FFS. It's really not happening. Computers sound too clean?

[logic_user99]

I need to check out that Alvin Lucier piece; it reads fantastically, so one only hopes that it sounds as good!

Hurrah! I've got some dusty-ish breaks going down, and the results are quite pleasing. I ran a few 'classic' breaks through Logic's plugins and then dropped them, sliced, into drum racks in Live. Gotta work on my loop slicing, but for now the drums are heading in the right direction.

re: S900 - In all seriousness, how much of a difference would one o' them make (they're reasonably inexpensive) to the actual sound of the drums? I grew up on an S2000, so Akai isn't a foreign language. However, the 2000's sound is really quite clean. The 900's different, right?

[Machinate]

re: S900 - In all seriousness, how much of a difference would one o' them make (they're reasonably inexpensive) to the actual sound of the drums? I grew up on an S2000, so Akai isn't a foreign language. However, the 2000's sound is really quite clean. The 900's different, right?

ahem, yes, although I do believe noisetonepause may be referring to the s950 I gave him...?!?

read this:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1995_ar ... ?print=yes

[logic_user99]

ahem, yes, although I do believe noisetonepause may be referring to the s950 I gave him...?!?

read this:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1995_ar ... ?print=yes

You gave him? You are a generous man, Machinate! That article, too, is fantastically interesting. Adrian Utley is a very insightful man. And, to think that he's now got to be pushing 60, he's still making some fantastic music.

[Johnisfaster]

a long time ago I realised I just wasn't getting any lofi sounds out of using only software, no matter what I did I just couldn't get it gritty like I wanted.

so I bought a mic, an akai s612, a boss rsd10 and a yamaha su10. all 3 samplers cost me about 300 total and they give me gritty lofi sampling for days. granted very limited memory on these things (s612 and the rsd10 don't even have memory!!) but you just resample stuff back into the computer when you get something you're into.

now if I could just start making tunes again. different story all together.

[forge]

I need to check out that Alvin Lucier piece; it reads fantastically, so one only hopes that it sounds as good!

it's quite amazing actually - that it was changed so drastically just by re-recording over and over again through a mic from the speaker - it's a pure exercise in room resonance - might be a technique worth trying - keeping each stage and moving through them

[ThetaState]

Give iZotope's Vinyl plugin a try. It's free.

http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/vinyl/

[nowtime]

Another thing that you can learn from them is that half of all music is actually silence. Listen to all the stuff they actually do NOT play at certain moments (and that every less talented musician would have put into those arrangements).

Wisdom well said.

How easy to forget. One of Miles' big teachings. And I am reminded of that great album by St. Germain http://www.google.com/search?client=saf ... 8&oe=UTF-8 and how sweet little niblets will come in and then leave the mix. Same with Dummy. (funny how there is a jazz influence on bothe records) Same with what I love about some Minimal Trance or Psy-chill; they will have maybe kik-snare-hat and 2-3 other tracks creating LOTS of space.

Tough lesson. It's so tempting to fill with arpeggiation and pads and percussion and voices and echoes and reverb and solos and efx and more percussion. Where's the silence?

i wonder what the parrallel is in other forms of music. Putting parameters on our overload of options. It's interesting they mention starting compositions with weird atmospheric loops. I could see that as helping to inspire a sparse mix. And that this was from the school of trip-hop which is jazz inffluenced. I can see them thinking "bass" "drums" "keyboard/harmonic part" "vocals" and "sound fx/solos" just like a jazz quintet. I'll have to go listen back.

[Broken Chip]

Record drums at 8 bit or 12 bit res. Think SP-12 or SP-1200 sounding samples. Limit yourself with what you use. Mad beats can be made on 2MB of disc space!

[noisetonepause]

re: S900 - In all seriousness, how much of a difference would one o' them make (they're reasonably inexpensive) to the actual sound of the drums? I grew up on an S2000, so Akai isn't a foreign language. However, the 2000's sound is really quite clean. The 900's different, right?

ahem, yes, although I do believe noisetonepause may be referring to the s950 I gave him...?!?

A: You gave me an S900 (and thank you again for that!).

B: The 900 and 950 are pretty much the same, except the 950 has more memory (for wimps).

[logic_user99]

The prospect of having a hardware sampler again does excite me somewhat. And, if it achieved 'that sound' for my drums, I'm even more excited.

Do you find that when you program from a sliced sample, you don't use anywhere near the number of hits that you've got available? 16 slices? I use 5!

@nowtime - 'Tourist' is a marvelous album. Subtle, and really well put together.

[noisetonepause]

Do you find that when you program from a sliced sample, you don't use anywhere near the number of hits that you've got available? 16 slices? I use 5!

I hardly ever 'slice' in the slice-to-16ths sense of the word. I don't really see the use of it, except for drill'n'bassish noises (and the world's moved on I reckon). I'll often sample good sounds from a loop, but the Live slicer approach seems quite useless to me...

[forge]

The prospect of having a hardware sampler again does excite me somewhat. And, if it achieved 'that sound' for my drums, I'm even more excited.

personally I think you'll be excited for about 5 minutes and then having to work with the knobs and tiny screen will shit you.

you can recreate what you need to other ways.

As for the slicer, I am the opposite to noisetonepause (hereafter referred to by his old nick of 'paws') I love the slicer and use it a lot - it can really inspire creativity

[logic_user99]

personally I think you'll be excited for about 5 minutes and then having to work with the knobs and tiny screen will shit you.

you can recreate what you need to other ways.

As for the slicer, I am the opposite to noisetonepause (hereafter referred to by his old nick of 'paws') I love the slicer and use it a lot - it can really inspire creativity

Now thinking back I may have been a little over-zealous on the excitement!

And, I completely agree with you on the 'slicer' front; using it to chop exact slices can lead to some curiously mistimed hits, which hten leads on to building rhythms that you might not have achieve any other way (can be a great way for getting 'shuffle' feels going on a beat)

[noisetonepause]

personally I think you'll be excited for about 5 minutes and then having to work with the knobs and tiny screen will shit you.

Working with the litte screen and the knob is quite different when you've got it setup as part of an unlimited Live-based setup where you can bounce it to audio in near realtime, have an endless amount of compressors and gates handy, etc. - as opposed to trying to squeeze a full drum kit, a bass sound and a piano into 30 seconds of sample time or if you want to do really convoluted looping/filtering/whatever (in which case the S9x0 or similar shouldn't really be at the top of your wishlist, anyways).

It's really piss easy to sample a drum hit from your computer into an S900 and assign it to a note. I'd say it takes about three minutes to set up a drum kit, which is obviously two and a half minutes longer than setting up a drum rack, but to me the end result is well worth it - and once it's set up, both are equally easy to work with.

I'm not going to be sampling a three minute location recording into the Akai and picking out multiple noises to loop and layer into a pad, that would get old tedious fast. A rack of capital-S Samplers will do that much more efficiently.

But the thing is, when you're sequencing drum hits in Live, the spaces between them is going to be digital zero, no sound, nothing. With the Akai, there's somethign there... which I think helps to add life.

[ChiDJ]

EMAXX II: Sample your drums with 8 bit grit and then run it's arpeggiator from 1-2 bpm faster than your track. Record the midi, groove quantize to taste - instant dirty drum funk.