Analogue Heaven Northeast 2009

ANHE09 is a thing. The official date is May 2nd, 2009.

AHNE08 flickr
AHNE07 flickr

What Headphones Do You Use?

Everyone's ears are different, but preferences tend to fall along party lines. For example, if you like KRK monitors, you tend to hate Genelecs and vice versa. I spend a lot of time with headphones on. All day at work - not just listening to music, but testing. When I get home, I'm using headphones there too, because I work on music when the kids are asleep. I even commit the cardinal sin of mixing with headphones, because I have no other options. Sometimes people ask me what headphones I use, so here you go.

Sennheiser HD580
The HD580s have been discontinued, but the closest related model seems to be the HD600. These are the nicest sounding, most comfortable headphones I've used. They're open back, which eliminates standing waves inside the headphones, so everyone around you will know you're listening to Coldplay, and they're useless when recording near an open mic. Open back headphones are a two way street, so you'll be more aware of ambient noise around you. This is actually useful if you need to keep an ear on the kids, but in most cases, ambient noise is a distraction. Therefore, they're best used in quiet rooms, late at night when sound quality and comfort are your top priorities.

The HD580s (and their cousins, the HD600s) are 300 Ohm impedance, so they'll laugh as your puny iPod headphone amplifier struggles to drive them. If you really want to hear what they're capable of, you need to drive them with something more substantial. They're circumaural, so the ear pads rest on your head, not on your ears, which explains why they're so comfy.

Sennheiser HD25SP
The HD25SP Headphones
are closed-back headphones that I use for tracking during recording. They're durable, relatively efficient (70 ohm), lightweight and sound great. The supraaural and headset design mashes your ears to your head tightly which is another reason I like them for recording, but they're not the most comfortable set of phones I've used. I've replaced the cables many times, and have gone through a set of ear pads, but they still look and feel like a new set of headphones after 11 years.

Sony MDR-7506
If I could have only one set of headphones, I think I'd have to go with the Sony MDR-7506. The high end is more detailed than the Sennheisers (which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your application), with a solid low end - not nearly as nice as the HD580s, (but nothing else is). They're closed back, so they can be used for recording and private listening. They're durable and foldable, which makes them suitable for traveling. They do a respectable job of muffling the outside world - not as much as isolation earphones, but as good as any supraaural set you'll find. They're comfortable enough to wear all day long - as I do every day at work.

In short, they sound great and are usable in virtually any application making them the one set of headphones that are good at everything. At around $100, they're an absolute bargain.

Sony makes a circumaural version of the 7506 called the MDR-7509HD with a slightly larger driver. I've never tried these, but logically, they should be more comfortable with an even nicer low end.

Tips for extending the life of earpads
When not in use, don't wear the 7506's around your neck if you're a guy. Any facial stubble will gradually sandpaper the outer material of the ear pads. When not in use, don't rest your headphones on the ear pads on the edge of a table, so the weight of the headphones crushes the foam - especially important for the HD600s.

Isolation earphones
I like the idea of isolation earphones - so much so, that I've tried many sets. I've always found the frequency response completely bizarre and they're inherently uncomfortable. I can wear earphones for a couple hours before my ears start aching. Isolation earphones are ideal for noisy environments like subways and planes, effectively lowering the noise floor so you can enjoy a more reasonable dynamic range and listen at lower volumes, protecting your hearing. This is a very compelling reason to use isolation earphones.

Etymotic ER4s
I've used these with the various included tips as well as custom ear molds, which Etymotic claimed would help the low end. In all cases, I found the high end revealing - to a fault. In fact, I think it is safe to say the high end goes way, way beyond any transducer I've ever listened to in my life. This is useful for locating problems in a mix - like if you want to check for bad edits. You'll hear things with ER4s that you'll never hear anywhere else. However, they're not particularly pleasant to listen to. This could all be forgiven if they had any low end whatsoever. Cutting frequencies is easy, but you can't boost something that isn't present. There is nothing down there. Boosting the low end with EQ only results in distortion. They are simply incapable of reproducing anything below 150Hz.

Shure E2c
I bought these when they were introduced, and payed a bit more than what they go for currently. The bass was an improvement over the ER4s, but the overall sound quality was veiled, muffled and flabby with zero definition. That said, given the choice between listening to the Shures or the ER4s, I found myself using the Shures. Go figure.

Westone 3
I just got these, so it would be disingenuous for me to post any negative opinions before I've spent a good deal of time with them, but I'll say this much: the Westone 3 earphoneseasily destroy all other isolation earphones I've tried. They damn well should with their three-way drivers. Note that these are true three-ways, not 'triple drivers' which are actually two-ways with two drivers 'doubled-up' on the low end. I'll post a follow up after I've spent some quality time with them.

How about you? What are your favorite headphones or earphones?

