140, that I am working on now… see below). I just wanted to say, you can follow what is happening in the music, by looking at the image of each “scape”. In the early days, you can see that I drew nice little scenes, trying to make art, and trying to make that art into music, and, it worked, to a degree, and then, as more object become available, you can “see” the “scapes” getting more complex, you can see my experiments with symmetry, and as you identify the various instruments, you will learn, just like I did, what causes what. a square turned to have it’s corner pointing up, is a bass instrument of some kind – several different kinds, from normal bass guitars to fretless guitars, to some longer fretless phrases, and so on. so you will be able to “see” in “scape” 138 and in “scape” 140, where I have lined up a whole series of basses into a long, diagonal line – and the resulting chaos that this approach brings.

I am now onto scape 140, which is apparently, another “bass overload” test, this time, with 13 bassists, two melodic events, and one descending arrow complex synth event. the cascading bass players are just amazing, a single, slinky, throbbing, ever changing bass note, made up of 13 horribly overlapping notes, grinds across the musical landscape, while bell-like melodic tones appear and disappear randomly in the background…it’s madness once again, but a beautiful, mental landscape.

Carrying on with the discussion of the visual aspect, you would then be able to see, and hear, for example, in scape 141, that there is only ONE bass part, which plays occasionally, and the three melodic letter shape instruments carry this tune instead of the basses as in 140.

Scape 141 is fairly minimalistic, but there are others even more so, so when you run across a truly minimalistic scape, it will be obvious, again, from the “track” image I upload, which is actually, the map or the “artwork” that created the sound of that scape – you will see an empty workspace, with just a speckled background – that is literally, just a background, with no instruments, so you end up with a very, very ambient, minimal piece. So if you look at each piece of art, that comes along with each uploaded scape, you will be able to literally “see”, the journey I took, see the paintings I made, to produce the sound you are hearing.

That means, that when I get to one of my “filter series” – where I take the same “scape”, and run it through five or six or nearer to the end, perhaps seven different “filters” – the exact same painting, except the filter is a different colour, and you will see that – first the pink, then the green, then the grey, then the orange, and so on – until I’ve run that one “scape” through every possible filter. you will also be able to HEAR the differences, and realise, that green filter makes one sound, while pink filter, makes a different sound, while orange filter, maybe, is a delay or whatever. you get to know them, and you get to know what they will do “to a piece”, and this is the best test of all – try the same song, through each one of the various filters, and see what happens then…

Another kind of series, involves using the same “background” on different filters, or, different backgrounds against one type of filter. The combinations, and the possibilities, are actually, almost limitless, they really are.

So for me, the fact that a visible artefact, a “painting” that I did – that’s actually, a huge bonus, and this is why: I sometimes struggle to describe music with words, but, describing it with a piece of artwork comes pretty naturally to me, so I love the fact that if someone asks me, “hey, how did you make “scape” 844, anyway?” my answer is right there and I can say – have a look at the track art for the piece, that is the actual piece of art I made, which creates the sound of “scape” 844…that uploaded track art, IS the answer to the question “how was this track made”? – answer – “this is what I drew, in “Scape”, to get that sound that you are hearing…”.

Additionally, if you really, for example, fell in love with a beautiful, ambient “scape” that I have made (something I do regularly) there is nothing on earth stopping you from buying “Scape”, the app, looking at the track art that I used to create the beautiful, ambient scape, and then, recreating it in your “Scape”, on your own ipad – by mimicking what I did in my “painting”. I am sure that as long as you got it close, that it would end up sounding very, very similar to my version – very similar indeed, but not identical. Very close.

At the same time, if you like my unattractive, sonically bizarre and / or dissonant “scapes”, you can easily “see” the tools selected to get that sound – and in no time, you will be able to control what “Scape” does, in the same way that “I” control it – although “control” is a dubious word – you will be able to do similar things, if you copy the art in my track art, the uploaded artwork for my “scapes”. Or if you like my super minimalistic “scapes” – you can easily re-create those, as they are very simple to make!

A whole lotta nothing. But sometimes, small input means big output, in terms of beauty. Some “scapes” are not particularly beautiful, but then, they may have other charms that appeal to other senses, so it’s not a requirement that they BE beautiful. A constantly ringing bell might actually remind one a bit too much of that early morning alarm, and when you have several of these admittedly, more melodic alarm clocks going off at once, it can be a bit overwhelming. But – still beautiful in it’s own way, in the way the bells land within the composition, how they fit together, and so on. Scape 145 is a perfect example of that, it’s all bells all the time, ringing incessantly, but – there is still something about it that I really like, a freshness, a randomness, and sometimes, those bells hit some nice accidental harmonies. then, they start to fade away…only, it’s a false alarm (get it?) and then they are back, ringing like mad again…over and over, you think the piece is about to end, and it’s not – it’s just wonderful repetition, and scape always does whatever I don’t expect it to – it’s full of surprises. you just never quite know what you are going to get, but, I can guarantee one thing – it will ALWAYS be interesting! always.

I don’t know exactly how many “scapes” I have recorded over the past couple of weeks, in this new burst of scape activity for 2015, but I do know one thing, I’ve been astonished at the quality, the variety, the different moods, the different techniques, the different results, that this remarkable tool can produce, and while I’ve maybe heard something like a hundred scapes, in two weeks or so – and there has been such an intense variety of music, from the most ambient to the most incredibly overbearing to the most powerful to the most jarring to the most fantastic of melodic, beautiful, ambient composition – it’s really just an amazing success, and it proves that generative music is here to stay, it proves too, that the inventor of ambient, is also, one of the master practitioners of ambient – because, decades have passed since those groundbreaking Eno ambient records – Discreet Music, Music For Airports, Thursday Afternoon, Neroli (to name but four of my favourite Eno titles) and there it was, 2012, and out comes “Scape” – which to my ears, SOUNDED like Discreet Music, Music For Airports, Thursday Afternoon, and Neroli all rolled into one beautiful set of ambient samples, and each “scape” I created, sounded like a new track from a new, unpublished Eno album – priceless, beautiful, unique.

To add gravitas to my words, I am now recording “scape 146”. which features what was then, the “new” filter, a very squelchy filter, so this scape, which is bells playing in waves, over this amazing distorted, squelchy backing – is like alien music from the future, I’ve never heard anything quite like it, and it’s a remarkable and unique composition – generated by this app, based on my instructions – but, guided, ever guided by the ambient hearts and minds of mssrs. Eno and Chilvers – what an amazing juxtaposition of sound sources, I can’t explain it in words, but when you eventually hear “scape 146” – you will know exactly what I am talking about…

I really do hope that I can make it through all thousand plus recordings, for one thing, after a two year absence, it’s really, really been interesting to “re-live” my intensive several-months long experience, but without the intensity of actually creating, hearing it at leisure, as I record it two years later – it’s a very, very nice feeling indeed, it truly is. If you don’t own the scape application, I would heartily recommend it to you now, and I would also recommend – don’t cheat, don’t do what some people do, which is find out how to expose all of the tools at once, and begin using the maximum toolset from the beginning. I strongly urge you instead, to do what I did, to discover the app in the same way I did, one new tool at a time, this gives you a chance to get used to each type of tool, gives you time to play with each type of tool, and then, you recall better too, what each one does, whereas if you start with the whole lot exposed – which is an option – then, you lose the fun and the excitement of being presented with new tools periodically, and you also lose the experience that Eno and Chilvers wanted for you – they felt that the full toolset was too much to start out with, that learning “Scape” in the “slow learn” mode was the best way to learn the toolsets thoroughly, and give you the best, least overwhelming user experience – so I strongly recommend doing it that way.

I can’t imagine doing it the other way, it just doesn’t feel right to me, I guess I am more patient than some, and I’d rather get new tools every few days, along with the lovely, lovely written suggestions, which are of course, modified oblique strategies – I found those suggestions to be gold, and I did indeed, try many of them out, exactly when and how they suggested that I do – and I was always very, very pleased with the results. the tips are good, they are good ideas, and I suggest paying heed to them as you are able to – it makes for an even more enriching experience.

I personally, though, doubt you could have a “bad” experience with “Scape” – because it’s a good tool ! You can’t really go wrong. I think it’s well designed, and if you start slow and build up your instrument library as suggested, you will learn what each tool does, what each instrument does, what each background sounds like, what each filter sounds like – and you can then, tailor your “scapes” to use all of the backgrounds, instruments and filters that you love the most! I think that is brilliant. It’s almost easy to forget, too, that this is a generative instrument, one of the first of it’s kind, a very different generative instrument compared to something like “Mixtikl”, which gives you perhaps, too much choice, whereas, “Scape” limits your choices somewhat, but there is so much scope for inventiveness, and the generative programming is far superior to anything previously seen – so that scape can create music so complex, so unique, that almost no other generative instrument can compete.

Many months after I finished my first go-round with “Scape”, and, after I’d had time with “Mixtikl” and “Drone FX” respectively, I wavered a bit on what generative app I love the most. In “Mixtikl”, I created 61 quite complex utterly customised pieces of music over a several month period, which I think stacked up comparably to the much more prolific 1000 plus that I did with scape in the period previous to that one. At the time, I slightly favoured “Mixtikl” over “Scape”, but in hindsight, I would have to say, “Mixtikl” requires some knowledge of mixing at least, and music, preferably, while “Scape” requires neither. All “Scape” requires is that you can draw a picture with shapes, and backgrounds, and filters – and just about anyone can do that. The other requirement is that you listen…

So for ease of use, for amazing programming, for the most amazing samples, and for the overall best generative app, after hearing just the first hundred or so of the 1000 plus “scapes” I have recorded – I absolutely would say that “Scape” is the “better” app, although, having said that, they are BOTH utterly remarkable and amazing, and on some levels, I don’t really think comparing them is truly fair – I love them both, I will hope to make more music with both as time goes on, and, once I put right the “wrong” of not releasing these scapes, then we can see where we are with ambient apps, and where we are with generative apps, and indeed, where we are with ambient, generative apps…and, really, who knows what the future may hold???

I certainly do not !

studio diary – november / december 2014

Posted by pureambient on December 8, 2014

The last several weeks have been more about getting equipment, computers, software and storage sorted out, than having a lot of time to actually play much music. That is slowly changing, early this morning, I spent almost two hours playing and recording some beautiful sampled sounds in Kontakt, and it’s rare that I sit and play the keyboard for an hour and fifty minutes at one sitting! I did capture a few interesting things, so I am hopeful that this long period of extended studio set-up, improvements, and testing, will also result in some new music along the way.

I’ve had more than my share of frustration with equipment; particularly, software and storage, but things are slowly sorting themselves out. Hardware issues, software issues, strange computer behaviours – I’ve got it all. But it is slowly getting better – all the time. I solve one issue at a time, eventually, they will all get done. Over the past two days, with a lot of assistance from my pal Ken Mistove, I have sorted out a number of long-standing issues in SONAR X3, and we have also made a number of improvements to how things work in the world of the music computer, external hard drives, and recording practices – big improvements, and things are running so much smoother, and better, already – which really pleases me, as I really just want to sit down and play music, not, troubleshoot for two hours, and then play for 10 minutes!

My attempts to film the Kaoss Guitar (the remarkable Ibanez RGPK6 electric guitar), well, on Sunday, November 30^th, I finally got some takes that were better than my original session from the previous week, November 23^rd; so we shall see, I’ve been going through the audio and video from the first session from the 23rd of November, and then I have to go through the miles of footage shot on 30th November as well.

I am hopeful that out of probably 25 takes between the two sessions, that there will be a handful of pieces that are worth making videos of. It’s difficult to say, but I feel that some of the takes from the second session will yield video, I am less sure about the first session – besides being a bit under-rehearsed, I was still having a fair number of technical issues too, so I was not able to concentrate fully on the music. So I may be forced to shelve the entire first session, although I believe that at least one of the final three takes from the 23rd may be good. Time will tell.

Update: there are definitely some good takes from the 20141130 session, beginning with one almost-ambient-but-not-quite quiet track, entitled “just gone”, which is mixed and ready for video build now.

Then tonight, I mixed the next candidate, a remarkable distorted reverse guitar solo entitled “slicer” – so that’s two audio mixes ready for video. There are probably three or four more kaoss guitar trax to come from the second session, audio mixing continues this week, with video builds to begin soon as well. End update 🙂

The Kaoss guitar itself – is an absolute joy to play, I had really hoped to get some videos made and uploaded so you can hear and see it, but I’ve decided that it’s more important to take some time, and get some really interesting examples of what you can do with this innovative instrument.

The recording set up for the Kaoss guitar is very, very simple indeed, I am using my Line 6 DL-4 delay (either bypassed, or, to provide reverse guitar on demand) to provide a stereo out, so it’s the guitar into the DL-4, and then directly into the sound card, thus bypassing all of the outboard effects in the mixer – and for the first time, I am relying solely on Guitar Rig for guitar tone and for reverb / delay effects – since it’s a live performance anyway, I didn’t feel that I needed to use the outboard stuff, so I am keeping it really, really simple.

