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Apr 22, 04
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(MUX) 2004 Live-PA Demo CD
Holas,
I have finally completed my live-PA demo CD! Sheesh, took long enough. Copies of the individual MP3's are available at the following URL: http://mux.ca/music/2004_demo I would love to hear your reviews, good or bad - if I were to recommend any tracks, I'd have to say tracks 4, 5 and 7 are the ones that shine brightest for me. Promoters - if you're booking, privmsg me and I'll get a hard copy of the CD out to you ASAP. Last edited by mux; Apr 28, 04 at 10:43 PM. Reason: department of redundancy department 
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Apr 22, 04
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The "bouncy, tweaky sounds" are the "tom1" sound from my (very, very analogue) modified Simmons SDS-800 analogue drum brain. The kick in Tagan (and in every song) is also from the SDS-800, as is the snare (that you can hear coming in at 22s). There's a long, geeky gearhead story about the modifications, ask me if you want to hear it. The song "Tagan" is my most favourite song to play live, 'cause that "analogue-y" lead is actually the 100% analogue Roland SH-101. The tweaks to that sound are all done live using the sliders for the envelope generator (ADSR) and the pitch bender mapped to the filter cutoff. I love playing live with sliders and knobs. :) The track "Tagan" was named by my friend Ivan (DJ Flowspiell) in Calgary - it's actually an acronym, which stands for "Track Ain't Got A Name". On a completely unrelated note, Ivan has a cat named "Cagan". Thanks for listening, and especially thanks for the feedback! :D
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Apr 23, 04
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I'm up for the long geeky gearhead story too.. that is if you're up for it. I've been writing music for about a year now (mostly using soft synths and sequencers, don't have any hardware yet) and I'm taking an audio production program in Burnaby at the moment, so geeky techy geary stuff has sort of become the theme to my life. PM me and mabey we can meet up at some point and geek out. Oh and sliders and knobs... =)
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Apr 27, 04
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GEEKY TECHNO GEARHEAD STUFF (long)
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The Simmons SDS-800 was originally made as an electronic drum kit, so that drummers could add electronic drum sounds to their live rigs. Think Rush, or Phil Collins - the kit was comprised of a central "brain" box, housing all the sounds, and four drum-like trigger pads. Simmons made a full line of electronic drums, some smaller, some larger - the biggest versions were modular and rackmounted, and you could add/remove drum sounds to the machine by purchasing extra modules. The SDS-800, however, came with only four voices - a basskick, a snare drum, and two toms. The full SDS-800 kit looked a little like this:  Over time, drummers realized that electronic drums sounded nothing like real drums, and given that the pads were made of metal and hard rubber, not only did they FEEL nothing like real drums, they were almost equally as heavy. The saving of space didn't really matter, so most drummers went back to accoustic drum rigs, and the Simmons, Pearl, Tama and Syncussion units they'd bought slowly found their way into pawnshops around the world. I started playing with analogue drums in about 2000, when I figured out that I was never going to be able to afford a real TR-909. I picked up a Boss PC-2 "percussion synth" pedal (the kick in "Ball Of Socks", incidentally), and fell in love with it - drum synths like the Simmons, Tama, etc boxes are the basis on which software like Stomper and Waldorf's "Attack" VSTi are made. I picked up the SDS-800 off an ad on Analogue Heaven - I think I paid a grand total of $200 for it (tho just for the "brain", no pads), bought it from a guy in Winnipeg (IIRC). The SDS-800 is pure analogue - four VCO's based on a CEM-3395 chip. What's really interesting is that the CEM is hardly pushed at *all* - with a little time and effort, I could *really* tweak this thing out! The thing about the SDS-800 is that it has no MIDI. If you want to trigger the four voices, you have to have something that'll send a "trigger" signal, a 5v electrical pulse, into a 1/4" jack on the back. Fortunately, audio signals are also a voltage, so for a long time I used a Roland TR-707's indy-outs to trigger the voices. Here's a pic of my "minimal techno" rig back in 2001, before any modifications:  (btw, the black thing on the right is a custom multi-band parallel lowpass filter that I built into a Canadian issue .762 ammo cannister - got the plans from "Electronics Projects for Musicians" by Craig Anderton - excellent book. The circuit is a bit too noisy for studio use, and not quite useful enough to justify taking out to shows, but it's definitely a conversation piece...) ;) Anyway - the downside of triggering the SDS-800 like this was mostly the kickdrum - I was using the kick on the TR-707 to trigger the kick on the SDS-800, but even though the 707 kick was very short, sharp and punchy, it was at least a few hundred milliseconds long - maybe like 300ms total. The envelope on the SDS-800 wouldn't begin to decay until it saw the END of the trigger - so I had basically a kick that was big and mushy; 300ms until it even began to drop in pitch! I obviously had to do something about the length of the trigger. So, I hunted around, and discovered the PAIA "MIDI2CV8" project - http://www.paia.com/midi2cv.htm. (hey, I was living in Central America, with no friends and no weed; I had a lot of free time!) I ordered it, built it, and hacked it into the SDS-800 - the MIDI2CV8 has a mode that lets you address eight 5ms, 5v trigger pulses using MIDI notes! 5ms was a HUGE improvement over 300ms, and my kick suddenly got a LOT snappier. They weren't *quite* there tho, and I couldn't figure out why - shouldn't an analogue beast of this size be able to stomp a TR-909 flat? Here's a pic of the installation of the PAIA kit - the main sound board is the one on the right, the bottom one is the power supply, and the one just above that is the PAIA board, built from a circuitboard and a bag of parts:  Now, some physics - when it comes to dance music, the sad truth is that "real" kick drums (ie, a big accoustic drum) sound like shit. The best kick drum for dance/trance/techno is a simple sine wave that starts at a lowish pitch and falls rapidly to a VERY low pitch, overlaid with a sharp "beater strike" sound (ie, like the foot pedal hitting the accoustic drum) to give it some punch - a nice midrange CLICK sounds best. In stuff like the TR-909, you have exactly this, but with a bit of fancier stuff, like the beater strike is accompanied by a 50ms burst of white noise that also modulates the pitch of the sine wave, adding extra punch... anyway. With any good kick, you have two envelopes - the sine wave has to fall in pitch over a short amount in time. So, you have an envelope for the distance of the pitch falling, as well as an envelope for the time it takes for the pitch to fall. