Composing with the Structure Free Sampler and more in Task 2

Unfortunately when I returned to the studio I noticed that the tracks I had recorded from the recital hall had all been lost because I’d stupidly not saved them all in the audio files which gave me less to work with. I had less resources to work with than I’d hoped as the only tracks that had been saved were the drum sample recordings I’d made and a guitar track I’d DI’d into the ISA with my Boss ME-50 multi effects unit. So I decided to use the drum samples and then sample parts from my first task as there was usable material there.

As my original intention was to record improvised sounds and melodies on various instruments and rearrange them in ProTools. I found that with my limited amount of sounds to work with, using the sampler would give me more sounds to work with. This use of audio sampling is one thing that marked Trent Reznor above other contemporaneous producers. In an interview he said

“When sequencers started to be able to record audio, was a big turning point in how I wrote music,”

When producing his album The Fragile he moved over to ProTools from the previous program he’d worked with due to it shutting down midway through producing his album. His use of sampling audio and using them as sources for midi instruments is what I am doing in my second task due to lack of source materials. I am quite enjoying the sounds you get from the sampler as it transposes the timbre of the sounds you use as well which creates rich sounds when sampling vocals.

I recorded some takes of myself singing some ooh’s and ahh sounds to create a chords which sounded more human against my cut up hi-hat and snare samples which were very dry.

Here’s a recording of some of my drum sample takes.

I didn’t realise how easy it would be to use the sampler in ProTools. Although it took me a while to work out how to input the midi values into the grid and change velocities etc, I think I will definitely use the sampler again. First of all you need to find the section of audio that you wish to put into your sampler.

selecting audio sample

Then you need to add a new instrument track to your project. In the inserts bar of your new instrument track scroll down to instruments and select Structure Free. This is your sampler and it should look like this.

The structure free instrument

All you need to do then is select the grabber tool and drag your highlighted section of audio onto the box on the right. It should automatically have a sine wave set to MIDI channel A1. Remove this by right clicking on the bar on the right and change the MIDI channel to A1 for your sample. You can test if it’s working on the keyboard below. You can also change the attack, decay, sustain and release of your sample in the edit section on the right. This is exactly what I did with my singing samples and I quite like the effect.

For drums I used a hi-hat sample and instead of placing all hits on the same note in the MIDI arrange window, I used the pitch effects to emphasize gestures as I thought it would be more interesting than trying to replicate mechanic hits with the sampler. I also did the same thing with the snare drum but more with the intent of making complimentary tones.

One limitation of ProTools I discovered however is that it only allows you to use 4 Structure Free instruments at a time which forced me to place samples in the arrange window manually with cutting and pasting etc. For this however I used samples with rhythmic content that I had recorded on the hi-hat. They were not recorded to a metronome however which meant that they wouldn’t sync up perfectly to the beat. I decided to use them anyway as they had the off kilter drum rhythms that I like from hearing producer Flying Lotus.

Here’s an example of his hard at first to follow drums from his last LP Cosmogramma

Although Flying Lotus is extremely tight lipped about what programmes and software he uses to make his music in fear of people copying his style, he has often mentioned J Dilla as a source of inspiration. Although J Dilla innovated the out-of-time beats, I am mainly drawing from Flying Lotus’s Use of texture in his music.

I was not particularly pleased with my hi-hat sample recordings so I used a fuzz-wah plugin in ProTools to change the loudest frequencies of the sound. Here is a before and after.

Before (named incorrectly)

And After

And here are the settings in the fuzz wah insert.

As you can see on the right the sound is also put through a band pass filter which cuts off low frequencies and high frequencies depending on where you choose to filter the sound. I also used heavy compression to give it a slightly aged sound. As the hi-hats were recorded in the vocal booth of the studio it was a very dry sound, so to give the sound ambience I used a TL reverb plug in set to the medium church preset and boosted the recognition of higher frequencies as it is a hi-hat.

Another technique I employed in my piece is time-stretching which was famously first heard on English DJ Goldie’s record terminator. With this effect you can change the playback speed of a sound without changing its pitch. This technology was first made available with the release of the Akai S-3000, a hardware device created for DJs to slow or speed up songs to synchronise with each other for live sets.The TCE tool (time compression editor) in ProTools is mainly used to synchronise out of time vocal lines and tidy things up for your mix, but I used it to extend a short sample of the phrase ‘are you ready’ that I’d taken from a guitar recording when I asked Adam if he was ready to record. It had quite a faint audio signal and no rhythmic coherence with my piece so I chopped up each word and placed them in time with the beat. I kept the words “are” and “you” the same speed and used the TCE tool to stretch the word “ready” playing it 4 bars later in the mix.

purple wav regions are "are" and "you"

I also used the RTAS Multi Delay Effect insert(factory default setting) on this channel for the  samples as the rhythmic effect worked well in the mix.

