the music of sound

This week we finished the mix for Anthony McCartens new film Show of Hands so I am off to spend some time outdoors, on a road trip around the South Island… back on deck on 5th May… ciao!

There are 100 inspirational quotes here… and heres a few I like from the list:

3. Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
William B. Sprague

14. Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare.
Japanese Proverb

19. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain

27. If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.
E. Joseph Cossman

33. Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain

37. Many great ideas go unexecuted, and many great executioners are without ideas. One without the other is worthless.
Tim Blixseth

53. Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
John Wooden

76. “Talent is formed in solitude, character in the bustle of the world.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Does a hook require a minimum of four notes or sixteen? I dunno but I sure know this tune has an instant hook that takes only eight notes to lodge firmly in my brain. Hit play, this song is like aural prozac – instant feel good! Shame the remix/arrangement used in the youtube video isnt as great as the one Giles Peterson played at the start of his Worldwide winners vol1 show, in fact skip the period drama soft core p+rn & download Giles show instead – its the first song he plays…. and just try & stop yourself from whistling it!

And for what its worth the tune is by Kenneth Brager & is called Fragment One from the album (?) Music for Dreams. Somewhere buried in there is an obscure sample that inspired that tune, I’m sure of it! But from where it comes, who knows…

ok, so the title of this post sounds serious but no, sorry, I havent discovered some connection between all music of the last century and the light reflected off a paua shell… Time is one funny concept: there is only now, but now keeps on presenting itself for reinterpretation, for example I heard a tune on Mary Anne Hobbes supposedly cutting edge BBC Radio One radio show last night (time shifted to when I feel like listening to it) and amongst all the admittedly great, inspiring music was this song that had two immediately recognisable samples in it: the amen break & that brass sample Public Enemy annoyed everyone with back in the day. Second (or third) gen retro?

The Golden Ratio?

So what? Well the former sample reminded me of this great article I stumbled across a while back & although I don’t personally like the amen break (it became so over-used & generic in the early development of drum & bass) and could never use it myself, I was still hankering for a reason to link to it… so here you go: check out how this theoretician links the amen break to the Golden Ratio: here

These aren’t recent but are interesting if you havent seen them…
When I first saw this, I was like WTF? Where is it going? Dancing hands?

Theres also a robot-girl version too…

This video is quite enlightening; lots of people use samples and
Daft Punk are no exception. I guess its just surprising how big
the samples are, as in duration/musical content..

A few friends have been borrowing my Korg Kaossilator & rather than risk them ‘misplacing’/losing my owners manual I point them here for a PDF of the manual… but I havent been able to find a PDF copy of the little card that comes with the Kaossilator listing the various scales & arpeggiator/gate patterns available on it, so I scanned it & here it is, click the image to display a large version (& the aforementioned PDF explains how to change scales/arpeg/gate patterns)

or a link to CNTRL click & Save As….

& ditto for Arpegiator/gate patterns:

or a link to CNTRL click & Save As….

And if someone would like to program a bunch of presets for the Scale MIDI plug in Ableton LIVE for each of the above settings I would be forever indebted…. if you do it, please, please email me a link!

i’m going to keep posting such things until I get ‘How to Finish 2/3′ finished…

This plug could be handy for any Zoom H2 owners who use a Mac (satans spawn will have to look elsewhere); its a VST/audio unit plugin that creates 5.1 audio from the quad recordings made with the H2…. And the smart thing with this plug is it takes into account the layout of the H2 mics, as per this disassembly pic:

For me, its pretty rare a sound I have recorded gets used without manipulation, and I prefer to assign source material to 5.1 during premixing (or predubbing if you’re american) but I can totally appreciate the use if say you recorded a concert live, and wanted to burn it to DVD…

For what its worth, and I suspect its definitely worthy of investigation, the same developer has a whole range of plugins available, including a plugin for decoding a double MS Schoeps setup. I’m going to say this out loud, so it becomes fact rather than fiction: I want to get my head around MS recording and I already suspect my next major mic upgrade will be an MS rig and maybe even a dual MS rig, so expect to read some externalised thoughts about the subject in the future. The technique intrigues me creatively as well as culturally, the latter because I have it on good word that many european film productions carry material in un-decoded MS right through into the final mix.
The aforementioned developers also has a great practical surround recording workshop documented on their site with comparative examples of approaches, have a read/listen here