Allo allo all!
Johan and I have been chatting for a while about this whole blogging "ting" and I must admit - I've been getting more and more into it. I'll try and keep the cross pollination (read that as copying) from my myspace blog to this one to a bare minimum, but I'd start off with one of the most awesome vids I have ever seen - and it has been posted on my myspaz before so apologies if you've already seen it.
Ok - so obviously this is awesome, but there's something a bit more going on too - and it's something I've been thinking about more and more over the last year, and thats ways of creatively abusing technology.
I'm currently doing some beta testing and creating some artist presets for a really well known VST company - a lot of fun but also a lot of trial and error and experimentation. It's really cool to be working with stuff at this early phase of development, with the added bonus that with software (as opposed to teslas controlled by guitars) you can't electrocute yourself - unless you get really creative with your pc tower.
When I started off writing music, as I'm sure many people experienced as well, the whole studio was a modular synthesizer in effect. There were no rules.
Run a synth through a guitar amp, mic it, then feed it back into the synth, just to see what happens. Maybe something cool comes along, maybe not. More often than not unfortunately, at least at the beginning, but over time, you get better and better at being a bit of a mad scientist, and sooner or later you're coming up with really fun stuff on a daily basis.
I kind of got in a little late in the multitrack recording game, and early on the budget pc music creation game - starting off as many people did with screamtracker, fasttracker 2 etc., but since those programs were only as good as the sounds you sampled in, the external gear and how you used it was still a huge factor.
Over the years (and I'm sure many other producers can agree), it's gotten a LOT easier to sound good, but the happy accidents of early experimentations tend to occur less often. It's something that I've found sorely missing in my experience writing music, and something I've really gotten a kick out of seeing in people I've tutored over the years, or in checking out videos of the results of amateur circuit bending etc - it's totally reenergized me acutally. I've always had delusions of being a bit of a synth nut but I'd forgotten how important that history and the history of experimentation was to me.
I've started rebuilding my studio, slowly, as I can afford it, based around the modular concept, trying really hard
For people who have never worked with a real analog synth, go out and get one. For people who grew up with em but have been using everything thats easier, take a trip down memory lane.
A while ago I built something called an Atari Punk Console, and was lucky enough to have matrixsynth host a vid I made of it on their blog - here's a link to the circuit and if you google it you'll find you can put one of these together using radio shack parts and a twenty dollar bill (plus some solder etc). It's not the most useful thing on the planet but it's super fun and it might make you feel a little closer to the soundmaking process.