The TCE tool can be selected from the menu bar at the top as one of the options in the drag down menu of the trimmer tool. Seen below sporting a blue square. To use the tool, select the section of audio you would like to change and simply drag from either side to the length you require.

I remember this effect most distinctly from the song Break 4 Da Reload by the UK Garage duo called Oxide and Neutrino where the DJ Neutrino sampled the quote “Can everyone stop getting shot?” from Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and used time-stretching to repeat the quote before MC Oxide started his rappety rap.

Reverb effects

On my vocal sampled midi instrument I set up an aux bus channel with a long spring reverb insert so I could automate it to abruptly stop with the attack of the snare drum to play with the idea of sounds in space and increase attention to the snare. I used the reverb initially to warm the texture of the vox instrument but I noticed I could do more with it simply by cutting the volume at certain points. Here’s a picture of what it looks like in the project. I believe it works quite effectively at some points.

Reverb volume following snare drum hits

One effect I used on the snare drum was reverse reverb which is an effect a lot of people commonly associate with being heard on Kevin Shields unique guitar sounds from My Bloody Valentine.  He actually only used this process in treating his guitar on a few occasions. Due to the mystery surrounding the highly innovative noise-pop album Loveless however many music critics cited his use of effects as mainly chorus and reverse reverb. Another technique he did with his guitar playing was his unique use of whammy bar which he held while strumming so he could emulate the effects of a warped vinyl, a complaint many people made when mistakenly returning vinyl records of the album. In an interview he says how he created this technique.

“I was trying to imitate string bending and slide-playing, which I couldn’t really do. I thought maybe if I tuned two strings to nearly the same pitch and then bent them with the wang bar, maybe it would sound like I was doing that. I borrowed a nice Jazzmaster from a friend, but it had a re-made tremolo that was really big. So I put tape on it to keep it from going all the way into the socket.”

He did however use reverse reverb on acoustic guitar on MBV’s debut album Isn’t Anything released in 1988 on the track Soft As Snow But Warm Inside. Combined with his use of the whammy bar it creates quite a unique effect as you can hear here

From the same interview with guitargeek I’ve quoted from above that can be found at the url http://guitargeek.com/chat/showthread.php?threadid=95434 ,  he talks intriguingly about his reasons in rejecting previous guitar effects and quite deeply about the use of new effects in the studio.

“It gets back to primitive survival instincts,” he says, “the ability to localize sounds in space–that feeling when you’re in the woods and a twig snaps or something rustles in the underbrush and your heart starts pounding. I’d like to achieve something like that with a guitar effect.”

Kevin Shields effects the entire acoustic guitar track with this effect whereas in mine I kept the original snare sound and mixed in the reverse effect at around 20% so it was more of a background addition to the song. I also found that it works well with the call and response between the hi-hat and snare drum heard around 0:54 where the hi hats play triplets, followed by the snare. Combined with the automated volume on the reverb aux channel for my vocal sample pad, I feel I’ve used techniques in my production akin to the way Kevin Shields describes by playing with the idea of space.

———————————————————————————————————————————-

At 1:44 in my track the sound panned widely in the stereo field that sounds like thousands of snooker balls being hit was created by using the ring mod effect on my Boss ME-50 pedal and plucking muted strings near the pick ups. On its own it sounds like this.

Side Chaining

As I’ve already spoken about how to use side chaining in ProTools I will only mention that I side chained the hi-hat samples to the bass kick as well as the vocal sample pad to make the piece sound more redolent of house music.

Task 2 recording part 1

For my second task I was hoping to emulate the production techniques of Frank Zappa he referred to as reassembly. In this method Frank Zappa is notable as one of the many musicians to pioneer the studio as an instrument. In this method he would use his sound recordings or  ‘sound sources’ and rearrange them in the studio, using a myriad of sounds from recorded conversations with his band members from the Mothers of Invention, to live recorded sounds. Here I’ll show you a small section from an article about the man.

Though sophisticated and innovative in terms of content and presentation, the first three M.O.I. albums are somewhat dated in terms of their “sound,” a shortcoming that Zappa later addressed by overdubbing new bass and drum parts on the We’re Only In It For the Money tapes in the mid-’80s. However, along with Lumpy Gravy, the first three albums (now available in a threefer package from Rykodisc) introduced several production techniques – and musical and lyrical themes – that would feature prominently in later releases. Both Absolutely Free and We’re Only In It For the Money featured non-stop, segued album sides arranged as suites of songs, interspersed with field recordings of bandmembers’ dialog and sections of musique concrete (“natural” sounds modified by tape manipulation). These audio jump cuts and sudden changes in ambience were also reflected in the music, as doo-wop, pop songs, political commentary, fuzz guitar rock and cocktail jazz all piled up on each other. As the years went by, Zappa’s edits became smoother, to the point of undetectability, but he consistently used editing as a compositional tool and created many coherent (if idiosyncratic) compositions from apparently random audio scraps.