As part of Komplete, and just in general, I’ve been relying more heavily on Guitar Rig 5 for a lot of my guitar-oriented projects, which allows me to create complex rack mount simulations of many, many excellent effects, which I can play through when I record, but then, if I am not totally happy with the patch I have chosen for the live take, I can then “remove” that patch, and replace it with a different one (re-amping, in essence) until I feel happier – so I’ve also started saving my patches, taking stock patches and changing them radically, and then saving the results, so I can re-use them on other takes later. I’ve never done a lot of re-amping because I considered it to be a bit too burdensome in the past, but with Guitar Rig – it’s a pleasure. It’s quick and easy, and there is such a huge range of truly exceptional effects, that you can very quickly build up some really complex and wonderful sounds – the kind of guitar sounds that 30 years ago, I could only ever dream of, or, hear on a Jimi Hendrix album (such as, “Electric Ladyland” – my favourite).

In that first Nov. 23rd session, I had played through one Guitar Rig patch that was a bit too echo-y, too over the top, so later on, I re-mastered it; removed the original Guitar Rig sound I used for the live take, and replaced it with a different Guitar Rig sound (a customised sound created by and saved by myself), a much better sound (if I do say so myself!), and really, that saved the day – it made the performances sound so much better.

So I am currently working on both audio mixes, and video creation and mixes, from the two Kaoss guitar performances; as well as, I captured a large number of new improvs using Komplete and Kontakt last night, which I need to go through next! after the kaoss projects, and see what is there – some of them are surely going to be good – the system is performing so beautifully now, it’s an absolute joy to use – and that is reflected in the music that comes out, too.

I think audio mixing is my favourite of those activities, or in the case of the Kaoss Guitar takes, well for any and all live takes that are simply live to stereo – I should say, “audio mastering”, as you can’t really “mix” a live performance, unless it involves multiple instruments, which these do not. So you just have to get the best stereo sound, make sure the track is normalised to the right level, be happy with your EQ and effects (re-amped or otherwise) and then – that is that!

I was so pleased with the results of the somewhat tentative and somewhat technically challenging first session, I had very little experience with the new Kaoss guitar, it’s quite a struggle to work out the very best way to play it, without sounding awkward, and slowly, I am gaining experience with it, to the point where on Sunday, November 30^th – I could almost make it do what I wanted 🙂 – almost, most of the time. Sometimes – it’s still outwith my control.

I’ve also been shopping, what with all the sales on line – but not for the ordinary kinds of things that most people shop for at Christmas time – I’ve been buying samples. During the past two months, I have added so much to my sample library, it’s just out of control, and this past week, I bought three amazing packages from my favourite software instrument maker, Soniccouture (http://www.soniccouture.com/en/products/) – I have a lot of these now, including the amazing Geosonics – sounds of the earth – field recordings adapted into music – astonishing stuff – at a huge savings, 50 percent off in total. That was a short lived sale, but I am glad I acted – it was great to acquire all of those sounds for such a good price, I could not be more pleased:

1) “the conservatoire collection” – a collection of renaissance and baroque samples – very pricey, but you get things like baroque guitar, psaltery, flemish harpsichords, hurdy-gurdy and so on – fantastic one of a kind classical sounds. I had an absolute blast using these instruments for the first time earlier today, and I can foresee a lot of interesting pieces forthcoming using this beautiful collection of antique sounds.

2) “glass works” – the sounds of various glass instruments, including a famous “cloud chamber bowls” instrument made by eccentric composer and instrument maker Harry Partch, I visited Partch’s studio when I was a teenager, on a school trip actually, and I actually played his original glass bowls instrument, so I am very excited to OWN those sounds! some of the pieces I recorded early this morning were made with the “cloud chamber bowls” instrument, and it sounded JUST as I remembered it – but perhaps even more stunning, is Soniccouture’s emulation of another of Partch’s unique glass instruments – the amazing “armonica”. This instrument sounds like nothing on earth, like a weird combination of bowed glass, church organ and ethereal spaces – that’s as close as the English language will allow me at a very poor attempt to describe an incredibly beautiful sound! Lovely beyond compare.

3) “ep 73 deconstructed” – this is the most intense, most detailed set of samples available for a 1973 fender rhodes electric piano – the kind my best pal Ted (RIP) used to use in our jam sessions back when I was about 18 years old – a great, classic sound, playing this vintage rhodes is a fantastic experience, it was literally, better than the real thing – and I could have easily sat and played it for hours on end – and, of course, it’s Soniccouture, so you get a lot of “extra” sounds, bowed, plucked, sound effects, and so on – variants on an already perfect set of electric piano samples – incredible attention to detail is Soniccouture’s watchword – the samples they create – are simply, the best.

However, best of all is this next item…

The final item in my “black Friday to Monday shopping spree” – based on Ken’s emailed link that simply said “HURRY!” – normally $200.00 I got it for $79.00 – one day only – it’s ADT from Waves Audio – a software “hardware emulation” where they take a classic piece of hardware equipment, and painstakingly re-create it in software.

In this case, “ADT” is, of course, “automatic double tracking” which was developed by one of the Beatles’ engineers, and it was used on classic Beatles albums from the late 1960s such as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “The White Album” – this device used tape machines, that were slowed up and down to create a second, “doubled” track, it was basically built for John Lennon, who complained about having to double track his voice – he wanted a machine to do it for him. So this guy, Ken Townshend, figured out a way to do this, using the existing technology of 1967 – which in itself is remarkable.

Even more remarkable is the fact that from ADT, a massive industry sprang, of doublers that are choruses or flangers; “Ken’s flanger” is what Lennon called the device, and the name has stuck – millions of “Flangers” have been sold since then, emulating this same “ancient” technique. While I have owned and do own a number of flangers and choruses, both hardware and software, this is the ORIGINAL, the one that started it all – and, I couldn’t own the original hardware, it only exists at Abbey Road Studios where it was designed, it’s not for sale, so having it as software, gives me the classic Beatles chorus and flanger sounds, WITHOUT tape machines and an impossible-to-buy-hardware item. If that isn’t technological magic, I am not sure what is 🙂

So 2015 is going to be a very interesting year indeed, I have a plug in version of the “original” chorus/flanger plug in now, so I can apply “Beatles” flanging or chorus sounds to my guitar parts (think of the lead guitar break in “Fixing A Hole” from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” – or Clapton’s solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” – what a sound!) I will also be able to choose from a huge, huge range of samples, something I’ve never really had available in my first 40 years of music-making 🙂

I wish I had a time machine back when I was 16, if I could have travelled 40 years into the future, and been shown what my tiny, modest studio would look like, in that far distant future of the year 2015, from the vantage point of 1975 – I would a) not have believed you, that such a thing could be possible, and b) it would have seemed like witchcraft, magic – the samples, a kaoss pad guitar (or, a kaoss pad itself, for that matter!!), synthesizers that can reproduce real sounds, sampled sounds, (or, a synthesizer itself), ipads, app technology, all of it is strictly magical stuff if you go back forty years. 40 years ago, I was 16, and I was working with my good friend and fellow musician Ted Holding, who had some recording and mixing gear, but neither of us had any access to the kinds of tools and software instruments available now to me, and to all musicians, in the year 2015 – we would have been dumbstruck with amazement, we really would have!

At 15 or 16, my “technology” was a knock off or off brand electric guitar, played thru a hand me down Fuzz Face, a Cry Baby Wah pedal, and later on, a borrowed echoplex – the kind with tape loops in them, not the new echoplex pro – played thru a Carvin bass head and a home made speaker cabinet. The guitar and the wah pedal were mine, the rest, mostly stuff left lying around Ted’s studio (aka garage) or built or repaired by Ted. I played through that bass amp for like, three years, until I could afford to buy an amp of my own!! Of course, when we hit 18, 19 and 20 we did achieve some manner of technology, but it was still a far cry from what is available now.

Ted expanded his selection of instruments, adding Fender Rhodes, Hammond Organ, and an ARP Omni string machine. I had better guitars, and I brought over a reel to reel tape deck to use as the worlds cheapest tape delay unit, which I would reach over and switch on during a guitar solo, and it was the best and most authentic tape delay I’d ever used…because it was real, real tape, on a reel, running past tape heads with a delay introduced…it sounded amazing to us then.

40 years on, a modestly priced delay pedal such as a Line 6 DL-4, can emulate tape echo very similar to what I was doing back then, plus a myriad of amazing delay effects, all in a small green box…no need to lug around a massive Sony reel to reel tape recorder, but I didn’t own any kind of delay or reverb unit, and couldn’t afford the expensive delays of the day…so using the tape deck as a delay pedal, was a no brainier. We were all delighted, it really made my guitar sound good!

Sometimes even now, even though I’ve now been doing “digital music” for quite some time – since 2005 at least – I’m still just stunned when I walk into my studio and I open up the computer, and I see the tools arrayed there, at my fingertips, for music production. It’s difficult to imagine how my young self would have reacted to the idea of having real instrument samples playable on demand, on a MIDI keyboard – disbelief, shock, astonishment – at the very least. But – I am glad I’ve stuck with music, because now, the toolsets are very nearly unlimited, and this gives you choice – choice to create sound worlds that previously, you could only dream of…

I plan on doing a lot of musical dreaming in 2015, and right now, I am making a start – I can’t wait to master the pieces from this morning, and start sharing some of the magic of glass works or the ep 73 deconstructed electric piano or to my very first attempts at playing the hurdy-gurdy – remarkable.

A good “problem” to have, I suppose – spoiled for choice, where to begin? At the beginning, of course!!!

file restoration – adobe audition – [the perils of digital recording] – from analogue to digital

Posted by pureambient on February 22, 2013

as anyone who has been doing digital recording for any length of time knows…when making digital recordings…shit happens.

you experience a drop out during that perfect take, consequently losing that take.

you left one of the tracks unarmed, so not everything recorded.

You forgot to change the track assignments for one set of inputs, so all of your instruments ended up blended together in one stereo pair, instead of in two nice, discrete, stereo pairs as intended.

the levels on one or more tracks were a tiny bit too “hot” so now you have digital clipping in some of your tracks.

unbeknownst to you, while you recorded 20 beautiful new pieces of music – each one was being recorded replete with many, many pops and clicks – thanks to any number of digital culprits…ranging from IRQ interrupt conflicts to bad USB cables to just plain bad luck.

your daw inexplicably crashes in the middle of that perfect take, consequently losing that take.

tracks are inexplicably distorted audibly, while not apparently being clipped – anomalous distortion from nowhere (this turned out to be a slightly overly loud output from a midi instrument, of all things – turn down it’s output, the distortion goes away)

you set up your midi and audio tracks the same way you did yesterday, but no sound comes out – even though yesterday, with the identical set up, everything was working fine. (this most frustrating of problems is quite common with me, and there have been many a session where the first 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes of the session were concerned with getting some sound to come out the daw – any sound, some sound, please…)

a solution you found to a problem such as the one above, works on one occasion, but does not work on another, requiring you to find a second solution to the same problem. (or a third).

the above is just a random selection of negative recording possibilities…(and all of the above have happened to me at one point or other in time!!) but I am sure if I queried ten of my pals who do digital recording, they would all have similar “lists” of what we will call, for lack of a better term, “negative digital recording experiences”, but maybe, it would contain half a dozen other / different problems encountered from the ones I experience, or a mixture of these symptoms and others unique to their systems.

and each system is unique, and idiosyncratic. I know this because I have two supposedly matching daw installs, one on a desktop and the other on my laptop – and the daws behave differently on the two machines (I kid you not). not in any serious way, but in a lot of little annoying ways…for example, if I record a session on the PC in my studio, and then try to open that session later on the laptop to mix it down – it won’t open until I accept a message about a missing plug-in that I don’t even use or know what it’s for. that means, every single time I want to open a PC session on the laptop, I have to use the SHIFT key method to open it in safe mode. ridiculous, but true!

but today I want to talk about the amazing fact that in this day and age, with the right tools, audio that is seemingly irreparably damaged – can not only be restored, but if you are careful, can be restored to a state of near pristine perfection.

back in the days of “tape recorders” – and I moved from many years of working almost exclusively with my teac 3340S 4 track ¼ reel to reel machine to using cool edit pro on a late 90s pc clone – if something went wrong on a take – that was pretty much it – sure, there were a few tricks that could be used, none of them easy to implement, none of them particularly effective – generally, you just had to erase the track and re-record a new take. or, if you were very adept, very patient, and very lucky, you MIGHT get away with “punching-in” small sections of music, to replace problematic sections. possibly. more likely – no, punch-ins just didn’t fly.

if, for example, you experienced random pops or clicks, or, if you had your levels too hot, and tracks subsequently ended up clipped or distorted – again, that was it, there were not any tools available to repair such damage, so you had two choices: play that impossible part again, or try to disguise the damage somehow.

neither method was very successful, and occasionally, because the take was impossible to “re-do”, I would just leave it, pops, clicks, and all, in the song, mix it as well as I could, and hope that the musical brilliance of the piece would somehow mask the giant “pop” at 3:51. usually though, I just erased that perfect take, and played a less perfect, but adequate, “popless” take. the problem being, with only four fragile channels of audio on 1/4 piece of tape – the only way was “destructive” – delete that take, and re-record it over the damaged one. and if you didn’t play it as well – oh well.

so recording on tape was all about being very lucky, about sometimes, nay, often, having to compromise – either by accepting a really good take with technical imperfections like pops, clicks or mild clipping – or, by erasing and re-recording something that was not quite as good, so you could get rid of the pops, clicks or distortion – but then, having to accept a “lesser” performance for the sake of getting rid of the pops…

recording on tape was often all about compromise, about making the best of a bad situation.

fluffed one note in a seven minute piano piece? well, if you were very, very skilled, you might be able to punch-in a replacement note or phrase on another track (assuming you had one available!) – or, possibly, not – which means basically that you have no choice but to go back and record the entire seven minute piece again, without fluffing that note.

