The Roland HS-60 is an analogue synthesizer with digitally-controlled oscillators (meaning they aren't prone to drifting out of tune like fully analogue oscillators have been known to). In effect, this is the same synthesizer as the Juno 106 (in Japan this model was marketed as the Juno 106S), but with built-in stereo speakers and an amplifier to drive them
This example was rescued from a thrift store, and works surprisingly well considering it was made in 1984 and doesn't appear to have ever been serviced. All six voices (which equate to the number of notes you can play at once) work, and the patch storage memory is intact. Two sliders were bent and the cap was missing from one, some lint and other gunge had built-up inside the end-cheeks, and there was some goo resembling congealed cola on the casing here and there. All this cleaned up nicely.
There's still an issue with the wiring inside: one of the connectors refuses to remain seated, and it affects the speakers and outputs. For now I have mono output, so I can't make full use of the chorus effect (which is stereo). Also, the Decay slider in the ADSR envelope is only 50% functional.
I've already made use of it on a track. There'll be more about that later in the week. For those interested in a look at the maintenance work, you can find the pictures and write-up on my website: www.manitouslair.com (Zone 2, in the 'Studio' section), or follow this direct link.
I finished something? Wonders will never cease. This project was started January 31st and completed May 30th, but it's not like I worked on it full-time over the four-month period. It was done in fits and starts and sometimes languished for weeks at a time. But I'm very pleased with the end result. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at what went into it.
When I learned there was to be a fan tribute to Gary Numan's 1981 album 'Dance,' compiled for the website Numanme.co.uk, I thought it would be great to participate. The entire album, including b-sides and demos, would be recreated by fans from around the globe. I decided early on that the song 'My Brother's Time' inspired me the most to create a cover version (although my favourite from the album is actually 'A Subway Called You').
For those of you who haven't heard it, here's Gary Numan's original:
And here's my version, The Manitou featuring Jimmy Aaron:
After formulating some ideas, I started recording the various parts as MIDI data. This was initially linked to the EastWest Orchestra plugin's Steinway piano, and Shortcircuit sampler loaded with a music box sample. The concept was to replace the piano and music box by degrees using custom-made synthesizer sounds. The distinctive melody on the chorus was added right away. This, like most of the other synthesized sounds, was realised on the Novation K-Station.
Percussion elements were also added early on. I decided on a bass drum and snare combo I came up with for my (as yet unreleased) soundtrack project. The bass drum came from my Alesis SR-16 drum machine, and the snare from my Yamaha MR-10 rhythm box. All percussion was loaded into instances of Shortcircuit so I could create a complete drum track for the song within the Sonar workstation software. Ride and crash cymbals and some massive tom-toms also came from the SR-16.
In Numan's original, there are percussive sounds which mimic the
ticking of a clock. I believe they were produced by recording claves
through an effects pedal. I opted to keep the clock motif but use sounds
from a real clock, in this case an all-metal alarm clock I recently
acquired (I used to dismantle them when I was a kid!) Another percussion element, which punctuates the breaks between vocals, is actually the sound of ice shattering. As a bonus it happened to sound clock-like.
Again dipping into my recent soundtrack experience, I called upon an effect I'm fond of, which involves running an electric guitar through the Roland SP-404's 'lo-fi' effect. This effect mimics lowering the audio bitrate. If you've ever heard a really badly-encoded mp3 you'll know what that's all about. For the layman: high quality digital audio is generally recorded at 24- or 16-bit. Old Atari game systems etc... used 8-bit audio, and a fair few of us 'children of the 80s' understandably have a penchant for that kind of sound, hence the invention of the 'lo-fi' effect. You can dial in as much lo-fi as you want until all you hear is bubbly white noise. Needless to say, I go for somewhere about middle. The result is a strange, buzzy, almost chime-like sound somewhat like a grandfather clock chiming in a rusty shed.
Next to go on was a simple square-wave lead made on the Yamaha CS01 synthesizer. I played a solo of my own devising in place of the saxophone which plays out the original song. The solo proved problematic when interacting with other elements: it clashed with some notes I came up with to accompany the original piano parts. I decided to leave the solo intact and remove a few of the offending notes from the accompaniment. Creating an almost atonal synthesizer patch also helped the sounds 'play nice' with each other, as much as that sounds counter-intuitive.