This idea of working with pre-existing sounds and composing with them with the means to create something entirely new isn’t a totally alien idea to me as sampling took off massively with the emergence of hip hop before I was born. A genre of music which in its origins hoped to carry strong political messages and biting social commentary. These two things of course are what Frank Zappa was never afraid to talk about with cogency and a liberal bent. Frank Zappa liked to face these taboos head on with his music and assembling diverse but contextually relevant sounds in the studio is something he had mastered.

My intentions for this task however are to reassemble sounds in a way which isn’t politically motivated but to use samples of recorded instruments to create a collage of pitch and texture. For my task I have recorded a variety of instruments with no forethought of rhythm or timing to be formed into something which does.

Instruments I have recorded are

Pump Organ

Andy Riffing on the Pump Organ

Side view of Pump Organ

Grand Piano

Mic Placement for Piano

Vox

Andy, Centre of Recital hall singing

Experimenting with mic placement to capture room ambience

Acoustic Guitar

No image available, sorry

Snare drum

recording isolated snare hits to sequence later

Hi Hats

Hi Tom

and finally Floor toms

Would have taken pictures had not the camera ran out of battery.

What I realised after I’d recorded all of my sounds was that my production technique bears more in common with Canadian producer Secret Mommy(Andy Dixon). Previously a member of punk rock band d.b.s he started his own record company called Ache to release his own solo material. He started his cut and paste production style similar to John Oswald‘s method called plunderphonics, borrowing sounds from pop song recordings and editing them beyond recognition and composing with the resulting sounds. He then started composing using sounds from field recordings. For his third album released in 2004 entitled Hawaii 5.0, referencing where he recorded his sounds, he made music entirely from sounds he’d captured from a holiday in Hawaii. The 5.0 part of the album title is a reference to the electronic manipulation of sounds he used in composing. For his next album named Very Rec released a year later including standard instruments too this time, he used a hidden condensor microphone to record sounds at places of recreation, including a basketball court, yoga studio, swimming pool, football field, ice rink, dance studio etc.

The sounds in this song are composed entirely from recordings from a late night session in a basketball court apart from the cello.

In 2007 he released Plays which following a similar method of recording ‘organic’ sounds is made only from acoustic instruments. The method he outlines in this interview from earshot.com.

“I just booked some studio time where I just had all my friends come in. It was a free for all; it was like an open house where we just recorded a bunch of music, and it was just completely improvised. I took all those recordings and then I made that Secret Mommy record out of it. So Plays is processed recordings of all my friends.”

This is what I wanted to do for my second task and I did, but with the unfortunate handicap of almost all my musician friends being busy on the day I’d booked for the studio, me and Andy Buclaw are the sole performers on the track.

here’s a song from the album Plays, a peculiar marriage of free improvisation and anally precise post production glitchery. He also made the video. crafty *ucker.

My approach is hoping to emulate the technique of Andy Dixon without emulating hyper-edited results as I’m not conversant with ProTools to do so yet.

Recording Bass guitar

For the first task I have written my own song and as time constraints in the studio have shown me, its best just to do what you can in the given time. So I decided to play bass guitar on my own song as I’d configured a working line through the guitar part a while back. Then it was to me and Adam to set up microphone’s for the bass amp. The microphones we used were again a Shure SM57 placed to the bottom left of the two speaker cones and an AKG 414B placed at the base of the right speaker. Look, pictures below.

Mic placement for bass amp

another shot of mic placement

Here are the results of that recording

That little bit of a kick

To record electric guitar I was worried that the amplifiers the university supplied wouldn’t give me the tone I wanted in the song as I’ve never been fond Marshall Amps distortion sounds since they released the MG series. Because of this I brought in my Boss ME-50 multi-effects guitar unit to get a wider array of sounds to play about with. The guitar I chose to record with is my DiPinto Galaxie which has 4 single coil pick ups. The amplifier is a Marshall Haze40 and below are the settings on both the amplifier and effects pedal.

Marshall Haz40 with SM57 microphone 5cm above speaker cone.

Boss ME-50 multi-effects unit

We found straight away that the SM57 choice was a good one as it sounded very similar in playback to what I heard live whilst playing. The DPA microphone placement was trickier however so we experimented with 3 different placements.