(of course, now, if you did this same recording as midi, you could just go into notation view, find the “wrong” note, and correct it – but I am talking strictly audio / analogue recording here).

for years….this was just the way it was. punching in rarely worked for me, it’s just not ideal, and for me, every recording where I did punch in, when I hear the mixed track played back…all I can hear is the part that’s been punched in. it sticks out like a sore thumb to my ears, it interrupts the flow…it’s just not the best way – it’s really better, always better, to get the whole thing in one single take – it really is!

but…we were used to these “rules”, the “rules” of the golden age of home recording, where you “bounced” three tracks down to one so you could free up the three for overdubs – meaning you had a sub-mix that was carved in stone, that you could never, ever change – and that is maybe the worst part of recording on tape, or rather recording on a four track! – it was very difficult to go back and fix anything; you had to accept compromises; and; if you wanted more than four tracks – you had to “commit” to one sub-mix of instruments.

so for all the problems that I’ve had with digital recording, I have to say, it’s still preferable to the tape days for one reason: now, with existing technology, most of the problems I described above (excepting the true “operator error” ones – if you didn’t arm the track, and it didn’t record, I am afraid I cannot help you!), actually can be fixed. with astonishingly good results.

over the past three or four days, I’ve been working on a digital restoration project, using my newly-acquired adobe audition version 3.0. I had nine tracks, recorded on the ipad when I first got the “addictive synth” application, from a 20120407 session, and I felt that some or all of them were good takes – but, unfortunately, due to the above-mentioned irq interrupt problem – they all ended up with pops and clicks throughout. lots of pops and clicks – perhaps as many as 60 or 70 in a single four minute track. since I’d recorded them “live” by playing the ipad and recording in SONAR – all the pops and clicks were recorded along with the audio.

at the time, I attempted repairs using several tools, but to no avail – until my friend and business partner ken mistove suggested adobe audition. since then, I’ve actually acquired a copy of audition version 3, that adobe, strangely, is currently offering as a free download – along with early versions of photoshop, elements, acrobat, go live, illustrator, and premiere pro ! so now this very excellent multi-track audio and midi recorder is part of my permanent daw set-up, and I am seriously considering abandoning sonar 8.5 – possibly. we shall see. sonar does have some great bespoke synths, and some fabulous mix plug-ins, too, but I am not sure if I would miss them that much…

there are many reasons I would consider this, for one, adobe audition is the successor to the original audio tool I used when I first “went digital” back in about…1998 ? – cool edit pro. so for one, it’s like getting an old friend back – except, an old friend who has had a serious face lift and restorative surgery. for another – adobe audition has a “healing tool”, which works very, very well for healing and totally removing pops and clicks, without damaging the underlying audio (assuming you are careful and take your time!) but not only that – much to my amazement, the same healing tool can be successfully used to heal distortion – so, my previous restoration project to this one, was recovering a number of tracks that had clipped audio on one of the tracks – again, as with the nine pieces I just restored of addictive synth and animoog synth tracks, saving some good tracks that otherwise would have been lost.

for yet another, audition has true fft style noise reduction, which I love, and I had sorely missed when cool edit disappeared – in fft noise reduction, you take a “sample” of the noise you want to get rid of, then apply a fix based on that sample – it “finds” noise like the sample, and…removes it. brilliant!

I knew audition could heal pops and clicks, because I had used a trial version of it some months back to do just that. but I did not know until very recently that it also can heal clipping – and I found that to be just astonishing. thinking back to the tape recorder days…if you had clipped audio – there was literally nothing you could do, the tracks were ruined, rubbish – there was no fix for clipped audio that I ever heard of – that was that, your tracks were useless, discardable. your ONLY option – reduce the level, record the track over.

not any more, not in the brave new digital world – now, clipping can be removed as easily as the pops and clicks can be removed. I find that to be utterly remarkable. I have already recovered damaged tracks from two sessions, about 17 or 18 tracks in total I think; half pops and clicks, the other half, clipped audio – and next, I am going to look at a session with 20 tracks (as mentioned above) that also have pop and click damage – these are “audio only” tracks made with the animoog, some of them quite beautiful, so I wanted to try and save as many of them as I can.

so far, when I have set out to recover tracks using adobe audition, I have managed to save every single track I attempted to save – I have 100% success rate, for pops, clicks, and clipping. that is also quite remarkable, but, I am fortunate, I’ve been fortunate. it takes a lot of patient work, to sit through and manually remove each click, pop, snap or bit of clipped audio, and in some cases, I had to make perhaps 50 or 60 “auto-heals” to a single track to rid it of all pops. you also have to be very careful with your auto healing, because it can slightly damage audio – but if you are very precise, use the smallest brush size possible for the pop, you usually end up with undamaged audio.

this also means, when I finish the next session, that I will have recovered something like 40 tracks, that in the tape recorder days, would have been written off as unusable, with no hope for repair – tracks that were literally brought back from the dead, as it were.

that is the good news.

the bad news is, it takes a long, long time to repair multiple pops, clicks or clipping; you have to be very patient, you have to be very careful (because it IS possible to damage the underlying audio) so what I do is I check each repaired pop or click by immediately listening back to it, to assure myself there is no audio damage. that really slows down the process, but, avoids any problems with damaged audio.

so for this last session, where I had nine tracks – five addictive synth pieces, and four animoog pieces – I probably spent something like six or seven hours, over a period of perhaps three or four days, working on them. just now – I just played them back on headphones, to listen very, very carefully to the results – and, for all nine tracks, there are absolutely no hints of any pops or clicks, and no sign of any audio damage at all – they are now very near “perfect”, they sound great, clean and tidy, and I cannot believe that a week ago, they were consigned for destruction.

how brilliant is that, really? I think this is one of the true miracles of digital recording, like undo and redo, the ability to repair damaged audio that was previously considered to be utterly unrepairable. that’s astonishing !

younger musicians will probably take this kind of thing for granted, but for older musicians such as myself, who grew up in the era of the “tape recorder” – these tools and processes are nothing short of utterly miraculous. also, as time goes on, and I listen to old recordings made on the teac 3340s four-track recorder, from the late 1980s and early 1990s…well, to be totally honest, I can’t remember, and I cannot fathom how I actually did it, I can’t really understand how I made it work without any digital tools!

miracles were performed, amazing “fixes” and punch-ins that were true feats of audio engineering – all of that bravado and skill, now made redundant, now just about completely unnecessary – because of the powerful tools built into programs like adobe audition.

I would also say, that as a recording tool, it’s very, very slick, I am falling in love with it all over again, as I fell in love with the power of cool edit pro back in the day. it has a lot of great built in tools, including amplitude and frequency analysis, not to mention a lot of really quality built in effects – I am really loving it so far.

I was spoiled, I was using the current version of audition (5.5, I think), on a trial basis, and then switched to this free version 3 – and, it’s maybe not quite as fancy – but functionally – it’s not really that different.

after a few days of using adobe audition version 3 – I am not missing the newest version any more, and I am very happy indeed using this “old” version. it does everything I need, without the slightly over-engineered clutter of a sonar…

digital recording can be very frustrating, it really can, and you can have so many problems with it, that sometimes, you long for the simplicity of that tape recorder. but…not me – I love digital recording, I don’t miss tape recorders, with their fragile tape, and rigid rules – so much can go so wrong, whereas in digital, if you are patient, and your system is stable – much, much goes right.

as far as the famous “digital” vs. “analogue” argument – well, I am all for a good bit of “tape warmth” but for me, the only realm where that matters is guitar amplifiers – they should have valves (tubes) in them, because for guitar, analogue/warm is better! but for the kind of music I play (mostly) quiet, very quiet, and quieter still, the digital realm is a much better one for me, because I can remove hiss, hum, pops, clicks, clipping and anything that gets in the way of the music…and digital does just capture the music, with no added harmonics from “analogue warmth”.

sure, I loved hearing my records on valve (tube) stereos and they did sound cool, and if I could afford one, I would buy one of those retro valve stereo systems that are about nowadays. I would also buy about ten different valve (tube) guitar amplifiers, too, including marshalls, fenders, and vox – not to mention, line 6, roland, pignose, and a few others, too! these require space and money…two commodities always in short supply.

but for recording clean, looped energy bow guitars in a big “reverb” room – digital is the way. if I were doing a lot of really distorted guitar, if I were playing rock or metal music, I would absolutely look to valve (tube) amps, but on the other hand, digital modelling has come a long, long way, and some of the amp “models” I have in some of my guitar applications, rival the real thing for amazing sound. as proof, I offer up my “gone native” album – every guitar sound is either a guitar synth, modelled guitar from the guitar synth, or modelled guitar from my line 6 x3 live – there is not a single “real” recording of a guitar through an amp on the record. and yet, if I didn’t tell you that – if you listened to the entire “gone native” album from start to finish – you would swear you were hearing guitar x through amp y. but – no, it’s all modelled, and if you work with your models, you can get some amazingly realistic guitar sounds.

analogue purists and my old friend, neil young, will disagree with me, but seriously, if you think about it, a recording played back through an analog valve (tube) amp will have a certain waveform, rich in harmonics. the same recording, played back through a solid state, digital system, will have a slightly different waveform, with fewer harmonics, actually representing the recorded sound without any additional colouration (which is what tube amps add to music – harmonics, colour, richness).

but either of those waveforms can be modelled, so the best modellers set up the real amp, with the real microphone, and use real guitars, to get the real, right modelled sound for tube amps. eventually, as modelling technology improves and improves, it will become impossible to distinguish between a “real” recording of a les paul through a marshal, and a “modelled” recording of a les paul through a marshall. I think that in some cases, the modelled sound already matches close enough to fool the ear. as example, I would point to my song “caladan” from “gone native” – this track features classical instrumentation, which augment a dual nylon string classical guitar solo. which when you listen to it – well, that’s what it sounds like. however – every sound in that track, except for the drum track – was made with the remarkable roland gr-55 guitar synthesizer – and to my ears, those “nylon guitars” you hear me playing during “caladan”…SOUND like real, nylon string classical guitars. again – if I had not told you it was a synth – you might never have realised. so modelling has become quite adept at fooling the ear, I believe.

I’d say it’s near impossible to discern the difference now. also, my guitar synth has an amazing “les paul” type sound, which is pretty damn accurate. which saves me a few grand that I don’t have anyway (for that les paul I have never owned, and never will, simply because I can’t afford a les paul!).

don’t get me wrong, I love valve (tube) amplifiers, for guitar, or for stereo – I grew up in the valve (tube) era, and my personal preference will always be a strat plugged into a marshall or a les paul plugged into a vox ac-30 or a fender super reverb (god I miss my super reverb!).

that’s an irresistible sound, it really is. but – technology is really catching up, modelling is getting much, much better, and it’s even got to the point where I’ve done some loud guitar improvs, using patches that involve modelled tube amps – and if you close your eyes and just listen – it’s not that easy to tell that it’s modelled…because even though it’s created digitally, it’s an exact match of the captured waveform of the analogue set up, so to the ears…it sounds like the warm, analogue guitar sound we all dream about.

nearly indiscernible from the real thing already, in a few years, even the most hardened “analogue purists” will be truly put to the test, because they will no longer be able to tell what is “real” analogue warmth as opposed to “modelled” analogue warmth. I already really can’t tell, and as I said, I’ve done some recording using ampkit plus on the ipad, that when you listen to them in headphones, you would swear they were made with a guitar plugged into a tube amp. seriously.

I am personally amazed by the way digital devices of all types mimic “analogue” sounds, even a first generation device like my now-ageing line 6 dl-4 delay pedal – it does some amazing tape echo sounds, and you can even dial in how much analogue “sound” you want for your patch – in fact, most of the best sounds on the DL-4 are modelled after tape echos, valve (tube) echos, and other ancient tech that just sounds good – but in that case, it’s digitally-recreating something that was originally created with some cumbersome and unreliable hardware (tapes and tubes, I am afraid to say!).

