Colin OOOD

I remember allright... except it wasn't one of mine - what do you think I am, stupid or something? Dick Trevor gave me his dreads when he had his head shaved after the Rock Bitch tour; I've been using them as cat bedding ever since. Well, mostly as cat bedding; when I go out partying I always bring a short length of Green Nun dreadlock with me to give to give away when asked - I'd be as bald as a coot if I gave my own dreads away every time I was asked for one.

Depending on what is wrong with the track, you'd be surprised how much can be done to make something sound listenable, and for sure there are some 'shiny turds' out there. However the fact remains that the better the pre-master is, the better result good post-processing will achieve. As for not having heard the pre-master first, experienced ears can recognise overcompression or inappropriate EQ...

Hi Tatsu, nothing sensible to add I'm afraid, except maybe this.

That is, as they say, the puppy.

Here's some mixes from me and the OOOD guys: OOOD/Voice of Cod/Unconscious Collective studio mix Stevie C - Psy Shambala Ryo - Triskele Mix Rama - Up For It I'm afraid the lads aren't into tracklists - mention them to Stevie and he starts looking confused and worried but here's the tracklist (with start times) for the OOOD/VoC/UC mix, which contains some of the tracks we've released over the past few years: 1: Voice of Cod - It's Just A Ride - 00:00 2: OOOD - I'm Funk Definer - Inner Trip Mix - 7' 52 3: Voice of Cod - The Art of Funk Shui - 15' 01 4: Benefaktor - Neptune Driver (Chris's Mix) - 22' 03 5: Unconscious Collective - Fluorostani Transcendance - 31' 40 6: Voice of Cod - We Are Free - 40' 15 7: OOOD - Logos - 47' 09 8: OOOD - Heliopause - 53' 36 9: OOOD - Kundalini Rising - 63' 27 Hope you like them!

Steve and I were in the studio when they were writing that. <proud>

This is one of the things that makes me think I might have the wrong band.

Hmm... in the early/mid 80s members of Colourbox collaborated with Ivo, the head of 4AD Records, on "It'll End In Tears", the first album by This Mortal Coil. However I've just checked the album artwork and the Colourbox members credited are Steven and Martyn Young, so I guess I was wrong. There is also the possibility that I'm talking about a completely different Colourbox, although I do remember some of the stuff they were doing back then could be considered a definite precursor to some of today's electronic music. All this notwithstanding I would urge everyone to do whatever they can to obtain at least the first two albums by This Mortal Coil, in particular the second one, "Filigree and Shadow", as they contain much of the most beautiful music written anywhere, by anyone, at any time.

For every thousand people you recruit to our cause, I will send you one unreleased track from Free Range. <----- piercing charismatic stare

Charlie you bastard. Yes. I'd like to know what it was like working with Ivo Watts-Russel on This Mortal Coil.

Good man!

Hahaha where do I get upset? Just offering some friendly advice; it could be wildly out of line though so you're right to be sceptical.

I note that Bill is no longer reading this thread, and hasn't replied... I can't speak for him but I reckon if you really want the answers to your questions you should STFU with the backchat and assumptions.

You're thinking of making a morph between, say, an electric guitar and a dog barking, I take it? As far as I know, Kyma is the only system capable of directly doing this, although you might get somewhere with a resynthesising instrument like the Camel Audio one (can't remember its name off the top of my head). The way was done in the oldschool electroacoustic days before fuckoff DSP was to set up eg. 16 channels on a mixer with the start sound on the left and the end sound on the right, with the first 8 channels carrying the start sound and the second 8 carrying the end sound; the composer would then work from the ends of the mixer in towards the middle, succesively modifying each channel with whatever EQ or effects were available so that each channel sounded slightly different from the last, with the aim of getting to the point where the two channels in the middle of the desk sounded similar enough (despite their different origins) for a transition between them to be as seamless as possible. To mix down the morph, the composer would start off with all faders at the bottom except the first one (carrying the un-effected start sound) and, over the lengh of the sound, perform manual fader crossfades between successive channels on the mixer, ending up (hopefully) at the end sound before it finished! BTW click here for another discussion on this subject...

My favourite is 'i blame mycel'...

Nothing has ever got me as inspired to make music as listening to music of the type I want to make whilst smoking a joint and having a laugh with my mates (who are also my creative partners).

Not as a rule. I only bounce down MIDI if there's something I want to do with the track that I can't do with MIDI, or if I need to free up CPU, or if I need to be 110% sure that 'sample accurate' means exactly that.

Ok then Here's Blue Seal, written by Ryo with help from Steve. It was written in Reason at Ryo's house and mixed using Reason rewired to SX, avoiding the Reason mixer, and at th point in the process represented by this screenshot I had something like 45 Rewire channels active in the project. To get to this stage I exported the track from Reason as a MIDI file and imported it into Cubase and assigned all the MIDI tracks to the correct Reason devices; however not all the Reason automation came across in the transfer so the MIDI tracks in the arrangement in the screenshot consists solely of note and pitch-bend data; I deleted all the note data in Reason leaving all the other MIDI controllers and automation so that the notes would not be double-triggered. The screenshot was taken at the point in the process where I really had to start bouncing stuff down, as you can see from the CPU meter! This is a single screenshot, by the way; for this project I was using my laptop as a second monitor, via MaxiVista. [EDIT]I started mixing the track from the top down; the tracks whose parts have been coloured are those that had had been worked on up to this point. All the grey tracks were still coming out of the Reason mixer on outputs 1 & 2.

eJay

I'd need a fucking big mixer.

I can't speak for 'everyone else', but personally I've been using Gubase since 1990... I can tell you there's no reason to be scared of it - in fact the way FL presents its arrange window, with anonymous white squares for each pattern (rather than named parts), seems to me to be kind of user-hostile A complex project in any sequencing application will look intimidating, especially if (like me) you don't use eg. folder tracks to group together related tracks; if I'd written it in FL Studio it would look much the same. Any project in any sequencer is made up of small elements, and as soon as you understand the small elements (which isn't hard) you can then understand how they combine to build something of great complexity. I could also post a screenshot of an SX project with 4 tracks - would this be less frightening to you? It would still be the same program...

It won't happen, I think... Propellerheads have said a few times that the only reason (haha) Reason is so stable is that they have total control over every aspect of its programming... I guess they feel that adding third-party code in the form of plugins would compromise that stability (although to be fair apps like Cubase and Live get by ok in general )

The whole point of a visual arrangement like Cubase is that you don't have to remember every single little sound! It's all there on the screen for you, and as long as you give things sensible names and make other ways for you to recognise at a glance which sound is which (eg. part names, colours, etc) there's no chance of getting lost.

Phew... thanks Insejn, I was worried then for a minute.