1903

a video by mrcury, using Tintinnabulome

Why Music?

Got a tip to this speech from the synthsights mail list. Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory, gave this fantastic welcome address to this year’s freshman class:

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, “You’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001, I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night. From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly beautiful piece, “Adagio for Strings”. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, North Dakota, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier - even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do.

Let's Sell Recorded Music!

One brief, personal fact: a majority of the music I listened to this week was freely available downloads created by friends and acquaintances. I didn't consciously set out to listen to the non-corporate alternatives, I simply used iTunes to find the most recent tracks added to my library. You know what? The quality wasn't any different. The enjoyment factor wasn't any different. It was only in retrospect that I realized that the bulk were 'unknowns'

OK, so let's review:

• Record companies aren't required as lending institutions, as record production costs are minimal compared to 20 years ago.
  
• Record companies aren't needed for distribution as artists can make their work available for download.
  
• Record companies aren't needed to collect money as artists have resources like bandcamp
  
• Record companies aren't needed for promotion due to the internet, and really, the product should speak for itself.
  

So, this morning I see this ars technica article about the record industry unable to come to terms with its own irrelevance, resorting to ludicrous subscription-model ideas, reminiscent of the infuriating blank tape tax.

iTunes, destroyer of worlds

It really wasn't that long ago that I remember standing in front of a wall of CDs every morning, trying to decide what it was I wanted to listen to at work that day. Then, MP3 compression came along, and I'd still choose 10 CDs, but this time, I'd encode them (using SoundJam), so I'd have a copy to listen to at work.

After a while, I had a reasonable MP3 library assembled, and thought it would be a good idea to have a portable player for my walk to work. My first MP3 player was a solid state thinger that had around 128MB of RAM, so it could hold 2-3 albums. This was before the iPod, but by this point, iTunes existed. I remember making my purchasing decision for this particular piece of hardware because it would sync with iTunes. It made sense for me to stick with an Apple solution, because I knew it would work continue to work in the long term.

So, while most people grudgingly use iTunes because they got an iPod, I chose iTunes first, and later down the road got an iPod.

Over the years, iTunes grew. The 5GB iPod came out, and it made sense for iTunes to sync to it. Apple launched the iTunes music store, so iTunes sprouted a specialized web browser. All Mac users had Safari anyway, so there are more than a few shared library elements, so that is all fine and good. Then, the iPhone came along and iTunes was drafted into service as a sync tool for that, too. Plus another store. The iTunes store. That sells applications. Um, OK.

I don't really understand why iTunes is required to sync an iPhone. iTunes syncs photos from iPhoto, right? Why not decouple the sync application from iTunes completely? I think the answer lies with Windows users. Windows users want their iPods/iPhones, too, so Apple sees this as an opportunity to cram iTunes down their throats. The application should feel and work the same as the Mac version, so iTunes for Windows becomes this HUGE thing. Windows users don't already have Safari, so they have to get the bulk of that. There is this enormous user interface library that Mac users already have, so that has to get installed. QuickTime too, for good measure. Basically, they have to lift huge chunks of MacOS into Windows for iTunes to work at all. No wonder Windows users see iTunes as bloatware. It is.

But, the alternative isn't any better. If Apple were to release a specialized, sleek Windows-specific iPod/iPhone application, it would be a two-tiered thing. Apple users would get the full experience, and Windows users would be second-class citizens. So, it is bloatware, or not the same thing. You can't please everybody.

Some Windows users are prickly about their computer doing things behind their backs, so when iTunes starts taking control of things and moving shit around, you should expect a violent reaction. The user's perspective is they have to install this huge thing just to load music on their iPod, and it is doing unwelcome things to their computer. I can certainly understand this reaction.

The original point of iTunes is to organize your music for you. Before the iPhone, before the iTunes music store, before the iPod, iTunes was about an elegant method for organizing your music. This is the reason it exists. If you're forced to use iTunes because you bought an iPhone or iPod, it doesn't matter how elegantly iTunes executes its original function, people are going to hate it.

OK, so here are a few tips on how to stop worrying and learn to love iTunes.

If you have your music library organized in a very specific way, and don't want iTunes to mangle it, uncheck this box before you do ANYTHING. (preferences>advanced)



In previous versions of iTunes, there was a separate option that allowed you to choose if you wanted to add track numbers at the beginning of filenames on import. This no longer exists. Sadface. I thought we used metadata for this sort of thing. If you want iTunes to keep your music organized, you also must now have track numbers at the beginning of each track.

If you want to manually load music onto your iPod/iPhone, check Manually manage music and videos (summary page when you plug in your iPod/iPhone)

OK, now you're in complete control of your stuff. You should feel better already. Breathe in. Breathe out.

OK. My advice? Let go. What are you actually gaining by doing this stuff manually? Are you a curmudgeon? OCD/Control Freak tendencies? Be honest. iTunes is really good at this stuff. Let it do its thing.

