One memory in particular I have about Rev 105 is being in 6th or 7th grade and listening to special feature about Soul Coughing. They devoted a whole hour of air-time to the group, featuring live and unreleased tracks interspersed with interviews and pre-produced segments about the band’s history and development (narrated, I think, by Mary Lucia). It was cassette-tape “gold,” and tape it I did. (Where is that tape today? Did I record over it?)
Remember how we used to collect our music?
You’d hear a catchy song on the radio but miss the ID, so you’d call the station. “That song. What was that song?” and you’d hum a few bars for the DJ, approximate a few misheard lyrics. “I think there was a trumpet?” And then she’d tell you what it was.
The next day you’d call the station to make a request, and they’d promise play it sometime within the hour. You’d wait at your parent’s stereo, your finger hovering in anticipation over the red circle on the tape deck. 90 minutes passed, and then:
“By request, here’s…,” the first few bars already creeping up beneath her voice. You’d fumble for the “rec” button.
And so you collected whole shoe-boxes of mixtapes with no particular unifying theme, each song missing the first few seconds because, of course, you needed to hit “rec” and “play” at the same time.
Apparently I had never been on the receiving side of the “just wanted to let you know I’ve starting seeing someone new” conversation before this evening. That’s why this post is both late and short.
I’m fine.
In other news, did you hear D-plan is getting back together? Feels like a good night to revisit some of those records.
After writing that post a few day ago about experimenting with the EPS-16+ sampler, I listened to a friend’s podcast which happened to be about sampling as an art form. It got me thinking: there’s definitely something about the overall sound of the early sampling era that is both distinct and difficult to replicate (authentically, IMO) using modern production techniques.
As I mentioned in my post, early samplers could only record a few seconds of audio; you had to build a groove out of many layers of sonic fragments. If you wanted to record longer passages of music (or simply a greater number of different sounds) you had had to lower the sample rate (record at a lower quality setting) to get the best mileage out of the sampler’s limited memory (~1 megabyte in the case of the EPS-16+). At the same time, recording at a lower sample rate obscured the sounds, making them darker, grainy, distorted.
But as “better” samplers became available for less money, higher fidelity meant samples weren’t necessarily obscured by the act of sampling itself. Larger storage capacities meant it was possible to assemble entire libraries of crystal-clear samples and long phrases. Both factors would have meant that samples were easier to recognize within a mix unless a producer went out of the way to edit and intentionally obscure them. Moreover, having long, clear phrases makes it a lot easier to build a solid (though potentially more “derivative”) groove from pre-fabricated parts of other songs.
It makes me wonder what kind of correlation might have existed between the rise of sampling-related lawsuits and improvements in the technology.
Just goofing around with layering some synths and samples.
It’s Friday night, so I’m going to make this one short.
Earlier this summer I put together a project that I called “Wikimixing” for the Megapolis Audio Festival. Here is a blurb I wrote about it at the time:
“Mixing on a computer is usually a solitary endeavor: one person controlling one mouse and keyboard making one decision at a time. We’re going to try to fix that. Part workshop and part experiment in “crowd-sourced” audio art, this is like editing Wikipedia but with sound instead of text. We’ll … collectively mix and manipulate sounds as a group in real-time using a bunch of colorful customized keyboard controllers, all connected to a single computer. The idea is to get as many hands/ears/minds at once collaborating (and competing) on the same soundscape, so that whatever strange, beautiful, or frightening noises that emerge are the product of our group’s collective will. Everyone is in control at the same time and yet no one is!”
You can read more about the ideas and technical aspects of the project here. But for whatever reason, I never got around to posting the final mixes on my own site…until TODAY. So unless you’ve been to the Megapolis 2010 Archive, they’re NEW TO YOU!
