Early Soviet Synthesizer and the Occult

Boing Boing: The Soviet synthesizer that bridged occultism and electronic music

You don't play the ANS synthesizer with a keyboard. Instead you etch images onto glass sheets covered in black putty and feed them into a machine that shines light through the etchings, trigging a wide range of tones. Etchings made low on the sheets make low tones. High etchings make high tones. The sound is generated in real-time and the tempo depends on how fast you insert the sheets.

Pretty fascinating, considering it was created in 1938. It was also used in the score for Tarkovsky's film Solyaris, and the band Coil travelled to Russia specifically to use this old instrument for an album. (The sheets in the image above are from their sessions with it.)


More Information at Wikipedia: ANS Synthesizer and Audio Sample

Steampunk Modular Sequencer

Ohhhhhh my goodness.

Sampling The Blues

I linked to Nicolas Jaar's work a few posts back, and his style kind of knocked me on my ass. Not just because I like it so much, but because I got a few ideas and techniques out of listening to his work that helped me remember why I liked making music. So, a few things popped out at me that I wanted to apply to future tracks.

- Use found sounds and samplers for building kits and other rhythmic components
- Shift my guitar work into electronic frameworks
- Pull back, and allow the space in-between sounds to breathe a bit

Since I was taking a break from the Yeti track, I was looking for a core idea for a new track. I had already been noodling on the guitar again, and had de-tuned my acoustic for slide blues, so that's where my brain was at.

I worked out some basic riffs, and tried to concentrate, with a metronome, on a combination of rhythmic tightness, and feeling. Blues is a very shifty, expressive style of music, and doesn't lend itself well to static tempos - it tends to shift gears, both slowly and quickly, a lot.

So I spent a few hours doing many takes of a variety of riffs, trying to stick to two basic variations. Then I did some takes of rattling, sliding, plucking, clicking, tapping, thumping, and a variety of other noises. Not only did I want to layer some these sounds in with the riffs, but I also wanted to see if I could build a simple rhythm kit out of those sounds.

What I ended up with were some good, usable basic riffs to hang the song structure on, but I definitely got a kit out of it. It felt good to not have to think about digging through sample libraries or spending hours on a drum synth trying to find the "right" kick or snare for the song, and instead building the drums out of the instrument I was playing, and my desk, and a brass slide.

After getting some of the initial tracking done, I realized I could do a separate recording of a little blues intro - that way I could do something expressive and melancholy without worrying about the tempo, as it was a lead-in. And that went pretty well, I think, although I probably would have recorded it differently - I should have double-mic'd or balanced it with a direct-in pickup channel. But hey, I think it was a good take anyway.

The general concept was to meld some emotional blues with a robotic - but organic/analog - percussion kit, which evolved into the idea that the song would be about someone's mind trapped in a computer, like Tron. It would give me the opportunity to create a semi-organic computer "environment" for the song to live in, while a frustrated, emotional blues thread ran through it.




The version posted at Soundcloud isn't completely current, as I already have some vocal tracks and some other changes in my master version, and I'll be layering some choruses and looping some harmonica riffs. But this is the last good mix I'll probably post until I complete the song.

I had jumped back into making music, mostly with synths, and wasn't exploring the one instrument that was in almost everything I'd made back in the day. So I'm going to keep trying to blur these lines, as it's fun.

Weeks of the Yeti, Part 2

Next I wanted to handle the transition from the Temple sequence to the Chase sequence.

Basically, after the Yeti encounters the temple, some Yeti hunters / adventurers will be encountered, who shoot and wound the Yeti and give chase. This would involve a number of elements in the sequence:

- Drifting out of the Temple sequence, we hear an airplane travelling across the stereo field.
- The airplane sound "lands" into an old-timey record player that starts playing a jazz/dixieland loop.
- The context has changed, and we're at the adventurer's camp.
- A Teddy Roosevelt-type voice spots the Yeti, gets his rifle and shoots the Yeti.
- The Yeti howls, and the main beat kicks in, incorporating the jazz loop.



First I had to work on the jazz loop. I don't have a bunch of jazz horns laying around, and I didn't want to clutter my main Reaper project, so I had to create a new project at the same BPM, so I could work on the jazz loop without disturbing everything else.