A descending melody, played on Crumar Performer string synthesizer, was initially going to accompany the choruses. They were busy enough as they were, so I saved the strings to follow the solo which ends the original version. Once the tom-toms were added, it quickly built up to a powerful send off for the song.
Next was bass guitar. The original features the inimitable talents of the late Mick Karn on fretless bass. The only part of his performance I hinted at was a piece of melody on the chorus, played on synthesizer. Aside from a couple of notes during the verses, my bass parts were saved for the outro. I wanted a little more bottom end without competing too much with the piano. Throughout the track I left the piano bass notes in. The music box is also
still present where I thought it sounded good.
Early on, I envisioned my friend Jimmy Aaron singing harmony with his distinctive voice on the chorus. I asked him if he was up for it and he said he'd give it a go. Jimmy is one for experimenting with vocal ideas and improvising. Not only did he sing on the chorus for me, but he came up with a simply incredible vocal track for the outro as well. My intention was to leave that part instrumental, but after adding the vocals it didn't sound the same without them. We also toyed with the idea of singing 'aahs' to accompany the solo, but decided against it in the end.
In Jimmy's words: "I'm glad you liked that outro idea, I like it too! :-)) Those
bells and the word innocence go so good together. And then 'what's
done is done,' a reminder it's the end of the song..." A little glimpse into his thought process when choosing the lyrics. Having worked on a track together in the past, I know my voice compliments Jimmy's best if I sing low. But when it came to following his melody, I realised I couldn't quite hit the low notes if I stayed in key with the first line. I toyed with the idea of singing higher and pitch-shifting the result, and even leaving the first line out altogether, before coming up with a vocal melody I could manage while staying in the lower register. Usually my vocals require a lot of editing: I choose the best parts from the best takes. In this case, the two takes you hear on the outro are unedited.
Rather than follow Numan's original vocal melody for the verses, I decided to wing it. The odd line came out much the same, simply from being ingrained in my memory, but the bulk of it is my own spin on the words. The line that proved trickiest was the first line of verse 2. No matter how you look at it on the lyric sheet, it doesn't fit the music! My vocals are far from perfect but I'm happy with the overall result.
I'm still waiting to hear whether this will be included on the compilation, but as soon as I know, I'll post the details here. Until then, enjoy the song. If you click through to the Soundcloud page, you can download the high-quality mp3 (it's free!) and also check out two remixes I did last year. One is another Gary Numan song, the other by John Foxx - two artists who've been highly influential to me.
Long time no see. I've been taking time out to deal with some personal issues, and to improve my photography skills. I've also made some progress with the sequel to The Crystal Goblin, and expect to have the first draft finished within the week.
Some music from my Let's Build Mecha e.p. from 2010 appears in Brokensea's latest episode of Doctor Who: Whisper in the Silence. The episode is dedicated to a good friend of mine who passed away a few weeks ago, Jay Ellington Lee. Jay was a true inspiration and a warm and humourous soul. I'm very proud to be a part of this episode and to pay tribute to Jay's memory in this manner.
I was shocked to realise I haven't made any field recordings since late November. But given that December and January are the coldest, meanest months of the year in this part of the world, it stands to reason that I'd want to shut myself away in the studio and not think about the outside world until said months have shoved off. As today was 8 degrees C, and promised a wealth of dripping sounds, I took my recorder with me on my walk.
I captured the sound of vehicles thundering across Johnston Bridge, which has a steel grid deck, and managed to capture the sound of the river lapping at ice on the pylon during a lull in traffic. I also captured a trio of idling diesel locomotives in the train yard. I'd heard them during the darker months and regretted not having a recording device at hand. I chanced to have the path to myself for ten minutes, with very little breeze or traffic, so the recordings turned out great. I've uploaded two of them to my account on Freesound.org, free to listen to or use however you wish.
Standing there recording locomotives through the chain-link fence, I got to pondering. Surely it must cost a lot in fuel to have these massive engines idling all day long (and possibly all night), not to mention the carbon emissions and noise pollution. They sit there chugging and hissing every day, and I haven't seen them moving for a while. Perhaps some learned reader can enlighten me as to why they aren't just fired up when needed rather than left running all hours of the workday.