Your iTunes library can live anywhere it wants. (preferences>advanced)



I put mine on a volume that doesn't get backed up by Time Machine.

Do you have several computers with iTunes, but also have an iPhone that you only want synced to one? Check this box. (preferences>devices)



Want custom ringtones for your iPhone? Take an audio snippet, encode it as Apple Lossless, then change the extension to m4r, and import into iTunes.

Mac users: Do you regularly encode MP3 files, but don't want to import them to your iTunes library? Download the LAME encoder QuickTime component so you can easily and quickly export audio files from QuickTime.

Mac users: just want to listen to an audio file without importing into iTunes? Just select the file and tap the space bar (10.5 and above) in earlier versions, I'd use get info or columns view. I've also set the default application attribute of WAV and AIFF files to open in QuickTime in the Finder Get Info window. The default of iTunes makes no sense whatsoever.

OK, back to iTunes. Here are a few things I like a lot.

Editing metadata of multiple files at once. Just select multiple songs, hit Get Info and go. I also like how iTunes auto-completes based on other tracks in your library. This could have been much more difficult, but iTunes is elegant.

Apple Lossless Encoding - 50% squish on your audio files.

The grouping metadata field. For example, you may want to listen to music by Eric Clapton, but his music is scattered over The Yardbirds, The Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Blind Faith, and so on. Put 'Clapton' in the grouping field and then you can search for Clapton and get all of the above. Of course, by editing multiple files at once, this is VERY easy.

Even easier is the use of discontinuous selection in the various browse fields. You can select disparate elements and see the aggregate in the main window.



Every column is sortable. Choose what attributes are visible under view options.



You can easily sort out low-bitrate encoded songs, for example.

Then there is the mysterious check box next to each track. I like to use this to disable huge single track creations from uploading to my iPod. Sort by Time, then uncheck the biguns. (device summary>options>Sync only checked songs and videos)


Leverage your metadata with smart playlists. Almost all my playlists are smart playlists. I can create playlists based on grouping data (see above), genre, songs I haven't listened to in years - any attribute you see in the meta data.

I could go on and on. I'm going to have to stop here, though. I understand why people don't care for iTunes, but I think if you look at it from the perspective of what it was designed for, there is a lot to like.

Musicspace

In an effort to meet up with Peter Kirn this weekend, I found myself at hackerspace in Somerville. The idea is compelling. For a monthly membership fee, you have access to non-apartment-friendly tools like a drill press, a lathe and all sorts of soldering and electronics gear. In addition, there is a large fabrication space in Union Square where they keep the heavy stuff like band saws. Of course, in addition to the tools, there is the community.

I'm wondering if a similar concept could be made to work for a recording/electronic music space. A place where you could listen to your mix on nice monitors, and provide a quiet, sound-proofed room for overdubs.

An Industry Dying

Yesterday in the New York Times, David Carr talks about the eventual death of the newspaper industry and offers some naive solutions.

Technology decimates media in the order of bandwidth. First, newspapers, periodicals, books. Text and pictures compress tightly, and are low bandwidth. Next comes audio. After that comes video.

Newspapers are in a tough spot right now for reasons that are well-known. It is difficult to watch a major industry die, especially for people my age as we've never really experienced it in our lifetime. The fact of the matter is that industries do die. We used to haul hay into the city for horses to eat. We used to haul ice blocks in to cool our refrigerators. There isn't much of a market for hay and blocks of ice today (unless the economy continues its current trajectory, that is.)

The death of newspapers resonates with me because the same thing is happening with recorded music for the same reasons: a surplus of free supply.



Newspapers should die, but we should find a way to save journalism, which itself has been slowly dying even before the internet. We need investigative journalists - people who can spend the time necessary to dig deeply into a complex issue. We need professionals who will hold civic leaders accountable.

The revenue models that supported newspaper journalism have slipped away. Classified ads have gone to craigslist. Used cars and real estate of moved to better online models. On the other hand, some of the expenses of producing traditional newspapers have disappeared as well. Strip away the printing presses. Say goodbye to distribution trucks. From an environmental standpoint, this is a good thing. I feel the same way about producing circles of plastic, putting them on a trucks and selling them in retail stores. Completely wasteful and unnecessary.

I don't have any answers, but I know we still need regional and national journalists. I will be watching what happens for clues about the future of the recording industry.

Frank Zappa Explains the Decline of the Music Industry

This video popped up on a mail list recently.



Frank has a valid point about the record industry as it existed in the 80s. The context of the mail list discussion was the current state of the music industry.

Well, a few things have changed since then. When this interview was filmed, it cost a lot of money to book a studio and record your music. If you wanted people to hear your music, you had to pay a lot of money for promotion and distribution. This vast expense required a record company. Today, obviously that isn't the case. If you want to record and release your own music, you don't need a record company. You may not be able to make a full-time living at it, but at least record companies aren't actively standing in the way. I think Frank would approve.