The first place we tried was on the reverse of the amp directed towards the middle. See below

first attempt using DPA and SM57

The SM57 sounded great but the DPA was mostly receiving room ambience and hiss due to its poor placement. So after a take we tried again. We then lowered the microphone pointing it more towards the floor expecting a clean sound from the sound absorption in the carpet, thus…

Second attempt, SM57 in same place

Third time lucky we tried pointing the DPA at the skirting board opposite the speakers of the amp, feeling the DPA could be used to capture sound reflection better.

Finally decided mic placement

To get the sound to come through to the ISA and then into ProTools, I patched 2 xlr cables from inputs 1 and 2 from Chill Room 1 to 1 and 2 into the ISA282-1 board. I then set up 2 new mono audio tracks and made sure the inputs in the mixer window were A1 and A2. To get headphone signal I patched from HeadLite output ch1 to Chill Room ch3 and set up an aux channel. The default input for the headphones in the ISA282 units is B8 so I then changed the input in the aux track in ProTools to it.

I recorded various takes with different amp and pedal settings so I could choose which takes to use afterward in the studio room. I ended up improvising a lot of parts which worked well separately so in the mix I lowered the volume using automation to drop out parts which didn’t.

Here’s a selection of the takes I ended up using.

and here’s the second take using the same mic placement.

and finally the third recording, replete with fuzz.

and there you have it.

Re-recording drums for piece 1

Adam, Tariq and me went into the studio with the intention of re-recording the song I had posted in my previous blog for his second piece. My arrhythmic drumming had caused problems which is has now improved due to using lighter drum sticks. We used 8 microphones to record this time and also brought in our own cymbals and snare drum with its dampening pad to get a cleaner punchier sound. We placed the dampening pad half on the skin so the circumference lay almost over the centre.

Arial view of 8 mic set up. Bass mic inside bass drum

We patched through 8 channels from Loud Room 1 to the ISA 282-1 and added 8 mono audio tracks on ProTools, routing them through with the inputs going from A1-A8. After placing the microphones in effective positions and tying all cables out of the way we started to take readings from all of the microphones 1 at a time. Straight off the bat we experienced peaking on almost all 8 tracks so we turned off the +30dbs button on 8 channels of the ISA 282-1.

Soloing tracks to take peak levels/nice sounds

ISA 282-1 levels for recording drums.

As we were using considerably more microphones this time round  we spent a lot longer placing microphones and taking readings from each channel by soloing them in the mixer window and playing repeated hits of each respective part of the drum kit. Due to the small dimensions of the room combined with large amounts of cables, stands and microphones we found it difficult to capture any usable pictures of the microphone set up, so instead I recorded all of the microphone placements and models used in this video here.

With the limitation on post-production editing this task required I wanted to capture sounds similar to what I have heard on In Rainbows by Radiohead which were produced by long-time collaborator Nigel Godrich. He is referred to by fans as the ‘sixth member of Radiohead’ in a similar way to how George Martin was often called the fifth member of The Beatles. From reading this interview with Nigel Godrich I had to seriously reconsider what role he plays in Radiohead. Here’s a short interview excerpt circa the release of OK Computer.

Nigel Godrich, picture cropped to eliminate fivehead

One concession to digital technology was made in the form of a Pro Tools system, which was used for tidying up little mistakes. “It’s been really handy”, he admitted. “But again it’s something that you have to learn not to use. Because when we first got it, I was trying to do this and that with it, and ended up sitting in front of the thing for two days. And everybody gets pissed off, and you lose the feeling that you’re excited about something. The trick is to do something fast enough and then keep going so you can’t get bored with the thing you’ve just done. “You just go and go and you don’t stop, and when you go back later and look at what you’ve done, you can say this one doesn’t work but that one is great.

Earlier in the interview he talks about the importance of capturing the energy of a performance and says on recording guitars he simply uses a Shure SM57 mic pointed towards the amp, and how making your performers labour too long over a song can cause the song to become stale as the feeling it has on its inception is lost when you try to retrospect on what elements you want to amplify. On recording OK Computer he also said he’d try to record the band playing new songs asap while they were unfinished so they could listen back to their songs with all parts included, rather than allow them to grow bored of certain elements played to death in rehearsal.

My problems with playing drums to a click track have always been trying to play with feeling while staying in time. In the same interview Nigel Godrich spoke about this.

As for click tracks, they were used for establishing tempos on some songs, and then switched off. “Obviously clicks will hold you back, expression wise. They’re useful as a tool, but they can take the performance out of it.”

It has been refreshing reading that the producer of my favourite band is more openly concerned with techniques in capturing performance and the feeling of a song in favour of pristine production.