Post: #51

(09-10-2017 11:07 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Man, that is early 90s as hell.
You can tell that thing never got with 100 miles of a DAW. I haven't heard a song with those minor imperfections in like 20 years.

But it sounds like everybody involved in making it had a great time.

It's bad, and I don't really want to own up to it, but... that one was all me. The period was so rough and ready and the club community was very tightly-knit, so you'd often have friends who'd have a track ready to press but nothing for the B-Side, so it was always worth knocking off ideas onto cassette now and again, so you could say "How about this", and you'd do it up properly in a cheap studio with a proper 808 or 909, someone would throw some quick lyrics onto it, and you'd split the royalties.

So what you're hearing is me playing this*, an Ensoniq VFX-SD, (50% stock patches / 50% self-programmed patches):



recorded onto this:



via this:



^ That belonged to my girlfriend, who decided she was going to be a rock star, but poked around with it for 10 minutes, then realised - in classic girl fashion - that it was too hard and she really just couldn't be bothered, so handwaved it in my direction: "Here, you figure it out". Girlfriend's been gone for decades, but I still have the 4-track.

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* Recently, a friend picked one of these up at a garage sale in Melbourne, and when I offered up my awestruck approval, (it was a great - if temperamental - keyboard), he dumped it on me to fix it, which I've been attempting to do for over a month now.

I burst out laughing when I read this in the manual:

"The great power and flexibility of the VFX-SD lies in the fact that it is really computer - a computer disguised as a keyboard instruments, but a computer nonetheless. The software that operates the VFX-SD is very sophisticated. In fact, there is a 128k computer program that runs inside the VFX-SD. That's more than most personal computers!"



Which means, holy shit, I did all that in less than 128k.

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Youse bloody kids today have it so damn easy now with your DAW's. This is why I'm kind of disappointed we're not living through a wave of incredible, experimental, cross-pollinated music because the ease of making it increased so severely.

Post: #52

128kb! Amazing power. I think my crappy keyboard, which I bought for 200$ at the local Guitar Center, has like a thousand times more power than that.

The problem is that the good stuff is out there, but it's hard to find. There's no good way to find the good stuff through the dross, because god knows it's in nobody's interest to show it to you. You have to sift through mountains and mountains of crap to find it, and you have to never, ever turn on the radio.

Here's another one I like. This is... Drum, and Bass? Despite not really having a strong drum track, or really a lot of bass. I don't quite get it. The ultra-specialization of techno that happened at some point aggravates the hell out of me.

Post: #53

(09-26-2016 11:18 AM)911 Wrote:  Techno is weird in that it is a musical genre than hasn't changed much in 25+ years. 90% of the DJs are crap, as are most of the women DJs.

Your commend is misinformed.

Maya Jane Coles, Kim Anne Foxman, Magdelina. There are plenty of great female techno DJ's. Here's a Spotify playlist (I didn't make it) with all bitch DJ's https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/pl...aWr9aQfVd.

Techno from the 90's has a way different sound than techno today.

90's:




today:

Post: #54

One part of techno I find really interesting is the 80s nostalgia you see from a lot of kids these days.
There's a whole genre of it, called synthwave. I think they limit themselves to only synths that were available in that period, but damned if I would be able to tell.

I particularly like this mix, whose basically sums up the whole thing: Nostalgia for a Time You've Never Known.



I haven't actually listened to most of the mix, because the first song is so damn good that every time I finish it I just go back and listen to it again. Like most good songs on youtube, it's by some nobody you've never heard of, who probably has never DJ'd a single set in his life, will never sign a record contract, and will make at most 30$ off of releasing a single on bandcamp.

God, I wish I'd been a teenager in the 80s. I could've had a fucking blast.

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Post: #56

(09-11-2017 04:36 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  One part of techno I find really interesting is the 80s nostalgia you see from a lot of kids these days...

SNIP

...God, I wish I'd been a teenager in the 80s. I could've had a fucking blast.

I'd class Synthwave as retro-futurism, rather than genuinely sounding 1980's.

They're reimagining the 80's as a combination of Tangerine Dream Movie Soundtracks, New Order's 'Blue Monday' and - especially - Commodore 64 SID music and NES game cartridge soundtracks. There's a sense of midi sequencing rather than a combination of that and human playing. (I remember it being very important to play bass in live - even via keyboard to a track, unless it was an obviously sequenced part).

The better stuff is danceable, (the first track you singled out, or the guy around 41 minutes who really knows how to programme a drum machine), but too much of it sounds far too clean and professional, too on the beat rather than off it, and alienating rather than communal, which was only a small, brief style of music in the early 80's. It strikes me as dance music for people who are uncomfortable leaving the house, which, admittedly, is what they're probably going for.

80's dance music, aside from the pretentious German Strain, was generally very communal / outgoing, (see 'Hey Music Lover' or 'Groove Is In The Heart' or late 80's Stadium House), and it was all about what was happening between the beats. It was rough as gates, and the drums were gated to hell, so they tended to sound like blasts of air or houses being destroyed than a polite snare drum hit. Your bass had better be syncopated, because after records like 'Slice Me Nice' and 'Love Reaction' drove 'Blue Monday' into the ground within a year, (and 'Blue Monday' already sounded suspiciously like 'Passion' by the Flirts to my ears), that ultra-quantised thing on the beat died off, and it was considered passe.

