On Wed, 22 Aug, 2007 at 10:01PM -0400, Chris McCormick spake thus: > On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 02:33:17PM -0700, Ken Restivo wrote: > > On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 11:34:26PM -0400, Chris McCormick wrote: > > > I've been sitting on this one for a very (very) long > > > time, but today is as good a day as any to release it: > > > <http://sciencegirlrecords.com/chr15m/music/CD005/Chris%20McCormick%20-%20Escape%20Velocity%20Mouse.mp3> > > > > Very nice! > > Cheers! > > > What do you use to get those crazy breakbeats? Is that Hydrogen? Some custom PD/SC/CSound/ChucK stuff? > > The beats themselves are 'classic breaks' which you can source just > about anywhere, but one great place that has a whole list of them in one > spot is <http://www.junglebreaks.co.uk/>. > > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break> is an absolute classic which > you can hear everywhere. Once you know it well it starts to jump out at > you in advertisements and all kinds of music, but I digress. I set beat-splicing with the amen break as a piece of coursework for students taking my content production module. It was a lot of fun listening to the results. James > Once I've selected the break I want for the particular tune I am working > on, I load up a tracker program (Soundtracker, Cheesetracker, or ModPlug > under Wine) and get it playing at the right pitch/speed for the track. For > jungle/drum and bass this is about 180 BPM, and for breaksbeat, big-beat, > etc. this is often about 140 to 160 BPM. You can also pitch shift, > time shift, add distortion, clipping, compression, whatever to give it > more life. There's something about the sample-accuracy of trackers that > gives this kind of music an exactitude that I've found missing when > using midi sequencers. > > Next I chop it up into bits by hand. This really depends on the break, > and on the song. One way to chop it is into a section starting with the > bass drum, a section starting with the first snare drum, and a section > starting with a snare drum that leads into a fill. This gives you an > arsenal of 'rolling' sounds that you can string together into various > interesting phrases. Which is basically what I do next - I put together > an interesting base phrase using the pieces, and then from there I spend > many hours (sometimes days) writing variations on that phrase for > different bits of the tune. I like to make it so that no two bars sound > exactly the same, and this gives the tune an improvised, 'jazzy' feel > (though I use that word extremely na??vely since I have had no jazz > training whatsoever). One way to ensure that no two bars sound the same > is to re-write the phrase by hand each time instead of copying and > pasting and doing a kind of 'chinese whispers' in your head so that the > beat changes each time you write it. > > In Pd I have actually come up with some algorithms for shifting > breakbeats around so that they make interesting sounding fills. > Basically this entails playing each 16th of the breakbeat separately in > time with your tune (so that the beat is re-constituted) and then > shifting those sixteenths forward and backward from the position they > are supposed to be at, in time with the beat. It's kind of complicated > to explain, but if anyone wants I could dig up a Pd patch to do it. The > algorithm just tries to codify, and attach to a midi knob, what I do > manually in a tracker so that it can be done live in realtime. > > >From there, there are lots of little tricks to making variations in the > sound to get that intesely sequenced feel like chopping samples short, > looping bits, putting delay on, and other effects. One great thing about > ModPlug is that you have very fine grained control over effects which > you can program to change parameters every single tick. So you can make > your effects as exact as the beats and have them changing in time in > response to what is going on in the song. > > Sorry about this long email; I hope I answered your question! > > Best, > > Chris. > > http://mccormick.cx > _______________________________________________ > Linux-audio-user mailing list > Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user > _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