So, I made up a simple drum/shuffle beat, and pulled it back, as I didn't really want any percussion up front in the loop to avoid conflicts with the main beat later. Then I started adding separate melodies for trumpets, trombones, tuba, and piano. Edirol's Orchestral was really helpful with this, even though it had a tendency to crash in Reaper, and was kind of a resource hog. I just kept plugging away, trying to find some good variations. I used the tuba as sort of a subtle polka with an alternating rhythm, added some swooping with the trumpets and trombones, alternating between the two, and the piano was just some ragtime-style tinkling - but I think it came together okay.

Then I exported the jazz loop and pulled it into the main project, and laid it over the main kick/snare beat, and it fit pretty damn well. I also added some wobbly vinyl sounds on it using iZotope's Vinyl plugin - love the sound of this free plugin, although it continues playing constantly, depending on where you are on the Reaper timeline, which I found annoying. But a combination of EQ and compression and Vinyl gave a good impression of an old 78rpm gramophone player. (I did have to recompose the jazz loop twice, as the horns and piano weren't balanced properly once it was compressed.)

Next, I did a little bit of cheating. I haven't had a record player or my old record collection in ages, so I needed to find a free "needle scratch" sound, so I could give the impression of the gramophone player being bumped. I found this, and added it in, for the moment the airplane "lands", when the Yeti gets shot, and to kick off the chase sequence.

Then I needed to work on an airplane sound. This I knew I could replicate synthetically, so I researched various ways to do this with oscillators. That was kind of a fun process, as I wasn't looking for a jet engine, but an old-school propeller style sound - and I wanted it to fit into the "arctic" soundscape and have a little bit of a 3d presence as it moved across the stereo field.

After a while of monkeying around I got the synth to a point where it was a good single-propeller sound, which I could waver slightly by going up and down on the keyboard. But I wanted a two-prop plane, so I took two takes of that and basically overlapped them, barely separated. Then I also added a Leslie speaker effect on top of those, so in addition to the pulsing of the two "propellers", there was a slightly mismatched rotating sound on top of them, to give it a little more dimension in the stereo field. And then I placed them inside the arctic reverb "room", and automated a slow panning "flight" of the whole group across the stereo field. It's not exactly where I want yet, as the "sputtering" I tried to imitate as the plane descends didn't quite come out right.

But the overall effect is of an old prop plane, flying from left to right, and as it reaches the right side, it abruptly "crashes" into the old gramophone player, which starts playing, and the listener is in the adventurer's camp.

So, a bunch of work for about 15 seconds of sounds/music, but I like how it's coming out. Just needs some tweaking. And now I need to do the voice work and foley, and flesh out the breaks and drops in the chase/jazz sequence.

What else is left? Lots. I have the feeling this is going to stretch to 20 minutes at this point. But who's counting?

Next:

- Add "Ice" sequence before the Temple sequence. This is where the sounds of ice cracking get incorporated into the main beat, there's a pause, and the ice cracks under the Yeti and he falls into the water. I've already done some samples of ice popping and cracking, but it didn't come out that well. Think I'm going to experiment with crushing and snapping styrofoam with time-stretching to see if I can't get some better quality sounds there. And part of that transition will be filter sweep and underwater sounds, as the Yeti struggles to get back onto the surface and dry off.

- Finish "Chase" sequence. Keep playing with the Jazz loop. Pick up the apparent tempo by adding more rhythm into the pockets, to kick up the pace. Near the end, do some complete sound dives and pauses, as the Yeti loses strength and collapses.

- Add the "Green Tara" sequence. Here, an old wandering monk will come upon the Yeti in the snow, and begin to pray over him. This is where Green Tara appears and heals the Yeti. The music here will build gradually as she appears - lots of synth and new age sparkly goodness. Going to be using stereo filter sweeps in stages, like the listener is "punching through" layers as it builds. Think is going to be a good sonic sequence, and possibly frustrating. But we'll see.

- Add a final Yeti sequence, using the main beat/bassline, and really mangle the hell the hell out it.

But for now, I'm leaving the Yeti project alone. While I had some great momentum at first, my ideas got more complex, and I realized I needed to get some chops in order to get the sounds I wanted. So, for the moment, I'm exploring other sounds and songs - I can experiment with some of the techniques I want to use for Yeti without cluttering that project up, and then come back to it soon.