I'm hearing resentment from musicians because recording music can't be their career, and, without label support, recorded music is largely becoming the domain of hobbyists.

First, there is a false sense of entitlement that irks me. They're convinced that if they were a musician at the right time period, they'd be an composer like Frank Zappa. Second, they're operating on a romanticized notion of what label support actually is. As an artist, are you really willing to give up so much creative control for the life of an indentured musician? Better to be a part-time hobbyist with complete creative freedom than a full-time slave, IMO. Labels don't want to nurture artists and help them grow creatively. Labels just want a hit. Preferably, one that sounded just like the last hit. And another. And another. If an musician ever grew artistically, it happened in spite of the label's meddling and desires.

But yeah, sure, I'd love to be a full-time recording artist with 100% creative freedom and carte blanche to do whatever whacky experiment I could think up. But this idealized, pure vision of musical freedom was enjoyed by only a handful of artists (Peter Gabriel, The Beatles, Frank Zappa, Radiohead, NIN (for example)), usually after violently slashing away at the legal tendrils that bound them to the record company to begin with.

Continuing on a FZ tangent, if you've never seen the Frank Zappa Crossfire segment, which was something I was dying to see after it was referenced in The Real Frank Zappa Book(a fantastic and funny read, by the way), you should really watch this. I get the sense that Frank Zappa and George Carlin would have got along just fine.

% - tensegrity

Download a free album by % - a result of the 2009 rpm challenge. Twenty songs constructed using a monome with mlr V and various electronic instruments and objects.

check it out here

Three Vintage Instruments

On Friday, I went on a field trip for some Volta testing, and, as a side-benefit, I got a chance to play some interesting vintage keyboards. What follows is my usual opinionated fluff.

Clavinet
Like many people, I've played my share of Clavient samples and Clavinet-like patches. However, I have never played an actual Clavinet before last Friday. I wish I hadn't. Playing a Clavinet versus playing a Clavinet sound through a MIDI controller is like the difference between visiting France and reading a book about France.

Everything I said about the physical loop regarding the Rhodes is in play, but, beyond that, I wasn't prepared for how fun it was. The most noticeable aspect to playing a real Clavinet is the throw of the keyboard. Very short. It was like moving from a manual typewriter to an IBM Selectric where you simply have to blow on the keys.There is no MIDI controller that comes close to a Clavinet's response. It feels great and it can't be emphasized how much this influences how you play it. it is easy to understand how the funky rhythms that define the Clavinet came to be; It naturally leads you in that direction.



CS-80
Unlike the Clavinet, I had played a CS-80 before, but this was almost a decade ago. They don't make synthesizers like this anymore. It feels like cold war-era, military-spec hardware. We live in a world of LEDs and soft switches. The CS-80 uses chunky push-button radio groups with real lamps underneath. When you press down, they go KER-CHUNK. I'd feel confident launching an ICBM with this hardware.

There is a saying in the photography world; the tripod left in the closet is worthless. Usually they're talking about cost/weight tradeoff. Carbon fiber tripods cost twice as much as the same model made out of other materials, but they are three times lighter. If you leave your tripod at home, you might as well not have a tripod.

Well, the vintage instrument you're afraid to turn on, or exists in an unplayable state might as well not exist. The CS-80 is a gorgeous, expressive instrument. However, there is no auto tune routine. I wanted to play it, but it wasn't in tune, so it was pointless. If you want to tune it, you have to have a tech who makes house calls on speed dial, because you don't want to, you know, move the thing or look at it cross-eyed after it is tuned. You might not want to play it either, just to be on the safe side.

Um, no thanks. Even if I was comfortable enough opening and working on a CS-80, this puts a serious crimp in my workflow. Not worth the expense and mental overhead, for myself. I'd be far to afraid to use it. I'd be saving it for a 'special occasion' and then it'd never get used.

I'm definitely down on vintage gear in general. It wasn't that long ago that if you wanted analog, vintage was your only option. Today, that isn't the case. I played an A6 again and found it to sound pretty amazing. I didn't spend any time poking about on the user interface or trying to get something done, but wow, what a great sound.



Prophet 5 rev 1
I had read about the sonic differences between rev1/2 and rev3 Prophet-5s. Even though the switch from SSM to CEM chips is fairly radical one, people tend to exaggerate matters when talking about sound. Or so I thought.

Maybe it is because I've owned a rev3 Prophet-5 for years and know what they sound like. Maybe I'm older and have had more time around analog now, but the rev 1 sounded a lot different than a rev 3 and all those differences were good. It simply sounds better. If I had a choice between a functional rev 2 and a functional rev 3, I'd take the rev 2 - no question.