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Colin OOOD

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Posts posted by Colin OOOD

    good fat bass anyone?

    in Music Making and Production/Industry

    Posted

    Yeah, Korg Mono/Poly! Wicked (not so) little synth! Fantastic sync sound too. Not cheap though...

     

    Anyway, we were talking about bass sounds... If you want it "fat and juicy" I think a good way to go is overdrive; I use the standard Cubase VST plugin and this really thickens basslines nicely. I've not tried it with squelchy basslines too much but I reckon if you kke it subtle and roll off most of the top end you'll be OK.

     

    But as for 'pushing more than it pulls', I don't know, maybe your ears are better than mine but I don't think it makes much difference. As long as there is no DC offset in the wave, the average travel of the cone is zero in ANY sound; sounds like you need some low EQ to sort your Micro Q out (a good high-pass/low cut filter at about 20Hz will do the trick).

     

    To get a good fat bass sound that sits in the mix well, you need to do a lot of (appropriate!) compression. Plus, I find that cutting out everything below 50Hz and boosting the main pitch area around 65-80 Hz (depending on the key of the track) leaves a good space in the sub-bass area for the kick drum to wallop away in... ok, ok, I'll shut up now.

     

    Colin

    Chopping voices

    in Music Making and Production/Industry

    Posted

    Marc,

     

    I'm not sure exactly, not having Cubase in front of me now, but I think one of the knobs on the MIDI Gate plugin should be something like 'Depth'. This controls the depth of the gating effect; setting it to anything other than full will keep a proportion of the ungated sound in your signal. You can automate this as well.

     

    Colin

    Chopping voices

    in Music Making and Production/Industry

    Posted

    For the most part you can place MIDI notes on every 16th note with a length of 1/32, but for that Posford feeling (and OOOD, and God knows who else, everybody probably) you need to double up on the timing every so often... Try this:

     

    At the end of every two bars, replace the last 16th note with 2 32nd notes each with a length of 1/64.

     

    Then this:

     

    Using the pattern above, replace the 2nd and 3rd gate pulse with one note 3 32nds long. Do the same with the 5th and 6th, and the 8th and 9th. Delete the 15th gate pulse (the one before the really short ones you put in earlier).

     

    Sound familiar?

     

    Colin

    Synthesis Question

    in Music Making and Production/Industry

    Posted

    2 or more pulse-wave with quite a lot of PWM; enough to fuzz the sound out but not too much to make it disappear (make the PWM different for each oscillator if you can). Modulate pulsewidth with a sinewave LFO at maybe 5 Hz. Detune the oscillators between 2 and 5 cents either side of zero. Wide open filter with maybe 25% res so it bites if you sweep it. A nice wide chorus and you should be there.

     

    At least, if you're after the sound I think you are!

     

    Colin

    where did that thing go again.. whats it called? ..

    in Music Making and Production/Industry

    Posted

    A very personal subject, inspiration; different for everyone, I'm sure.

     

    For me, a strong source of inspiration has been smoking weed, listening to music with my friends - many of whom I collaborate with from time to time. However, getting too stoned can sometimes be a definite hindrance to the correct operation of a computer, although the level of stonedness I personally have to achieve for this to be a problem means that unconsciousness is an equally likely effect! :)

     

    Now that I'm trying to cut down on my ganja consumption I find equal inspiration in my choice of collaborators. I find it incredibly inspiring to work with people who are excited about making music, of whatever kind - and who are able to express themselves well with it. Mike. Geoff. Ryo. Steve. .

     

    Colin

    Artists playing "live"

    in General Psytrance

    Posted

    Hmmm... Yeah, playing live is difficult. For about 5 years we used to do 50/50 sets; we'd take the whole studio up on stage and play alternate tracks from the PC (no audio, MIDI only!) and from DAT so we could set up the system for the next live track. For our music and system I think this was the best way of doing it at the time; the live tracks had an immediacy and power you can't get from pre-recorded mixes; audience interaction was, well, fucking fantastic; the uncertainty of playing live meant that magic could happen, and it sure beats standing there pretending to twiddle knobs. We ended up releasing 9 live tracks as our debut album.

     

    HOWEVER... it kicks fuck out of the equipment (we were doing 2 gigs a month in the UK for a couple of years - a lot of tearing down and setting up) to the extent that one thing preventing us from playing like that now is our gear is broken. It also used to take us a week to set the studio up at home after a gig even though we could set up and soundcheck in an hour and a half at a gig, which meant that writing was often difficult. Plus the uncertainty of playing live meant that things could go wrong very easily! If you're trying to mix the tracks live on stage you need proper monitoring; not something you have every time.

     

    Another thing against the way we used to do it is that our writing methods have now changed completely. Previously, our live sets sounded like the records because exactly the same gear was used in exactly the same ways to do both. Nowadays all our music goes down as audio - this is stuff that you _can't_ perform live, 1 instrument per part, because we don't have that many keyboards.

     

    Personally I want to do as much live as possible when I play, but at the same time I want my tracks to come across as well as possible. At the moment this means playing .wavs and playing live keyboards/guitar/percussion/didge (delete according to which act). It's a compromise, but there you are. At least there is musicianship on stage during the live set - it's more saisfying for me as an artist/performer and, I hope, satisfying for people who want to see some evidence that performers are doing more than pressing 'play' and dancing.

     

    I always used to say that acts who did DAT/CD/WAV 'live' sets were lying to the audience, that if all they want to do was pretend to perform then they should be DJing. I think now that with production taking the direction it has, this is more of a necessity if you want your tracks to sound the same on stage as they do on vinyl. But if you're not going to give added value (and most of the acts I've seen live _do_ have some performance aspect to their set) then for Bog's sake, get off the stage and on the decks.

     

    Colin

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