I know this first hand, because I used to own a tape-based echoplex – and that thing was a mechanical monstrosity! frankly, it was terrible – sure, it sounded awesome, but it was noisy, unreliable, prone to jamming – it was not the best piece of tech ever imagined. but – line 6, when creating the dl-4, modelled this type of echo unit beautifully – so you get the great analogue echo / delay sound, but in a much, much smaller box that is not nearly as prone to breaking, not nearly as idiosyncratic, as an original echoplex was!

it’s very odd thinking back to using that, it was the first delay device I ever owned, and I can remember playing my guitar through it when I lived in a place called fletcher hills, when I was about 15 years old – in fact, that’s where I met one of my oldest living friends, jim whitaker, a guitarist from whom I learned a lot, we made a lot of recordings together and played quite a few gigs together, too back in the late 1970s.

at that point in time, if you were a guitarist, your main sound-producing tools were:

a guitar

a guitar amplifier

and that was that. if you were really forward thinking, and wanted to have a huge palette of amazing sounds, you would expand this first like this:

a wah-wah pedal

a fuzz box

and then finally, going completely mad here, like this:

echoplex tape delay unit

so the guitar was…originally a no-name, red, semi-hollow f-hole electric, then, a three-pickup vox bulldog (god I wish I still had that ugly old guitar!) and then finally, a fender jaguar (god I wish I still had that beautiful old guitar!).

with these five items, you were fully prepared as a guitarist. in my case, the wah pedal was a vox clone, made by thomas organ (who bought the vox wah line, I think) and the fuzz box was a very used, very beat up original red arbiter fuzz face that joe norwood very kindly gave me (probably because it sounded horrible) – frankly, I don’t know how jimi got it to sound so, so good (probably something to do with the stacks of marshalls that I never had!) – because I never could. (you can hear this actual fuzz unit on a track I recorded with my best friend, the late ted holding, when we were about 15 or 16 years old, entitled “froggy’s holiday” – an instrumental, and during the song’s chorus, you can hear me clicking the fuzz on for my lead guitar part) – it was a pretty rough sound.

when I compare and contrast this utterly primitive set up, circa 1973, to my current guitar set up – 2013 – exactly forty years on – well, let’s just say, my 15-year old self would not have believed what can now be achieved with live guitar – imagine, such things as guitar synthesizers, looping, ebows, and reverse guitar – most of which, simply did not really exist in 1973, except perhaps in the very most expensive studios. so if I could have seen myself, from age 15, watching my 50-something self do a live loop with a guitar synth, playing oboes, flutes, and clarinets from the guitar fretboard, and recording and layering them live with a magic looping box – I simply would not believe my eyes or ears. that is how far guitar tech has come in forty years.

a sound as incredible and as exotic as reverse guitar, on the other hand, could only be achieved back then, by turning a tape over and playing forward against the running backwards track, and then turning the tape back over – trial and error style. so to have a device like the line 6 dl-4, where with one button push, your guitar is playing backwards, live…that would have been impossible, voodoo guitar magic of the most extreme kind imaginable.

jim whitaker and I would not have believed it – and in fact, I still kinda can’t believe it. I really can’t believe the rich and varied palette of sounds, and sound modifier, that I have to hand – it’s just amazing what technology can achieve now, it really, truly is.

in summation – analogue, tape recorders, and antique guitar gear all have their place, but there is no sin in using the very reliable, very clean world of pristine recording offered by digital recording – and, you can even save your “irreparably damaged” tracks – which I still find to be absolutely astonishing. for that alone, it’s worth paying the price of “the loss of analogue warmth”…which, as time goes by, that “price” diminishes each year, as modelling tech improves year by year.

possibly the most interesting observation I might make though, is that regardless of the state of my own personal guitar set up, or recording set up – is the fact that whether it was my 15-year old self playing guitar through a real tape echoplex, or, my 25-year old self playing through my first digitech rack mount multi-effects unit, the DSP-128, or, my 35-year old self playing guitar through multiple loopers such as the oberheim echoplex pro and the roland rc-50 looper through complex, multiple-path live guitar set-ups, or…my 45 year old self playing through state of the art modern stomp boxes such as the digitech time bender and doing post processing with a quality digital reverb such as breeze…or, my 50-something-year old self, playing through eventide space, the top of the line reverb available in a stomp box – no matter which of these “dave staffords” was playing through “what guitar rig” into “what tape recorder” or “what sound card”…the main thing is, I always, always, am totally immersed in the experience – I love playing the guitar.

and that is something that time, nor technology, will ever change…if I went back to guitar, amp and wah pedal now – I would make the best of it, I would have a go at “the burning of the midnight lamp” or “voodoo child (slight return)” or “white room” – all songs I’ve played over time – or something where the wah pedal would “work” as the sole effect.

why not – it sounded good then, it will still sound good now – which just goes to show, it’s not really the tools you have, it’s how you use them, that truly counts.

something that eno said has really stuck with me over the years, he was talking about synthesizers and how they give you too many choices, too many sounds (and I agree with that view, actually) and he was talking about the yamaha dx-7, and how in his opinion, it had a very small handful of really, really good sounds that it made, and the rest were dispensable. he would rather just use that one good sound, the one really good sound, than switch between 10, or 100, bad sounds. I call this “the eno principle”, and each time I assess my collection of sound-producing devices, I make a conscious effort to PARE DOWN to only the sounds that are the best – and not use the others. it’s hard work, but you should stick with what sounds good – and avoid presets or patches that don’t totally en-thrall you. too much choice is sometimes not so good…

eno noticed then, that some devices did one thing particularly well, so he would just use that device for that one purpose, rather than any of it’s other possible uses – use it for what it does best. and that makes sense to me.

so over the years, whenever I get a new instrument or effect, I always try to identify the handful of sounds it makes or processes that are truly, truly amazing or beautiful – and I then pretty much only use those sounds. I used to use the dx-7 in performance with bindlestiff, and it had about 8 sounds that I really loved, so in every gig, when I played the synth, those were the 8 sounds I would use. the other hundred odd sounds – rarely were used or heard.

In the same way today, in the studio, if an instrument or effect has a truly, truly beautiful sound – then I use it, and I use it repeatedly – because it’s good!

one current example of that is the line 6 dl-4 delay – I have more than one delay, and since I have the digitech time bender delay which is smaller, more compact, more modern, and more capable – I’ve decided to let the dl-4 do what it does best – reverse guitar.

so – the dl-4 stompbox is now on one of the ancillary “lines” going to one of the mixers, and it’s set to reverse guitar – so when I switch to that line, I get – instant reverse guitar – it’s always there, it always sounds beautiful – and I don’t have to then spend time calling that sound up on the time bender, or on any of the other devices I have that might also produce it. so I’ve taken the dl-4, picked one of the very best sounds it makes, and dedicated it to making just that beautiful, reverse guitar sound…why not?

so these great sounding patches or effects become the unique musical language that defines you, certain “set-ups” become “your sound”, and in my case, an ebow guitar (preferably a guitar with humbucking pickups), with the tone control on the guitar turned off, into a clean, reverb room, looping with the roland rc-50 looper (or any looper) – is very much a “dave stafford” sound. that simple, simple “set-up”, is basically what I used to make the entire album “the haunting” – simplicity itself – clean, clear reverbed guitar, energy bow guitar.

as another example, the roland gr-55 guitar synthesizers’s “go to” sound is absolutely, without a doubt, “rich strings” – which I return to again and again, because it sounds really good, and, it works really well in loops – so it’s a perfect candidate to become a standard “dave stafford” sound…again, why not?

of course, I do use “other sounds”, and I do look at, work on, and conjure up lots of new sounds to try out – always. and occasionally, I hit upon one, a combination of guitar synth, guitar, and effects, perhaps, that I really, really like the sound of – so I remember that one, so I can use it again.

this current world of digital recording, the digital here and now…to that starry-eyed 15-year old jimi hendrix wannabe, would have been an impossible, unbelievable world – not real, not possible, totally unbelievable. yet, that same boy is still here, and that imaginary digital world, where backwards guitars were magic, has turned out to be true – but I still can’t believe the sounds that can come out of an electric guitar – it’s absolutely unbelievable.

I’m sat here listening to some eventide space demos that I recorded in december, and a piece entitled “nature’s wrath” has come on – and it’s simply, the weirdest, most shocking, craziest guitar tone I have ever heard in my entire life. it is a reverb with a large component of very warped time and a lot of distortion – an amazing sound.

I think it’s one of vernon reid’s “artist presets” but whatever it is, when you manipulate the expression pedal as you play, the stereo sonic smack effect is unbelievable – it’s based on the reverb model “mangleverb” so that gives you a hint, and distortion is a major component in the reverb sound – to me, it’s just astonishing that such a patch can even exist. playing through it – well, that’s an experience once again…and, an experience that the 15-year old dave stafford could not have even imagined. but here he is, somehow, in 2013, travelled forward in time – playing that sound, making the magic sounds that he would have once thought to be completely…impossible!

so – forty years – from analogue to digital – from real instruments to ipad applications – from primitive to modern – it’s been a long and interesting journey, and I cannot wait to see, and more importantly, hear, where the next ten, twenty, thiry years of technological advances will take we musicians…but wherever it is, I want to go !!!

I cannot wait.

🙂

the return of adobe audition / guitar synth sessions

Posted by pureambient on January 15, 2013

over the past few days, I’ve been involved in mixing tracks from a live improv guitar synth session recorded way back on february 26, 2012, and it’s been a challenging and interesting session indeed.

first of all, I am using a different tool for the final mixes, a tool I’ve used before, but now, I am sure that I will eventually invest in, instead of trialling it, and that is adobe audition 5.5.

when cool edit pro disappeared way back when, i’d heard vaguely that it had been taken over by adobe, and that’s welcome news, but I didn’t really mean to wait ten years to check out what adobe had done with the cool edit pro code…but basically, that’s what happened. I’ve been “making do” with other audio tools in the interim, sonar, sony sound forge, t-racks 3, and so on – so imagine my astonishment then, at seeing just how very far the original excellent ideas that cool edit pro espoused, have been carried through, brought up to date, and even into the future, by adobe with audition.

for audio – this is just heaven. for the first time since the cool edit pro days, I can do noise reduction properly – fft style! – by taking a sample of the noise I want rid of, and then applying that to the track or section I want to clean. there were some strange residual artefacts in some silences in take 9, the take I’m currently working on – and audition’s fft-style noise reduction cleaned them perfectly.

then there is the amazingly efficient pop removal tool, the “auto healing” brush. I’ve tried a lot of different methods of removing pops and clicks over the years – and this one actually works. it takes a bit of practice, but if you are careful, you can totally remove every pop and click without any damage to the actual music. it’s a visual system, and it works really, really well.

for just those two practical, sensible tools, I am already sold, but then last night, I was trialling many, many echoes, delays and reverbs in the tool – and for built in effects, they are just outstanding. I’d also already had a really positive experience using audition during the final mastering of “gone native” – using it to measure the effective levels, using the really sophisticated and most excellent analysis tools, so I could gauge the best levels for the tracks on the record – that was an invaluable help at the time.

not to mention, multiple levels of selectable undo – listed right there for you to choose from. brilliant!

I still have a couple of sessions that have disastrous pops in them, which I never had time to cleanse when I had the trial of audition earlier this year, so for me, just for the effective pop removal tool, it’s a no-brainer. but it’s also a great, great tool for editing audio, making mp3s, etc. – it pretty much does it all.

this is the first time in a long time that I’ve mixed something outside of sonar, and I wasn’t really missing anything, sonar does have some nice plug ins, but from what I understand, audition supports vst as well, so I am going to be trying out breeze and my mellotron and so on to see how audition does with them – watch this space.

I could also switch to a hybrid scenario, where I record in sonar, apply any plug-ins or reverbs I need, deal with any midi tracks, and once I have a decent sub-mix, send it to audition (which I can actually, probably, just call from sonar – so no need to export!) for final touches.

I got excellent results, and in fact, I ended up doing two additional mixes of take 9, to test out the effect of different delays and levels of reverb on the track, and in listening to the mixes today, it’s done a great job – I am particularly pleased with how well the fft style noise reduction cleaned up those strange noises in the silences, that is fabulous, that was something I loved about cool edit pro, and in fact, back in the day, most of what I was doing was converting master reel to reel tapes of either dave stafford solo albums, or bindlestiff/band albums, to digital, the very first thing I would have to do would be take noise samples (I ended up with a big library of fft files by the time I was done!) and noise reduce the entire master just to get rid of all the hiss and noise from the tape…and it worked beautifully.

so to finally have that tool back, configured the way I prefer (even better, now) is invaluable to me, and, with all the unfortunate popping that I’ve been cursed with this year in particular, on sessions that are very important to me, I am equally enamoured of the most excellent pop removal tool – I love it – I am absolutely loving adobe audition.

this will probably also mean that I don’t need to use sound forge any more, because from what I can tell, audition is superior in almost every department – including specialised, extensive analysis tools, another huge plus in my book. I also love the little “instant level” adjuster, a tiny digital potentiometer that hovers in every track, and you can instantly raise or lower the level in db for any section or the whole piece on the fly – a little too quiet? tweak the pot, and it ups the level, and saves the file – all without bothering you. that’s a brilliant idea, leaving me free to get on with the work – no dialogue necessary for this most basic of functions! excellent.

anyway, the track I’m working with had quite a few challenges, I feel it’s an interesting track, it’s certainly imperfect, as improvs often are, so I used the tools in audition to try and improve the parts of the song that I felt were not 100% up to scratch, and mostly, what I’ve done has really, really helped the track a lot.

