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Get that bleedin' kettle on

Simple mambo pattern = tying me in knots

I've spent the last few weeks trying to get my head round this devious mambo pattern, taken from The Drummer's Bible via my drum teacher. Closehat-5 is actually a pedal hat, and the Ratty Rimclick is a rimshot.

No bass drum on the one is a tricky devil, and means fighting the natural inclination of my right foot to stamp down at the start of each bar. It's me trying to do something different to the usual funk patterns I've memorised and play over and over, and dammit it hurts, but that's what (my) learning is all about, constantly shouting at myself - "stop doing that thing you can do in your sleep, do this stuff that makes you feel like you're a beginner again".

So I've been practising at my usual slow tempo, here's a rendering of the beat from Ableton Live using a motley collection of drum samples at 115bpm, or thereabouts:

  
(download)

...which sounds alright, I guess. I don't watch Strictly Come Dancing, but I'd like to think that the Reithian edict is still in order and you've all become experts on dance steps and tempos through Bruce Forsyth's tutelage; so you'll all no doubt be smacking your foreheads at this point and be going - duh, mambo tempo is 192-204bpm - hello:

  
(download)

...which makes much more sense. Obviously I've a way to go before I can get up to 200bpm with this pattern, but I'll get there. Possibly in 2015.

The great thing about this pattern is I can break it apart and use the constituent elements to torture myself in other ways, the "no bass drum on the one" thing, the pedal hat on the one and three, the ride pattern and strange accenting, the toms... weeks and weeks of twiddling out of a couple of bars. I might need to come back in another life to get this drumming thing down.

Filed under  //   drums   music  
Posted November 1, 2009
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Distorted output from an Akai S950 sampler

Mmmm, chips. Barely 20 minutes into using my newly-purchased S950, the sound became extremely, digitally-ish distorted. So before I start crying, it's a good chance to whip the top off the thing and see what we've got in the grey box. Mmm, circuit board porn.

...and it's a lot busier in here than I expected; the weight of the box (almost 11kg according to the manual) should have been a clue here. But then this thing did come out in 1988 - my (also broken...) E-MU ESI 2000 is virtually empty by comparison.

So you can see the power supply on the left, with a large heatsink. There's at least two big main circuit boards, the lower one hidden by top one, which I'm guessing is the voice board, because of the eight identical columns of chips, one for each voice. I imagine the main out is on the right-hand side somewhere. Underneath this I imagine we have some sort of CPU board. There's a large trapdoor underneath for adding two 750KB expansion cards. If your S950 says 512 Kwords on bootup, it's unexpanded - 1024 Kwords equals 1.5MB, 1536 Kwords means it's fully expanded to 2.25MB. 

I was hoping that there was some sort of loose connection rather than a blown opamp or power supply problem, which I'd be rubbish at fixing and tricky to track down. There are wires connecting the circuitboard to the audio out board - waggling and pushing the wires down into the socket the wires in this area (top-right as you look at the picture above) fixed the problem.

So I've not had a great chance to play around with it, but here's a not-particularly indicative scratchy loop of a TR-606 and Boss handclap, with heavy spring reverb, sampled at 5KHz, sat next to an MS20 bassline recorded straight into Ableton Live. 

  
(download)

Filed under  //   akai   electronics   music   s950   sampler  
Posted October 12, 2009
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Wombling along - Russell Davies on world-building

But the number one reason is the combination of great songs and brilliant world-building. The best bands are almost always fictional constructs. They make little myths out of themselves; through music, interviews and performance, the best bands have a story as well as music. And this gives them a constructed world their songs can spring from - meaning they can be about more than Boy Meets Girl, or can at least approach it in a different way. For The Smiths it was a literary melancholia. For ABC it was sarcastic glamour. For The Wombles it was the importance of tidying up.

From "Wombling along" by Russell Davies.

Filed under  //   art   music  
Posted September 25, 2009
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What does your city sound like?

Really love this idea - a site that shows you tracks on upload-yer-own-music service SoundCloud from cities around the world. According to their blog, it came out of the London Music Hack Day held at the Guardian offices.

If the city you want isn't listed on the main board, try bunging it in the URL - from round here Birmingham, Leamington, Rugby and Coventry all have tracks listed against them. 

Filed under  //   music   soundcloud   web2.0  
Posted September 24, 2009
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Gavin Russom's bootleg remix of "piece of me"

Ah, Britney just reminds me of when all you (apparently...) needed to do to get your site to the top of search engines was to put "britney spears, mp3, porn" in the meta tags. Bless 'er and her frequently photographed ladybits.