I always loved what came out of NYC right after, (84-87): Freestyle. It was a blast to dance to. Even the English ended up running with it until Hi-Nrg, Italo House and Acid House took over. Hear how gated the snares are?













This is what I mean by dance music often being cheap and nasty recordings. They even rerecorded it around '87, and it still sounded a mess.





Its influence even snuck into the occassional rock song. I always loved this one, because the dual vocal meant it could occupy both half of my brains at once.





It's odd... I never hear this in influence in Synthwave. It's like everything stops in 1984, when it was the back half of the decade that was really exciting.

Post: #57

Following on from that... Freestyle was hugely-popular with the hottest club girls, as was Acid House and New Jack Swing. Techno was more music for boys, Hi-NRG was music for Gay Men and Suburban Girls out for a night on the town who'd dance around their handbags if you went to the wrong club. Nothing got girls off the floor than the forced hype failure that was Drum N Bass in the mid 90's. It was entirely critical hype over something that was never going to be popular. I wasn't surprised when Brittany Spears and Backstreet Boys started getting big. Chicks could dance to it.

New Jack Swing was a lot of fun too. You can hear it developing out Freestyle with a song like this, which paired a bunch of Brooklyn guys with an English Pin Up Model.





Listen for the high hat here... hear the Triplet Swing? That's Freestyle turning into New Jack Swing. Fuck, I love how raw a track this is.





Goddamn, Neneh was smokin'. And I love that harsh rising keyboard hook.



It's a style I consistently found rock drummers unable to pull off. They just can't get the triplets over the back beat. Jazz Drummers, no problem.

I was talking to a mate last night about the music in his Sonic Game and mentioned how New Jack Swing was as big an influence on that as Techno. He asked me what the difference was. I tapped out a kick / snare combo on his synth whilst beatboxing a hi hat, and I could see he was sort of getting it but not quite. Then I did a little yelp on the '4 and', and he instantly got it. "Oh... Rhythm Nation."

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Either way, if you're going to mess around with faux-80's, learn to gate the drums. If you're going for the Prince Linn sound, detune the snare.

A couple of years back, when I was doing string arrangements for some Major Label idiots in London, the little twerps in the band involved had decided they were now rock stars, and were blowing thousands of dollars a day by turning up five hours late for sessions, like it was still 1987 or something.

After a week of this, the Engineer and I decided to knock off our own album on their dime. The Producer didn't care - he'd say he was going off for an extended coffee break and to ring if the fuckwits did turn up. So, one of us would hit play as the other did his thing - one or two takes max - and we'd knock it out track by track, and get a serviceable backing track before the twerps ever turned up for the day. It was a lot of fun, particularly as I was thrown into the deep end with drumming and, on occasion, playing bass.

In this case he had his guitar part queued for me to play along with, and I said it was sounding very 80's Bruce Springsteen.

"You're right. I'll turn up the reverb and gate and compress the drumkit," he said. Whilst they sometimes used a real drum kit, they also sometimes used fully electronic kits to trigger samples, which is what we used here. It felt very Thompson Twins. So I winged the part, overdubbed some tambourine, (there was no 'Be My Baby' style castanets handy), then laughed my arse off when I heard the final result.

Here's a raw excerpt: you'll really notice it on the toms, kick and snare. It might sound weird, but I'm playing off his guitar parts rather than a click and they're not there so any tiny timing issues must have been his, because it worked great in the mix.

http://tinyurl.com/ycmkqkjo

He forgot to zero out the settings, so when the band came in to do their thing later...

Contrast with the sheer rawness with which I programme Linn Drum samples. The 80's weren't shiny and pretty. But note the lack of gating on the snares, (which I intended to put in at the mixing phase if I took any of these dance songs seriously, but I always end up using rock drums in the end to escape the cheesiness because you can't go backwards to your childhood, you know?) You can see how important a part of any 80's mix it is.

http://tinyurl.com/y8eo68or

Note the gated toms in this one.

http://tinyurl.com/ybdu9mec

Post: #58

(09-10-2017 09:19 PM)Cronus Wrote:  One of my favorite mixes this year. Boris delivers.

Came into this thread to post that exactly set. Nice, Cronus.

I've been on a Kolombo kick lately. I love this track:

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Going to watch Solomun play tonight.

So good.

Post: #62

(11-14-2017 09:34 AM)Ringo Wrote:  Going to watch Solomun play tonight.

So good.

Follow up to the post above.

That was one of the most insane performances I've ever seen.

Solomun played an epic 6-hour set (!!!). When I left at 8am (5 hours into his set) the place was still at probably 75% occupancy. Unreal.

He played another long set couple of days later at the legendary Warung club in Santa Catarina:

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Great set.

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Post: #69

(09-10-2017 08:48 PM)AnonymousBosch Wrote:  

Oh boy... I'd forgotten how gorgeous that chick (Camilla Henemark) was. Probably one of the reasons why my puberty started a few years early.

(09-12-2017 02:01 AM)AnonymousBosch Wrote:  Its influence even snuck into the occassional rock song. I always loved this one, because the dual vocal meant it could occupy both half of my brains at once.





It's odd... I never hear this in influence in Synthwave. It's like everything stops in 1984, when it was the back half of the decade that was really exciting.

I think it's an aesthetic choice, kind of like how "The Wedding Singer" is set in "1985". Anything post-1985 seems too processed/slick for most synthwave guys, I guess.

Post: #70

Gotta love Klock

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