I had originally intended only to release one improv from this session, take 10, which is now retitled “extreme gradient” but I went back and listened to the entire session, and the somewhat raw take 9 – which has now been retitled “provide the spark” – leapt out at me as being a strong contender – because of a unique and bizarre accidental “introduction”.

a fragment of a loop got caught in the looper, so this was a short sound, with a gap in between it, a short duration event in a short loop. it was playing along, so I just let it play, and instead of clearing the loop and starting the take, for some strange reason (none of the other 17 takes have this intro) I decided to just overdub this running loop, and then launch into the song proper.

so as this short sound was repeating, I started inserting short bursts of guitar synth, two notes, one note, on top of it, in successive iterations, and very quickly built up a strange, strange “mini-loop”, with a gap in between, that continued to repeat right up until the point, about a minute and a half or so into the piece, where I then started to play the main improv I was working on that day.

at first I thought, this is just too strange, I am not sure I can actually use this for a video, but as time went by, I “got used” to this strange introduction, so I decided to work up the track in a mix and see what I could do with it. one aspect of the loop was that it went on a few bars longer than I would have wanted, so to try and add some variety, I used audition to add in a nice delay about half way through the iterations, and then a more extreme delay towards the end – I took a preset delay called “delicate whispering” and altered it to fit the time signature of the piece, eventually (after many attempts) getting the right delay sound – not too overbearing, but enough to differentiate the final iterations of the loop from the first ones – and I think I have succeeded.

as often happens with loops, they can sometimes grow too loud too quickly, so again, I was able to “grab” sets of iterations, and selectively lower their levels (by grabbing in the gaps around them) so that the whole level of the looped section became more even.

the final tweak came at the end of the song, where I originally meant to have a sort of xtc/”great fire” gradual move from dry to reverbed, but in the end, while I did do a variation of that, I actually reverbed different sections of the final guitar solo with different levels of reverb, which had the desired effect – again, trying to instill some variance in this section of the song, and sometimes a bit of reverb is just the thing.

so there is very dry guitar, very dry guitar synth, and then very wet guitar, and very wet guitar synth – lots of variations – which you kind of need on a track where basically, I am playing a lead solo throughout the track – without variations, without a bit of delay and reverb to break things up, it would have sounded like a four minute fifteen second guitar solo – prefaced by a long, strange loop. (of course, that is what it really is, but hey!) – I think I have altered it just enough to make it interesting, and improved it’s user-friendliness a hundredfold in the process…and that’s all thanks to audition, and a bit of creative thinking – and, the tool is so intuitive, so easy to use – of course, probably since it’s the descendent of cool edit pro, I still recognise it’s functions, but it’s so completely different from cool edit pro that actually, it’s almost unrecognisable as ever having anything to do with cool edit pro – stripped down, rebuilt from the ground up – as with many adobe products – this one oozes pure class.

having said all this, I still have a third option with this strange loop – to release the untreated version. my main motivation for working on the alternate mixes of “provide the spark” was more about learning more about audition and what it can do, and I had a great time trialling various excellent echoes, delays, and reverbs – I had a blast, and it even boasts successive equalisation of repeats in some of the more complex echoes, delays and reverbs, not to mention – of course – 5.1 reverbs, which can be customised for the 5.1 environment! I’ve never seen a 5.1 reverb until last night – wow!

so in listening this morning, I am comparing my original “dry” mix, which uses only the effects present in the live/looped performance (which were considerable, by the way), to two different alternate versions that had been noise reduced, levels adjusted, delays and reverbs added, and trying to decide what makes the most sense for the video.

after listening to all three mixes a few times this morning, my view so far is this: it’s between the original untouched mix, and the second delay/reverb mix – the first delay/reverb mix has too heavy a delay on the last section of the loop.

I think in the end, I may start again with the untouched loop, and do just the noise reductions, and the level adjustments on the loop – and some very careful reverbs at the end – and see where that gets me. if still not satisfied, I will then approach some kind of delay on the last parts of the loop, similar to the on in “version 3” that I am favouring at the moment.

I believe what this means is that, after two nights of work, that I am still not happy, and I want to take more time and see if I can get a “best of all worlds” mix – addressing the needs of the loop, and of the main track, effectively. I am getting close, and these rough mixes are certainly helping me gauge what else I might need to try…

luckily, I now have a great tool on hand to mix with, well, I actually have several great tools, and that’s the beauty of having daw, you have lots of options – within sonar itself, I have so many mix options, so many plug ins, it’s not funny, and then on top of that, I have several external tools, of which audition is just one, to aid in getting the best sound possible…so I feel totally spoiled for choice. I also have the t-racks system, which I have yet to explore…

audition is a definite new year purchase, meanwhile, I plan to use my current trial version for another few weeks to clean up some sessions that have been patiently waiting for me to do just that – in particular, a really good session with the ipad from april 7, 2012, demonstrating the amazing power of some of the synthesizer apps, ended up with a lot of pops due to a usb conflict, so I had to shelve several really promising tracks that should have been made into videos for the applicationhd channel – well, hopefully, if I can clean them up, they now eventually, better late than never, will be. I really want to get those tracks out there as they are really remarkable, albeit currently spoiled by many, many pops. (note: in the interim, all of these tracks have been cleaned up and are now pop-less, and are ready to be released!).

this and another session (at least – probably more sessions that I don’t know about yet, as my backlog is still quite extensive at this point in time) are plagued by pops and clicks, and I am sure that here and there there will also be other clicks and pops, and if I end up buying audition, then I need never worry about that again – I have the perfect tool to sort those out (not to mention, I can use it on the audio from old tapes of every description, even vinyl noise – I can clean up anything with this suite of tools).

once I get back into digitizing tapes (a room full of cassettes and tapes awaits me, as always) that fft style noise reduction will also give me great value, so I can reduce noise and remove clicks and pops…

the current version of audition is pricey, yes, but to my mind, it’s worth it for the time and trouble it will save in cleaning up “difficult audio”.

and I seem to have rather a lot of that about the place.

while I certainly have no lack of music to work on, I will say, it’s remarkable to have such a capable and diverse tool set with which to restore and improve audio. I am loving audition – in any of it’s versions, right back to it’s genesis as cool edit pro 🙂

the music of the moment – last minute adjustments – “flying solo”

Posted by pureambient on July 17, 2012

well, I stated my goal for this past weekend as doing the needed repairs on the one unfinished song from “gone native”, “flying solo”, and, dealing with the album artwork.

while I can’t say that both are finished, I made significant progress on both, and I a pretty certain that “flying solo” is complete, whereas the artwork, well, we did photos over the weekend, and sketched out some cover ideas, but that just needs more time – one possible idea for a cover has been conceived, front and back, so that just needs more work during the coming week.

as far as repairing “flying solo” goes, well, it’s been a really interesting experience. first, I don’t believe I have ever tried to “reverse engineer” a guitar part that I had previously recorded, which is a challenge to begin with, however, in this case, it was made even more difficult by the fact that said guitar part was originally completely improvised, take one, off the top of my head.

in the event, it proved to be quite, quite difficult to “learn” an improvised guitar part – more difficult than I would have imagined, a two-hour session last saturday, with 8 takes made, yield no clear winners but it did mean that after two hours, I had pretty much mastered the form of the part – which is a solo guitar, with no accompaniment at first, so about a minute playing utterly on my own, and then the drums and existing guitar solo come in, and I then had the beat to play along to – and then another brief solo section at the end.

returning to the piece on sunday, I did a further ten takes, with take ten marked “best” – and, it does have a clearly superior (and new) ending. in fact, in many ways, it’s entirely better than the original track. however, there are two notes in the introduction that went slightly out of tune, so something will need to be done to fix that – probably “fly in” those notes or that phrase from another take would be simplest, and take 6 from sunday seems to have a “good” intro, so it’s a likely candidate.

I did do some very rough tests last night, using 95% of take ten as the take, and flying in part of take 6 for the questionably-tuning notes, and it seems like it is a winner with that slight adjustment. of course, I really was trying to get the entire take live, but after 18 tries, I think 95% live might be all I can manage – sure, I could do many more takes, until I got one that was more perfect, but – I doubt I would get the beautiful ending that I improvised on take ten again…

It’s disappointing though, because on a couple of occasions, I got VERY near to nailing the entire thing in one live take, which of course I would have preferred. I found it strangely difficult to “play” this part, it was like learning someone else’s guitar part, and it took a lot of work to make it sound natural, as if it were improvised – which strangely, originally – it was…but now, it’s a re-creation of an improvised part.

the fun part of this though was the middle section, when the drums and guitar solo come in, I just completely improvised the rhythm guitar that went behind the central solo, in the original version, I had just taken a section of the improv guitar, and “looped” it as a backing, so now, the song has a proper rhythm guitar part, including a lot of really strange harmonics and bending – strange because of the synth voice I used, “flying tremolo” – which does some amazing things to the sound of your guitar, especially when you play harmonics. I thoroughly enjoyed playing a sort of adrian-belew-vamp behind the solo, and I think it has improved the song greatly to have a new intro, backing rhythm for the solo, and outro – nearly captured in one very good take.

the two notes in question are right at the top of the neck, and you guitarists will know that if you “miss” hitting these notes with extreme accuracy, they WILL go out of tune. it’s a shame, because those two notes are “right” on most of the other 17 takes, but never mind.

I am also tempted, now that I know the part like the back of my hand, to possibly have one more go at it – it depends, if I can find an intro that I love, or that can be used to repair my near-perfect take ten, then I would just use that, but if I can’t…I may end up playing this two-minute guitar part yet again…I want it to be right, and if possible, to be perfect.

re-recording the part has changed the character of the piece a little bit, but not in a bad way, I actually think that piece is stronger now, especially since I totally improvised the middle section EACH time, on every take, I did it differently each time, “learning” parts and then discarding them, replacing them with better ideas, learning what NOT to do – and by the time I got to take ten on the second day, I actually had constructed, almost by accident, a rhythm guitar part that really works with the piece. I knew exactly how to handle it, and I even introduced a chord change in two spots that did not exist in the original. why not?

the new introduction, well, it’s very nearly the same as the old one, but hopefully this time, with no inherent distortion (levels are being kept on the low side just in case). the intro was made even more difficult in that I had to calculate the timing “blind” – I had to play for a certain amount of time, play all the notes, octaves and chords planned, and end up on a descending riff of G, F#. E, D# JUST as the snare drum comes in… so that is a feat of extreme estimation – start too fast, you end up early, start too slow – late – and it was not easy ending up at JUST the right spot every time. to my credit, I did make it there at the right time on the majority of the takes – you just “get it” after a while, you know just how long you have…

much to my everlasting astonishment, on most takes, I ended up there at precisely the right moment – basically because I was playing the part correctly – but a couple of times, my tempo would stray, and I would end up either early or late – not that that is a huge issue, because of course in SONAR I could just move the intro to where it needed to be – if I detached it from the rhythm guitar that follows. but it was and is my preference to play the part right, from start to finish, and not resort to any moving of guitar parts, and I think my current solution, using almost ALL of take ten, plus a tiny bit of take six (or another one if I find a better candidate) – take ten went extraordinarily well, and I really liked the ending I played, it was very gentle at the end, ending on a barre e minor on the 12^th fret – strangely, a couple of beats AFTER the drummer hit his final cymbal crash, but it was always meant to be some solo guitar after the drums finished – and I held the chord briefly, and then stopped it – which has the strangest, most wonderful effect of doing a sort of detune-then-fade out – thanks to the very odd “flying tremolo” patch – it gave me the perfect ending – very pretty followed by a briefly detuned, dissonant farewell – the sweet followed by the sour – which worked out perfectly. if the synth hadn’t of done that, the ending would have been too sickly sweet, so I am really glad it did!

so my first experience of learning a “dave stafford guitar part” – an improvised, take one part was – that it was bloody difficult to learn, and nearly as difficult to play! that surprised me, because I thought “it will be easy” – but in the end, it turned out to be difficult enough that it took me four hours of practice to play one minute of guitar “well” – because once I got to the end of the intro, I just “wung it” (that being the past tense of “winging it” I assume) and made up the entire thing from middle section onwards through the ending – and that was really fun, playing along to this very outrageous solo, a very loud and “in your face” solo, and trying to make it work in the “reverse engineered” fashion – it was a blast..

I’m sure if it had been any other part, it would have been much easier to “re-learn” but by chance, this particular little piece of music is quite tricky – it starts with an e minor ninth chord at the root, which then jumps up to a high melody beginning on the 15^th fret; then, back down to the root for another e minor chord, with a 2 note trill; then, jump back up to the 12^th fret, a climb up the e minor scale across the strings, and then a really high melody including an incredibly hard to replicate top-string bent D to E at the 22^nd fret followed instantly by a two note trill on the second string, and then a couple more difficult trills on the third string…then a reverse strummed e minor chord at the 12^th fret which then turns into a riff that climbs up from the 12^th fret e on the low string, resolving on the third string in an F# (to re-iterate the e minor ninth theme present throughout) – then, a section involving some octaves played on the fifth and third string, that eventually climb up to a final strummed chord e minor chord with a set of descending half-step note pairs, descending down across the 12^th fret; then a jump back down from the 12^th fret to the root, and at last to that final four-note ascending pattern, coming off an e minor chord…into the middle section.

written like that, above, it sounds as difficult as it was, I really had to analyse it to truly become familiar with every nuance, but now it’s committed to memory, I could play it live if I had to – and maybe I will, as it’s a very distinctive piece indeed.