Anyway, here's a rather moody bootleg remix of the search engine queen by Gavin Russom of Delia and Gavin on DFA (check the epic Carl Craig remix of Relevee), and latterly of Black Meteoric Star - it appeared briefly on his Myspace page - yeah, remember those - last year sometime, and Youtube appears to be the only place you can get it from.

Filed under  //   britneyspears   gavinrussom   music   youtube  
Posted September 16, 2009
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Cybraphon - bloody genius "autonomous emotional robot band" thing

It's so good, I hope this lives forever. Just to explain what this mad device is  - it's the Cybraphon - a sort of band-in-a-box, patterned after 19th Century mechanical bands, which responds to what people say about it on the internet. The happier it gets, the more happy the music it plays, and vice versa.

I hope it inspires other artists to play around with what I'm guessing it's based on, which is the Arduino - an "open-source electronics prototyping platform" - essentially a circuitboard you plug into your computer over USB, with digital outs and analogue ins, meaning that you can attach all kinds of sensors and output devices.

I've got a couple of these from when I was intending to build a 128 sized Arduinome - and I will get round to it eventually, honest. I got one
of them out the other day and managed to make a couple of LEDs attached to the digital outs flash on and off, such geeky fun.

I should say that the Cybraphon is by the Edinburgh-based art collective FOUND and you can see it at the Inspace Gallery (Google Map link) as part of the Edinburgh Arts Festival, until 5th September 2009.

Filed under  //   arduino   art   diy   electronics   music   video  
Posted August 13, 2009
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Unitxt


 
Lovely. (via Philip Sherburne)

Filed under  //   music   video   youtube  
Posted August 9, 2009
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Robert Rental and The Normal live - video clip from 1979


Via Gutterbreakz, archive footage of Robert Rental and The Normal playing live with a Wasp (and the Korg 700s?) and tapes in 1979. Not sure that this is the "Live at West Runton Pavillion" performance; if it is, the track on the video has had the intro chopped about a bit. My heart skips slightly to think that the rest of the performance might be around somewhere - surely Mute would have put it out by now, though?

Also a great bit of film in there from what looks to be the address on the back of the early Mute sleeves, Decoy Avenue, with their tapes and wires and batteries home studio.

While I'm on the obsessional Mute thing; been listening to TVOD far too closely and you can clearly hear that one of the channel he's switching between is "The Good Life". You can hear Penelope Keith going "Barbara I rea-".

OK, kill me now.

Filed under  //   danielmiller   music   muterecords   robertrental   video   youtube  
Posted June 10, 2009
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Tape-to-tape dubbing - reggae/dub mix

Hoo, Roland just made really lovely looking gear in the 70s. This is my Space Echo, same sort as Lee "Scratch" Perry used to use, and I've been getting all over-excited about how great it sounds, particularly when driven into dubby feedback.

Speaking of dub, here's a mix for your listening delight. "Pick a dub" by Keith Hudson was my first encounter with the spacey sound of dub, through John Peel playing tracks from the early-Nineties re-issue on Blood and Fire. Typically I misheard the laconic Liverpudlian and confused the assistants in Selectadisc (RIP) in Coventry  by asking for Keith Hudson's "Pick a dog". 

I heard nothing much until Scientist's genius "Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires" made up the K-JAH radio station on GTA3, which re-ignited my love for it and I've been trying to pick up bits ever since.

Here's the mix anyway, on 8tracks - Tape-to-tape dubbing. 

1. Underground - The Upsetters
2. Jacqueline - Hugh Mundell
3. Please Don't Go - Horace Andy
4. Ice Cream Love - Johnny Osbourne
5. De Materialize - Scientist
6. Black Heart - Keith Hudson
7. Red Hot - The Upsetters
8. Chapter 3 - Joe Gibbs and the Professionals
9. Spying Glass - Horace Andy
10. Bam Bam - Sister Nancy
11. Turn The Heater On - Keith Hudson
12. She's Lost Control (dub) - Grace Jones
13. Up Town Top Ranking - Althea and Donna

Filed under  //   8tracks   dub   mix   music   reggae  
Posted March 23, 2009
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Depeche Mode - "Wrong"


 
Should've been through Basildon. Track rather marvellous, got to say.

Filed under  //   depechemode   music   video   youtube  
Posted March 23, 2009
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