Ableton Forum

I've heard that autechre sometimes spends a great deal of time looking at oscilloscopes and sometimes writes songs that simply "look good on the oscilloscope"
can someone explain to me exactly what you'd be looking for?

also, is there any good vst oscilloscopes for osx?

Probably the only intelligible waveform investigation you could do is to get CLEAN sine/square/triangle... waves without any aberations or harmonics. Music itself looks like chaos on the o'scope, any drums other than the kick would be unintelligible. I'd love to have one at home just for the eye candy, it would be cool to tune a guitar with too.

Well, I guess that explains a lot about their music..

are you using Waves products or Reaktor?...
Im sure if you look at the waves going throught the master track long enough you will know what to look for. I say take a dose and listen to your favorite tracks while watching the final wave being produced.

thats a very interesting idea. Autechre has done so much.... I still listen to Amber all the time for its super soothing energy.

Tone Deft wrote:Probably the only intelligible waveform investigation you could do is to get CLEAN sine/square/triangle... waves without any aberations or harmonics. Music itself looks like chaos on the o'scope, any drums other than the kick would be unintelligible. I'd love to have one at home just for the eye candy, it would be cool to tune a guitar with too.

thats sorta what I thought, so I'm wondering how they could possibly say something like "we sometimes make tracks that simply look good on the oscilloscope. unfortunately it tends to be a bit on the rave side" or something to that effect, it's not a direct quote of course.

Oscilloscopes are ok with just an oscillator, but anything beyond that is just silly. IMO

I have a spectra-graph VSTi that I use quite a bit, that's quite useful if you are trying to analyse the frequencies. Time is horizontal, frequency vertical. It was made by a friend, I'm sure there are KVR type ones similar.

It's much more useful than an oscilloscope though. I have it on the master and flip it on and mute down to just two problem tracks and look at the trace to try and get clues about any voicing issues.
It can be handy to have a stereo / phase meter on there to flick on too, just so you don't make any silly mistakes.

yes, I do have ears.
they are around here someplace


here's my quote for any magazine editors

me wrote:I generally use electrons with a positive phase because they sound warmer, I got the idea in a lucid dream I had once. All my music is converted to analogue at the output stage because it is more human. I never ever play in G minor, because of a very specific reason relating to my past.

Writing music that looks good on an oscilloscope
is like
choreographing a dance that , when drawn out in Autocad, will meet the structural building codes of your area.

Usually what this means is that it appears in phase, and is balanced along the axis (kind of nice, more or less evenly expanding within bounds equally either side of the center point wavy diagonal ovals).

[edit] found a picture, scroll down on this page
http://www.wohler.com/overviews/B-AM-3B.html

laird wrote:Writing music that looks good on an oscilloscope
is like
choreographing a dance that , when drawn out in Autocad, will meet the structural building codes of your area.

Yes and no. You can see aberrations in simple waveforms that you won't hear, for that matter you can see DC offsets (the waveforum not centered around zero) that you can't hear and you can clearly see the volume of a waveform that's beyond your ear's sensitivity.

But only for very basic, pure waveforms.

+1 to Angstrom spectragraphs would be much more useful.

I should try to find a software O'scope, could be cool while tweaking on operator.

Angstrom wrote:yes, I do have ears.
they are around here someplace

well I know some people would make the comment that you shouldn't be using your eyes but I certainly don't feel that way. I think your eyes can tell you certain things that your ears can't make out and vice versa.

on a slightly similar note I've been playing with the concept of symetrical melodies by laying out a grid of notes (left to right top to bottem as a scale) and then making symetrical patterns in it. I got the idea while playing with my padkontrol when I realised that symetrical patterns make nice melodies so I'm playing with the concept of bigger or smaller grids of notes.

not really the same thing we are talking about but my point is visual and audio should be friends as there is complex math involved in both and sometimes your ears can't recognise maths that your eyes can recognise

Johnisfaster wrote:sometimes your ears can't recognise maths that your eyes can recognise

And your ears hear logarithmically, non-linear, they're not sensitive to small changes in amplitude.

Tone Deft wrote:

Johnisfaster wrote:sometimes your ears can't recognise maths that your eyes can recognise

And your ears hear logarithmically, non-linear, they're not sensitive to small changes in amplitude.

thats a little more specific, but exactly my point. not to mention your eyes don't experience phasing problems from a bad studio

My favorite autechre quote: writing about music is like dancing about architecture

still, if you call waveforms = music
then you are more into minimal music than I am.

laird wrote:My favorite autechre quote: writing about music is like dancing about architecture

still, if you call waveforms = music
then you are more into minimal music than I am.

I could be wrong but I think they were quoting someone else when they said that.

http://www.pacifier.com/~ascott/they/tamildaa.htm

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to want to do."
--Elvis Costello, in an interview by Timothy White entitled "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52.

A cool quote, but one that would leave the forum in complete disarray.



I think the whole point of the o'scope exercise is to get as pure of a waveform as possible, they just sound f-ing amazing at volume, no fuzz to them.