I assume that I will resolve this eventually with a new mix that I am happy with, and I love the “new” middle part and ending – even if I am never 1000% happy with every note in the impossibly-designed introduction – it’s just bloody difficult, so I definitely challenged myself there…but then I never dreamed when I was originally playing it, on march 6, 2011, that I would have to come back a year and a bit later, and try to re-play it – if I had known, I would have played something easier to learn!

it doesn’t surprise me, however, the lengths I will go to, to try and “save” a song that has problems, especially if I think that the song is a good song – I will spend a disproportionate amount of time “fixing” a song that I spent three minutes making, originally – because I care about the music being “right” – and for me, “right” means, basically, perfect, or as perfect as it can be given my current faculty on the instrument in question…

the passing of the “album”…how we view recorded music now

Posted by pureambient on July 13, 2012

well, they make jokes about it now, about vinyl albums, about “sides”, about those big, square cardboard containers with their big, circular chunk of vinyl – but when I was a teenager and a young man, we didn’t have the CD format, and we certainly couldn’t have imagined something as exotic and unlikely as “downloads” – so it’s remarkable how much has changed, in the way music is delivered, over a very short period of time.

in a similar way as my previous blog topic, the running order, the “album side” has also come to my attention, of course, because I have just “finished” an album – or rather, finished the music for an album – because of course again, now, the real work has to begin – all of the detailed work that supports an album release.

because I am a bit…older…in my mind, albums are still albums, and they still have two “sides”. so for “gone native”, in my head; side one is active rock songs, side two is experimental music, loop music, ambient guitar and so on. for anyone a bit younger than me – well, it’s a CD, or it’s a download album of 20 tracks – there are no “sides”.

which I believe, in many ways, is a real shame. first of all, it makes having “concept albums” much more difficult – in the vinyl days, you could have a concept for side one, and a different concept for side two. or, you could spread two parts of a long work over two album sides…and it is a bit sad that you can’t really do that with the CD format.

there were a lot of options! and while the compact disc does offer a lot of advantages, there is, perhaps, something lost as well – certainly the artwork suffers; and vinyl purists will say that a certain audio warmth has been lost as well. for me – well, I hated surface noise and scratches so much, that I can accept that “loss” without complaint – but it’s difficult for some people, the CD format.

for me though, I am forever thinking of most recordings as vinyl albums, having two (or more) “sides” – and each side has it’s own character, a good example of this is “all things must pass” by george harrison from 1970 – a triple album, six sides – four sides of which, are normal “songs”, the last two sides, are jam sessions – “apple jam” (since it’s on the apple label, a very handy joke indeed) – but that was very distinctive, you knew what to expect. so putting on side one, would be a very different experience to putting on side six. when you wanted to reflect and listen – side one. when you wanted to rock and roll, with eric clapton, george harrison, and a host of superstar musicians jamming madly – side five or side six. easy!

and whether it was intended or not, you would develop fondness for a particular side, if I use the beatles as example now, the white album: a double album, four “album sides” – I think everyone who owned it on vinyl, as I did, thinks of this record in terms of the side they love the most – for me that is undoubtedly side 3, because of the presence of so many amazing songs, and to this day, when I go to listen to the white album, I will often select “disc 2”, and stop the disc after “long, long, long” – that’s the old vinyl “side 3”. birthday, yer blues, mother nature’s son, everybody’s got something to hide (except me and my monkey), sexy sadie, helter skelter, long, long, long – I will never forget that running order. that’s my “side 3” of the white album…

it even allowed artists to name their albums in a peculiar way, for example, a normal, single vinyl LP by the raspberries was named “side 3” – because it was their third “side”, third album (not because it had three sides…however…see below).

or, with a self-titled album from todd rundgren’s utopia, where there were literally only three “sides” worth of music (because, in that case, that was all the songs they had)– the fourth side just being blank vinyl! – but, this practice goes way back, “second winter” by johnny winter, an album from the 1970s, is another example of a three-sided album…(my pal jim whitaker had this album, I never owned it, but I remember thinking “how peculiar”…that it had three sides…).

so: the compact disc isn’t able to have “sides”, so you do miss out on these peculiarities, some of which made for some very charming, entertaining and clever/artistic/unique ideas from musicians (or the artists representing the musicians)…and it’s been a little bit more difficult to do this type of creative packaging in the CD format – difficult, but not impossible, and I am sure we could all cite examples of unusual and creative CD packaging, but, as clever as some of those are – there will never be anything quite like the vinyl album, with it’s massive 12 X 12 inch canvas “work space”, where musicians could create or have created, a lot of very large scale artwork to attract (or repel, as the case may be) potential customers.

and, you can no longer have three-sided albums, or even make jokes about having three “sides” as the raspberries did – actually, they were very serious, not really joking – you get one, one long block of time, for your digital music now, and that’s the CD – here to stay I think; and despite a lot of vinyl purists’ complaints about the sonic problems CDs allegedly have, I for one, do not miss….surface noise, crackles, pops, snaps, hiss, distortion, “vinyl warmth” and all the other problems that vinyl had – when I used to buy vinyl, I returned almost as much as I bought, because of these problems – I despised the idea of trying to listen to MUSIC…through a barrage of snap, crackle and pop. (michael dawson, you remember this!).

this became extreme during the oil crisis, when the quality of vinyl plummeted to new depths; and I can remember buying really quiet, ambient records like eno’s “music for airports” –over and over again and and then immediately returning it, over and over again, until I got a copy that was only 2% noise instead of 17% noise.

even then, I would take the precaution of recording each and every record, once, to a high quality chrome cassette, and then NEVER playing the vinyl – and if the cassette died, then I had a near mint vinyl “master” to repopulate a new cassette. this system worked reasonably well – I would listen to the cassette, and put the once-played vinyl away for safe-keeping – but it should never have had to have been invented, the poor quality of vinyl made it unavoidable.

I recently found “crib notes” for transferring vinyl to cassette, where I timed out the spaces between songs, so I could quickly remove the crackling between tracks, so I would do a sort of “live mix” to cassette, removing the noise during the spaces between songs – talk about an extreme desire for SILENCE surrounding my music! but that’s what I want – music, with silence in between. and blessedly – the CD gives us that! – so I consider it to be a modern miracle, because it actually solved this problem for me. as an ambient musician, I’ve struggled to acheive silence between my tracks, and in them when it makes sense, and it’s difficult to keep noise, and clicks pops out of very quiet music…difficult, but not impossible.

I don’t miss any of that crackle and pop nonsense, and buying a quiet album now (on CD, obviously!) is a pleasure instead of a test, I am just horrified by good, clean music being damaged by surface noise and crackles and pops – it totally spoiled my enjoyment, so I for one, will always love the CD format, long may it thrive…of course, some day, it WILL be superseded by something (although I cannot imagine what) but I am sure whatever that is will be spectacular.

since I have just finished recording “gone native”, this question of “sides” and “concepts” has returned to haunt me, and I was feeling a bit regretful that there is no way now, when I go to have “gone native” pressed up, really, that I can have a two-sided record, because if this had been back in the vinyl days, I would have had a definite running order, a definite set of “loud” songs on side one, and a set of “quieter” songs on side two – but all I can do is make note of this on the CD sleeve; perhaps, leave a space or gap of seventeen seconds between the two “sides” – that might be one idea, I don’t know, but I am regretting that just this once, for my ultimate guitar album, that I can’t have it be “two-sided”. oh well, this is progress I suppose…

the idea of “sides” really lends itself well to concepts, and for “gone native”, it’s not just loud and soft, rock and ambient – it’s a lot more, it’s also, to some extent, past and future: side one, is a set of rock/progressive rock songs I’ve developed over the past three and a half years, side two, more recent loops and experiments and examples of extreme guitaring – the future of dave stafford guitar, because the tracks on side two are the first examples of the work I will be working on going forward, including a lot of very exciting music using either soft synths – software synthesizers – and/or, application-based music, using iPad apps for guitar or iPad app synths…

sure, I can just “explain” that there are meant to be two sides, as I just did, and that’s fine, but somehow, it’s just not the same. I wish we had unlimited funds, because if we did, I would do a short run of heavyweight vinyl for “gone native” along with the CD run, which would mean I could then realise my vision for the “two-sided” version of the record. but – it’s just a question of timing, if I had made this record in 1979 (when I probably should have) it may have been on vinyl with a “later” CD release…since it’s going to (hopefully) come out in 2012, it will be CD only with alternate downloads.

…unless I can get 500 vinyl pre-orders (highly doubtful), that is not ever going to happen…but that’s OK, my main concern is the music, and that is actually best delivered via download or via CD, not so much on vinyl 🙂

speaking of “gone native”, there is going to be an unavoidable delay before I can continue to work required to actually get the record released, which frustrates me no end, as I’ve wanted to release this album for more than three years!

but I am just having to patient – I have multiple issues, from hardware failure (my main work laptop is now down, it does need a new fan I am afraid) to other unavoidable facts – such as – I haven’t even begun to look at the artwork, which is holding me up, so that is what I am going to work on. unfortunately, an image I really wanted to use, is unavailable to me, so, I have to start over from square one…but, I have some ideas, so I am sure that will be sorted out soon enough.

I can’t really move forward at all, broken laptop and all, without the artwork, so I can’t even set up the downloads at this point in time, so unfortunately, I am just having to wait for the laptop to be repaired, work on the artwork over the weekend – but as soon as I am able to push the release forward, of course, I will!

there are other aspects of pre-release that I can work on, such as samples of the songs on the discography, other web site updates, etc. so I will be working on those while I am waiting for the main release to finally occur.

despite any delays or setbacks, I am really excited about the impending release of “gone native”, more excited than I have been about any album of mine, for a long, long time; and I am pleased to say it looks like as well as making the album available for download in the pureambient store, that it appears that we will be able to produce a limited edition CD of some kind, so of course, once I have more information on that, I will let you know.

I think regardless of format, despite the fact that we’ve lost some of the idiosyncrasies of the vinyl album format, that the concept of “album”, even without sides, still exists – people still think of a CD release as being an “album” (at least, I believe that older people do – not sure if younger people would maybe just call it a “CD” – I do not know) so I think the idea of an “album”, as a collection, a scrapbook, a snapshot, a group of songs that serve a common purpose or denote a key theme, will be with us for a long time still.

that certainly describes “gone native” – it’s a collection of songs and more abstract works, but in my mind, it’s an album, and it will always be an album, regardless of what names get applied to it over the years.

I think that “changing formats” demands in turn, that we change in the way we think about music, and I look forward to whatever the next great innovation is, I’ve seen the vinyl album be replaced by the CD, I’ve then seen the CD partially replaced by the download (legal and illegal, I am afraid) and I am not sure what might be next – but I am betting that it will be very, very cool !

so – is the album dead? – I do not know; the album is dead <?!!?>, long live the album…

the importance of the album “running order”

Posted by pureambient on July 9, 2012

first of all, I’d like to apologise for the length of time between posts – I can say happily that it’s for a good reason – the work on “gone native”, which is getting closer and closer to reality every day – the work continues.

secondly, I just want to mention that further down in this posts, there are links to both audio and videos that feature on gone native, so if there is to be a “sneak preview” of the album, this is it – three excerpts of earlier demos of songs from side one, and a few videos for tracks from side two of the record – the ambient/experimental side – so please check out the links below.

third – here we go:

because of the continuing work on the pre-production of “gone native”, various topics surrounding releases keep coming to mind, and this is one topic that I have long held as significant – I really feel that the very best records are made or broken by the order in which the songs are presented.

I know for a fact that george martin worked very closely with the beatles to establish the best possible running order for each beatles album (even including the very early ones!), and lennon went on to say later, how appalled he was by the re-ordering of tracks on the beatles “albums” created by capitol america for the american teenage market in the early 1960s – how the beatles had chosen the songs for the british albums with care, in a very specific running order for very specific musical reasons – and then capitol america just ignored that completely, releasing songs out of sequence in the bizarrely constructed “capitol masters” series. (and, myself being born american, now british, I grew up hearing those wrong, incorrect, bastardised capitol “versions”..a fact that fills me with a gentle horror now – and even in that very wrong form, that music WAS still brilliant…). note: that did NOT stop me from buying the capitol masters vol. I so I could hear them in that childhood-memory order!

it was not until I was fully adult that I realised that I had been…swindled in this way, that I had never heard the beatles albums properly, the way the beatles intended – so, in 1987, when they did the first release of the beatles albums on CDs, I bought them all – and was amazed to find, for example, that “yellow submarine” is actually a track from “revolver”, and other similar, remarkable running-order discoveries – the british records make SENSE; the running orders make much more musical sense when heard in the original british releases…

now that I am used to them, the british ones seem right, the american, wrong (so what’s new there?) but I’m here more specifically to talk about running orders in general, not for the beatles, so shifting back to that topic…

in the here and now, the running order of “gone native” is something I’ve given considerable thought to, and it’s ended up, by intent, partially chronological (side one), but partially, musical (side two) – so the earliest rock songs begin the record, with the very first rock song recorded, “thanks frank” (remarkably, originally recorded, in a tour de force I-can’t-believe-I-nailed-that-guitar-part take one, in november, 2008 !!) in the lead-off position – followed immediately by my first two pieces featuring all of my “new” 2009 tech: sonar 4, the line 6 x3 live, and the m-tron pro mellotron – “open to anything” and “force of nature”. these were the earliest songs created using these exciting new tools, which soon led to much more sophisticated song construction: more complex pieces still followed: “wettonizer”, “sinuous thread” and “what are souls made of”; full-on multi track extravaganzas, including not only mellotrons but real bass, and lots and lots and LOTS of guitars…

having the m-tron pro mellotron soft synth available was hugely inspirational, and I was working simultaneously on several active tracks for “gone native” that rely on the presence of the mellotron to bring the mostly rock / prog / guitar-based work to life, and at the same time, I was creating the all-mellotron, all m-tron pro created ambient album “sky full of stars” (released in late 2011) – so getting that mellotron made so much difference to both my active music and my ambient music – I don’t know what I would do without it now, and, it’s also a huge part of the upcoming “scorched by the sun” record, “dreamtime” – where I have overdubbed m-tron pro “mellotrons” onto bryan helm’s remarkable series of basic tracks – so again, the m-tron pro has shown it’s worth in that project as well as my own two album projects…

for the tracks on “gone native” that feature mellotron (most of the songs on side one do) it might be anything from the simple flute part at the end of “force of nature”, to complex overlays of black sabbath sound effects in “sinuous thread” – despite the fact that this is primarily an album about guitar, guitar, and more guitar, the addition of the mellotron parts, in all of the songs where it appears, gives the pieces a unique atmosphere that would be hard to create using any “ordinary” soft synth – the m-tron pro is unique, and it will always be my “go-to” soft synth – always.