In other news, I've mixed and mastered all the cues and sound effects for my soundtrack project. I'll be listening to them throughout the week for any last-minute changes and then they're done. What began as a side project turned into an all-consuming job. I'm immensely proud of the (almost) finished product, though. I challenged myself, achieved what I set out to do artistically, and the producer of the audio drama is delighted with my work. An extensive series of 'making of' essays will ensue once the show is released. The soundtrack itself will also be freely available, and interviews with cast and crew are also planned.
I can report that I have all the cues roughed out for my soundtrack project. 75% of them just require final mixing, while the remainder need some extra elements and/or structure. I'll be finishing up over the next few weeks.
As that tapers off I'll be doing some pre-production work on Tales Episode 1, with the aim of mixing it in March. By then I should also have the rest of the scripts ready and will announce the casting call for episodes 4 & 5.
Here's part two of my article on field recordings - part one of which can be found in the archive. This will give you an idea how much work goes into preparing the sounds I've collected for use in audio projects.
Once I have the raw recordings transferred from the Zoom H1 to my hard drive, it's time to edit them. Because I record a lot of sounds these days, I've made it a habit to announce what I'm recording at the beginning of each file. Before I started doing this I had trouble keeping track - especially if I didn't get around to editing files right away.
Step 1: I load the raw file into Sound Forge, my audio-editor of choice. I then trim the ends a tiny bit to remove the click noises produced by the Zoom's record button. When recording, I take special care to make sure the audio doesn't 'peak' (a techy term for overloading the mic, resulting in a distorted recording). As a result, the raw recording is often very quiet. So I normalise (increase the volume of) the file to 98% (2% below 0db or maximum). Step 2: I remove any rumble from the recording if it requires it. Some of the lower bass frequencies can muddy a recording, so as a rule of thumb I EQ out anything below 80hz, which is about as low as the human ear can hear. If there's traffic noise in the background or particularly troublesome bass frequencies I'll go as high as 225hz. Mild wind noise can sometimes be scrubbed out in this manner too.
Step 3: Dynamics/compression. Oftentimes with digital recording the sound you capture is but a shadow of what was heard at the time. Compression allows an increase in volume while preventing the high peaks (the parts of the sound that have hit the 98% volume ceiling) from distorting. It also lifts subtleties such as ringing sustains, reverb, etc... that are naturally present but too quiet to discern in the recording's raw state. The downside to this process is it makes the background noise louder as well. But luckily there's a secret weapon to deal with that in step 4. Compression works best for very loud sounds, such as metallic objects being struck. Softer sounds, such as birdsong and streams, etc... are usually left as-is.
Step 4: Noise reduction. Once I have my file optimised for volume, it's time to scrub out some of the annoying background noise. I use a program called Goldwave for this. Its noise reduction filter allows you to feed in a sample of the unwanted background noise and magically scrub those frequencies from the recording. It requires some restraint, though, because being heavy-handed with this feature can harm the recording rather than improve it. I listen carefully to each file and adjust the settings to reach a natural-sounding balance. In some cases I'll apply a preset called 'gentle hiss/rumble reduction' if noise reduction affects the sound too much. Unless the sound is too problematic to clean (in which case I fall back on some extra EQ or discard it) the end result is a nice clean-sounding file.
Step 5: The final step is to load the cleaned file back into Sound Forge for final editing. I cut out parts of the file that have microphone or wind noise, or other unwanted sounds that haven't been completely removed by the scrubbing process. This is also when I cut files containing multiple takes into single pieces or 'one-shots.' These can then be used as-is, or loaded into a sampler and played as an instrument.
I've worked with these techniques on and off over the years, but this is the first year I've combined them as an archival process. I'm learning things all the time about how certain sounds respond: how much compression to use here, and how much noise-reduction to use there. There's still no substitute for capturing the cleanest sound possible in the first place, but when you're at the mercy of a noise-polluted environment or a sudden gust of wind, a little software can do wonders.
So here's what I've been up to. Work continues on the soundtrack project. Some really good songs are coming together after a bit of an uneven start.
I hope to start mixing Episode 1 of Tales in December. In the meantime, I'm concentrating on getting the last three scripts finished and editing sound effects. With winter setting in, I won't have access to the woods for much longer. More sounds are needed for the new scripts that I could have been collecting in the summer. There will likely be a fair bit of cheating in the studio!
I also hope to find the time to write a short story to submit for a collection called The Bell Club.