– and then – life happened, and I wasn’t able to work on the album for many, many months – time then was often spent doing definitive mixes of all of the above mentioned songs, especially “wettonizer”, “sinuous thread” and “whatever souls are made of” – those three cost me weeks and weeks of time, particularly the very sonically dense mix of “wettonizer”…but in time, I nailed it (with a lot of remote help from california, by the way, from my good friend and business partner ken mistove).

eventually, I went back to work on the record, spending quite some time working out the curiously reverse-engineered “this is a test” – I had a guitar solo, made when I first got the line 6 x3 pedal, just the solo, by itself, that I really liked, so I set out to create a song based on this solo, adding first drums, then bass, then many guitar synths, until I had built up a real song. using another piece from the 2009 x3 sessions, an unreleased ambient loop of ebow guitars, I also added that to the piece, so it’s a rock song with an ambient loop outro, a most unusual combination – and it’s one of the highlights of the record – possibly because of it’s unique, reverse-engineered construction, and beautiful ambient outro.

“gone native”, the album’s title track, took quite a long time to gestate, but it was well worth it, it was begun pre-guitar synth, and completed post-guitar synth, so it is sort of a hybrid, it’s a “standard” dave stafford prog/rock piece, leaning heavily towards the “rock” side – drums, bass, mellotron and lots of guitars – but then that guitar synth came along, giving me organ/guitar hybrid solos, cellos, thunderstorms and other amazing sounds to combine with my phase-shifted mellotron flutes – all contributing to one of the most remarkable pieces of music I’ve ever had the honour of working on – it’s just one of those tracks that you know is right – it’s just right!

then, when I had a block of time to actually work on the record this summer, I took a some pieces from early 2011 (one fully produced piece involving drums and classical instruments, from the guitar synth, of course “caladan”; one guitar piece with overdubbed solo – “flying solo”, one piece involving four different guitar synths mixed into one song “sun willow quartet” – adding drums to the latter two), recorded when I first got the roland gr-55 guitar synth, and the next three rock pieces were complete…

“junction” is the penultimate track on side one: a song I would find difficult to describe in words, so suffice to say, it reminds me of early to middle period bill nelson (and it also makes a vague musical reference to “secret ceremony” by bill nelson, but only roughly)…it also contains a roving “bill nelson/maps of dreams” style bass guitar – but, call it “bill nelson done dave stafford/guitar synth style” if you must call it anything at all.

at the moment, I am struggling with this part of the record, the next and final piece on side one, “flying solo” did not translate well when compressed to a test MP3, I am getting some distortion from the rhythm guitar tracks, and further investigation shows me that the original track does seem to have some inherent distortion, so I need to sit down properly with the multi track master, and see what my options are. if I can’t fix that guitar, I would either have to re-record it – not necessarily possible, since it was an improvised take, but possible, or, if I really can’t solve it, I might have to remove the track entirely – which would be a shame, as it has a nice legato solo in it that I really like.

update: a further remix of the original “flying solo” did not solve the problem – well, the wav file sounds fine, but it doesn’t compress well, so the MP3 still distorts, so now the plan is to re-record the rhythm guitar – which is maybe a good thing. so I would take the drums and the solo, and “underdub” a rhythm guitar – strange, but possible…we shall see!

this running order works for me, because it’s basically chronological – five original rock/prog pieces from 2009 first, then, one reverse engineered piece from 2009 completed in 2010, and finally, five more drum-based pieces from early 2011 rounding out the side – eleven tracks that “are” side one of the album:

“gone native”, side one:

thanks, frank

open to anything

force of nature

wettonizer

sinuous thread

this is a test

gone native

caladan

sun willow quartet

junction

<<<flying solo>>> repair, re-record, replace, remove?

so for me, the driving force behind the running order of side one, was to show a musical progression – plus, these are all rock, rock/prog, or drum-based pieces (and you can hear the progression in the music, it gets more and more sophisticated, and hopefully, more and more interesting, along the way…) as well as sticking to a rough chronology, whereas side two is a completely different animal…

side two, on the other hand, was entirely conceived and constructed during the current session, during the summer 2012 mastering/mix sessions for the album, drawing mostly on music created between march 2011 and the present. since this is a shorter time span we are covering, and I was wanting to demonstrate some very different guitar sounds, styles and approaches, I decided to not stick to the chronological model this time, but instead, to base the running order of side two more on the style of the music itself.

now, it had always been in my head that the ambient mix of “whatever souls are made of” would be the final song on the album (although in the end, it’s not quite the final track…), and that idea stuck, and in the final assessment, it’s a good call – it achieves a number of things: it brings us back to a more song-based area after the rather unusual sonic experiments that are side two, and, it brings us full circle back to a 2009 composition, it “ties back in” with side one – so that device works as intended.

so what to put “in front of” that final track, since I had decided on the “ending” first? I just looked at what I had recorded over the past many months, and made decisions based solely on musical merit, performance appeal, and uniqueness – or some combination thereof.

to begin then, I definitely wanted some ambient pieces, just a few, to demonstrate at least some part of the mostly ambient musical world I’ve been inhabiting since about 1989; I also wanted to include a few very unique examples of some very unique guitar styles, some specialised pieces; just as side one delivers a broad range of guitar information in the “song” format; side two delivers a different range of guitar information in some more exotic and unusual forms, including ambient, looped and treated music.

“salusa secundus”, the first track on side two, is what I would call “semi-ambient”, it’s ambient in nature, but there is still a fair amount of musical activity in the piece – yet, the overall effect is ambient. this was a piece I built up very quickly in one day, by layering guitar synth parts, and it just happened very organically – there were no re-takes, I just added parts until it was “right” – including a very occasional bass guitar, carefully timed to work with the guitar synth parts in a particular pattern. It uses some particularly beautiful guitar synth patches that include pitched up guitars and wind chimes (always a lovely sound) and I just like the feel and the spontaneity of the piece – it was always going to be on this record, it just “belongs somehow”, and it’s a great way to introduce the ambient section of the record. the thunderstorm patch, previously heard in the title track, also makes a return appearance, and then that single, ominous bass guitar note keeps appearing…

the next track on side two is a very, very unusual one, “desert power I (drone mix)”; it’s a live loop, originally done as a video for youtube, that I then took the audio mix and ran it through a special resonant filter (using the breeze plug-in in sonar) to create an utterly unique and very strange alternate “mix” of the song – all of the normal guitar sound has been replaced with a wonderful, buzzing drone that I really like the sound of – and, it’s a very unique sounding piece, like nothing you have ever heard (I hope) – perhaps reminiscent of early fripp & eno? – if it is similar to anything at all.

track three on side two is “cinematique I”, a piece similar in character to “salusa secundus” but realised in a completely different way – a totally live loop, one guitar synthesizer, looped, but inhabiting a slightly darker, more dissonant musical space than “salusa secundus” does – so this one might be comparable to a later robert fripp soundscape – and it’s created the same way – a completely live, ambient, dissonant, loop. this is perhaps the most dissonant piece on the record – and I have at various times in my career, over the years, created a number of very, very dissonant loops, far more dissonant than any of the pieces here, but I think it is essential that at least one such piece be included to show the “darker side” of dave stafford looping.

and speaking of that dark side, next comes “the gemenon blues (long form)” which is certainly one of the strangest pieces of music I have ever recorded, it’s an almost eight minute long live guitar synth looping performance, where I create a backing loop of a sound called “crims-o-tron” on the fly, and once that’s established itself, eventually, I play a live solo on top of the loop, which I then also loop, so the piece starts out very dark and strange, then, a thick, sinuous guitar solo appears, and is then joined by many more looped guitar solos, and the whole thing is incredibly atmospheric – and I am happy to have a few live pieces on side two (desert power I (drone mix), cinematique I, the gemenon blues (long form), wide open spaces), that represent what can be done with one guitar – or one guitar synth – the roland GR-55 – and one good looper – the roland RC-50 – you can get some remarkably full recordings out of that combo!

next, comes something so completely different that it’s almost indescribable, it’s a studio piece, a multi track work, but, it’s composed entirely of loops and sounds made using the korg kaossilator, the miniature x-y pad synthesizer, and this piece, “zencouraging”, was a complete surprise to me, as I had created it one day back in december, 2011, and then immediately, completely forgotten it’s existence, and when I was looking back over the last year or so of tracks for material to include on side two of “gone native”, I happened upon it, many, many months later.

it’s one of those songs that you cannot describe in words, it does have drum loops in it so it’s not truly ambient, yet, it’s so atmospheric, it has a beautiful, deep, deep synth bass that is so incredibly sonic, you almost feel it more than you hear it, and it’s melodies are very, very distinctive. because there are no keys or strings, there is a certain “kaoss pad” melodic style that is unmistakable although very hard to describe in writing – the synth melodies are less distinct than they would be with a key or string triggered device – they have a sort of wonderful “fuzziness” of pitch. this piece is truly a one of a kind, it contains no guitars whatsoever, but it, surprisingly, it fits in beautifully with the various loops and experiments on side two – a real standout track in my opinion.

switching gears again, the next piece, “wide open spaces” (video forthcoming), was almost an accident, I was testing out an ipad application for guitarists called “ampkit +” and during the trial, I recorded three different energy bow guitar solos, and this one moves from mournful to joyful to lyrical, a weaving, sliding melody.

it’s not ambient e-bow, as I’ve mostly done historically, but instead, it is an intentionally active, melodic guitar solo – using the e-bow. of the three ebow pieces recorded on that day, I felt that “wide open spaces” was best – although all three are quite good – and it seemed to me to be a good, upbeat-feeling piece to start to bring the record back around to it’s more upbeat beginning – to the next and penultimate piece, “whatever souls are made of (ambient mix)”.

“souls (ambient)” is just that, the full song appearing on side one of the record, but with all of it’s melody e-bow guitars, bass, and drums, removed; leaving only the backing layers of looped and layered energy bow, which create a fantastic empty shell, that sounds wonderful with or without those overlaid instruments – so it’s a reprise, a chance to experience the song in a very different, far more atmospheric way, and it’s one of my very favourite pieces on the record (in either guise, if I am honest).

originally, the record was meant to end with “whatever souls are made of (ambient mix)” – and nominally, it still does, in terms of tracks proper. however, I had a live guitar track, or rather, part of a track, that I really wanted to include on the album, but it wasn’t quite an actual standalone piece, so, included as a “hidden track” a couple of minutes after the conclusion of “souls” (ambient)”, you get the remarkable “a plague of frogs (coda)” – which is literally just the “delay tail out” of an active piece of guitar originally recorded for a youtube video.

so, I played this piece of active guitar, ended suddenly on an e flat chord, and I had set up the digitech time bender delay to create this amazing delay “tail”, which sounds like a chorus of frogs – so I just snipped out the frog chorus only, faded it in and out, prefaced it with 2:17 of pure silence; and this “hidden track” then came to life – just to add a bit of unusual atmosphere to very, very end of the record.

“gone native”, side two:

salusa secundus

desert power I (drone mix)

cinematique I

the gemenon blues (long form)

zencourage

wide open spaces

whatever souls are made of (ambient mix)

hidden track: a plague of frogs (coda)

I am hoping that by talking through the reasons and the logic behind my two very different running orders, I can demonstrate here just how important running orders can be, and in this case, how important running orders are to me.

because I grew up in the era of vinyl albums, to me, an album has a certain musical identity that is in part dictated by the songs on it, but almost equally importantly, by the order in which those songs is presented.

what would the beatles’ “revolver” sound like with something other than “taxman” as it’s lead off track? for some unknown reason, it was decided to put george’s song first, and that is so iconic, “revolver” is almost defined by that odd count in – that was actually added onto the beginning of the track – and I can’t imagine those songs in ANY other order – I really can’t – and in the same way, for my own music, which of course I do spend a lot of time creating and then compiling into albums, I have a very, very definite running order in mind – that’s the way it works out.

I am aware that some artists and bands do not care about running order, leaving that decision to producer or even manager, but I personally disagree with that, you need to care about the presentation of your songs, and the order in which the customer hears them – while it may seem trivial, it’s actually hugely important, because this one album might be the only record of yours that they ever hear – so you want to make a good impression!

I personally believe that running orders are very, very important, and I take them very seriously even if other artists and bands – do not – that’s fine, but for me, I will always care about this, and each time I collect songs together into a new album, I will always spend the time to work out what the very best running order for those songs is, to optimise the listener’s experience – and in the case of “gone native”, I’ve done all I can to make it as enjoyable and as logical as possible.

first you rock, past, present and future (tracks 1 – 11) ; then you rest (tracks 12 – 14); then you explore (tracks 15 – 16); then you arrive full circle back to the ambient shell of one of the earliest pieces (track 17); then finally, a detached chorus of electronic frogs (hidden track 18) whisks you away to an unknown musical future of as-yet-undreamed musical ideas…

who says running orders are not important? it’s in my nature to care about every aspect of the music I present, and that includes the order that those pieces reach your ears – the best order I can imagine given my knowledge of the tracks themselves…no chaos, instead: logical, orderly, sensible, and – delivered and presented with a real sense of quality.

the music of the moment – dave stafford / “gone native” – test pressing

Posted by pureambient on June 23, 2012

after three days of intensive work, the first set of master mixes for the “gone native” album is at last, complete, and I am sitting here listening to the very first playback of these new mixes as I write.

the first thought that I have is that this record has been a long, long time coming, as reflected by track one, “thanks, frank”, which is playing now, which was really the whole impetus for making a rock / progressive rock themed album. recorded originally in november, 2008, this is the oldest song in the collection, and the song that started it all. at that point, I had spent many, many years as an ambient artist, a live looping guitarist, and occasionally, as an acoustic crafty guitarist, but part of me was harking back to a time when I played a thing called “rock” – so I created a drum part out of pieces taken from mike bowman’s “fever drums” (drone forest, velveeta heartbreak), which was originally a source file for the drone forest project, and then overdubbed it with a live guitar take – which turned out to be one of those amazing, lucky “take one” miracles that you get so, so seldom – it just worked. I overdubbed a bass part, wasn’t happy with it (because it wasn’t as good as the drums or guitar) – scrapped it, overdubbed an new bass part – which was better, but still imperfect – finally, in the brand new, june 2012 mix of the song, I did some edits to the bass part, and now, at last, I am truly happy with it – it works.

so – a power trio of drums, bass and guitar to lead off the album, and then onto the work that followed in a “rock” vein, the first pieces, recorded with SONAR 4 in 2009, my very first proper multi-track work in a long, long time, and over the next three and a half years, I created a number of pieces with “gone native” in mind. it was, undeniably, a slowly evolving work, and the first eight or ten pieces all took quite some time to conceive, organise and mix – I wanted these songs to truly reflect my ability as composer, arranger, and mostly, as guitarist. more importantly, I wanted these to be the best quality in terms of the playing, the arrangements, the mixes – I wanted this album to be the best.

the title track is one example of demonstrating my playing and arranging skills; a powerful, pounding drum part is overlaid with a myriad of strange and wonderful guitars, many of them created using the remarkable roland gr-55 guitar synth, which makes such a huge difference to this record, as well as the m-tron pro mellotron, which I had found indispensable on the “sky full of stars” album – because of my positive experience with it on that album, it’s made it’s way onto the title track and onto other tracks on “gone native” as well, providing that crucial bit of authentic prog colour – and for me, that allowed me to create a “virtual band” with the instrumental line-up of guitar, bass, mellotron and drums – eerily and not accidentally similar to a certain band called “king crimson” – and while this music does not in the main sound anything like king crimson, nor would I compare myself to that band in any way shape or form, I love that particular combination of instruments, and just using those four instruments, you can really create a good band sound.

as time went on, I greatly expanded on that basic “virtual line-up”, most significantly through the introduction of the roland gr-55 guitar synthesizer, and, in other ways, but it’s present for the first few songs, certainly for both “open to anything” and “force of nature”, two of the earliest pieces here.

of course, to do rock or prog right, you have to have drums and bass, so during this time, I also taught myself (with a lot of help!) how to use both BFD2 and session drummer 3 in SONAR – between these two, I could create high quality drum parts, and I delighted in trying to create real sounding, interesting drum tracks to compose against. I also took up the bass guitar again, something I hadn’t done regularly since I was a very young man, so that these tracks could benefit from having real bass. so, even though the drums are made with machines, everything else is very, very “real”, and it’s my hope that the humanity of the instruments will help to blend in the drums, so that everything mixes up very nicely and organically. I think, in the main, that it has worked out well – I’ve had some compliments on the drum tracks already (feedback on early mixes), so that’s a good sign.

I won’t go into a song by song analysis now, at some point, I might detail that, but suffice to say, this is, in the main, not an ambient album, it’s a rock/prog rock album, and therefore is completely different from any record I’ve ever made. most of what I’ve done over the past 20 or 30 years, has been very live, or looped (I’ve done a lot of loops), and not multi-tracked, and not including anything using bass and drums, so it’s already in a completely different class to say, my last two records (“the haunting”, and “sky full of stars” – both from 2011) which were both very, very ambient.

this record gives me the opportunity to do things like play extended bass solos (“wettonizer” – a tribute to king crimson’s finest bassist, john wetton) play an active ebow solo (“wide open spaces” or demonstrate the quirky but amazing korg kaossilator (“zencourage”) – every all-guitar album should have at least ONE all-synth piece on it!! there is a broad range of styles here, there is extensive use of guitar synthesizer on the later songs which gives me a wealth of “instruments” to inject into the mix, there is even a song reverse engineered from a guitar solo (“this is a test”) and a song treated with a resonant filter that converts it to a buzzing drone that does not resemble the actual performance in any way (“desert power I – drone mix”).

there is ambient music here – how could there not be, given that it’s dave stafford – in fact, in my mind, the record has two sides, just like the old vinyl albums had – side one, is “songs”, rock songs, prog songs, strange songs, but basically, all multi-track affairs involving drums. basically, that’s the first ten tracks, then, the next eight, are a variety of unusual pieces – guitar synth demos, live loops, and even an ambient remix of one of the songs on side one, (“whatever souls are made of – ambient mix”) to close the record.

a few of the tracks on side two are pretty much completely ambient, or semiambient, and there are a few live performances on side two as well (“desert power I – drone mix”; “the gemenon blues – long form”, and “wide open spaces”) as well as the aforementioned multi-track korg kaossilator piece (“zencourage”). I like this idea; first, the songs, and actually, the album feels to me like it’s in three pieces, not two, the first eight pieces are the “songs proper”, tracks 9 and 10, are the “bridge between” – songs that are more recent, with partial drum tracks, and then finally, eight ambient, synth demo, live or otherwise strange and wonderful examples of extreme guitaring.

In this way, I really hope that I can demonstrate not just the work of the past three and a half years (impossible to believe that I have been working on this project for that long, but there it is, in black and white) but really, the work of my life, because these 18 songs are the sum total of what I’ve learned – sometimes, from others – from people I’ve worked with, for example, sometimes, from myself – such as learning the ins and outs of MIDI, SONAR, mixing in SONAR, guitar synth, korg kaossilator, and iPad applications – the latter which, barely existed when I started this project. in the last few years, I’ve been adding in a lot of very interesting technologies – everything from the roland guitar synth to the m-tron mellotron to the korg koassilator to the iPad applications – and that has made the record much better, it has really benefited from those innovations – and I’ve also learned an enormous amount myself, about the possibilities of making music with a lot of very, very bleeding-edge technologies, and some of the remarkable things that can be accomplished are truly mind-boggling – but that will be for the next few albums, which will explore a lot of the more experimental music I’ve been making in the last year or so.

“gone native” then is the sum total of two things, first, forty-one years of playing experience, and second, the changes and growth and experience of the past three and a half years. hearing these eighteen piece today, gathered together at long last, for the first time ever, well, even I am surprised and amazed at the incredible diversity on show here; from the hard rocking, guitar based songs all the way up to the very ambient pieces on side two, it’s an amazing variety of music and I am very, very proud indeed of this brand new dave stafford album.

production is next, it will be a few weeks probably, but once everything is set up, I will be announcing the details for download to begin with; and possibly, this time, a short run of “hard copy” CDs for those who prefer physical media to downloads – this is something we are going to start looking at again…

in the meantime, there is much work to be done still, but, I am so, so pleased to be able to say with finality, that “gone native”, dave stafford’s first proper hard rocking rock/prog album, is completely done, and will be ready to release before this summer is out. until then – keep on rockin’ !!!

applications-based music

Posted by pureambient on February 20, 2012

I am really enjoying making music in nanostudio and in the fairlight pro (while having lost a bit of interest in garage band – too simplistic, although it has the best hammond organ sounds around, so I will use it for that – definitely!), mostly during lunch time at work, strangely enough (what an odd, odd sensation to have a digital recording studio at your desk, during lunch, and to be able to sit there and create…amazing!).

I’ve started a number of new pieces, the first, a drum backing entitled “powerhouse” – this one is intended for use with lots and lots of very, very heavy guitar – so, a pounding bass drum alternating between eighth and sixteenth notes, a cracking, intermittent snare playing at odd times, and thumping toms pounding along with the bass drums…strange percussion, and I brought in cymbals from two different kits so I could have four distinct crash cymbal sounds instead of two.

I used a rock kit for the basics, and for additional sounds, a tight kit, which brought in some really lovely and strange-sounding cymbals – which I smack with precision. So what this means is a three-minute six-second drum backing, which I think I will send straight to sonar so I can overdub it with guitar synth. the roland gr-55 has some fantastic detuned patches, and I’ve had a hankering to create something really heavy, so maybe dave’s first metal piece is finally at hand. I did do a couple of metal improvs of dozey lumps songs last year just to test out the detuned voices, but I haven’t made a serious recording with them yet. so I am thinking – nanostudio drums for “powerhouse”, detuned gr-55 metal patches, and I will have me a song. it’s very exciting…and I look forward to working on it.

I’ve also been working on two different pieces sequenced on the fairlight pro, “feast for crow”, which is creepy, creaking film music for a film that doesn’t exist, and the latest piece, “resolve”, where I used a “random instrument” with 8 voices selected by the app for me to use in the composition. this resulted in a most unusual sounding piece that I am at a loss to describe, somewhere between chinese traditional music and a late-sixties zappa mothers woodwind arrangement. very weird, but – very compelling, the sounds in the fairlight are just purely cool – I love it!

I think that what is happening with some of the app-based pieces that are evolving is that along with one or two other tracks that have been evolving over the past 12 months, that I probably now have completed enough songs to fully populate “gone native” – so it is getting to the point now, where, with a few overdub sessions, if I can “complete” four or five nearly-complete pieces – including 3 or 4 made in nanostudio, then I would have a finished album at the mixing stage – or rather, another finished album at the mixing stage. “caladan” is an earlier piece that is actually complete and just needs mixing, I have only just realised that it absolutely belongs on gone native, as it was part of the journey from 2008 to the present…

the interesting thing about “gone native” is the sheer diversity that is represented – starting off with a track I recorded using only the X3 live, playing live guitar on top of a live drum track I cloned from mike bowman’s excellent “fever drums” sequence – so quite primitive, live guitar on top of live-sounding drums – and then, bass added later – so a basic power trio – nothing fancy – and then, onto the future, more songs evolving, in SONAR, using more sophisticated sounds from the X3, and then, the guitar synth arrived – and began to be incorporated into the pieces, so we went from x3 live only to pieces using both the x3 live and the roland gr-55. then, the next step in my musical evolution, making music in apps on the ipad.

so, a nearly four year journey, from a simple power trio approach right up to the very high tech approach of using nanosync to create drums, bass and synths, and then porting, via nanosync, back to SONAR to add the live guitars – unthinkable just four short years ago. I think I would arrange the album in two parts, as well, the first part, pre-guitar synth, pre-apps-based music, the second, including all available technologies. the modern day equivalent of a two sided concept album I suppose! it is interesting though, because just over half the time involved pretty basic technologies, while the other “half”, or maybe it’s closer to one third, of the time was much, much more about technology – but good technology, tech that brought me a massive palette of amazing guitar sounds.

I also think that once “gone native” is complete, mixed and pressed, that I might give serious thought to making an album that is 100 percent made with the guitar synth. I’d love to give that a try, really put it through it’s paces. For now, though, you will still get to hear it really, really shine on tracks from gone native, including some very interesting guitar synth parts on the title track.

it’s also remarkable to me just how quickly I’ve adapted to working with nanostudio, using it’s drum sequencer is incredibly easy and intuitive, and the synth voices are heavenly, beautiful, brutal, odd, amazing – really creative sounds, really useful, and I could really just play that synth all day long. speaking of playing that synth, last night, I organised all the “casual” cliips of me playing synth on the ipad, taken over the past couple of months, with a view to set up and publish some of them onto the pureambientHD channel, including some eden synth / nanostudio live performances from january 22, 2012 done outdoors at plean country park.

I’m excited about all of these video clips – in fact, three very different types of music being worked on – first, the korg ims-20 synth, which I do not know well, but – what a sound! secondly, the aforementioned eden synths – really beautiful sounds there, kudos to nanostudio for putting together such a lush package of quality drum sounds and to-die for synth sounds – very impressive – and finally, more recently, a foray into microtonal synthesis, using the remarkable microtonal synthesizer “mugician” along with a tabla backing courtesy of the even ***more*** remarkable itabla which I have spoken about elsewhere in detail. the interesting thing about all of these off-the-cuff perfomances is that in each case, I had almost zero understanding of the app or any experience at using it – yet, in all three cases, the apps worked so well and were so easy to learn – that you might never have known that I had no idea what I was doing unless I told you!

and then the utterly different experience of the fairlight pro – but once you “get it” – you fall in love with creating music a bar at a time. in fact, music happens in such a different way, that things can happen that might not when composing in “real time” – the sequencing allows you to build songs in tiny stages – something I’ve rarely done, but sometimes, you can make a strange turn – and your piece goes where you least expected it to – which to me is what it’s all about…

pureambient / dave stafford

the music of ambient loop guitarist dave stafford and the pureambient microlabel

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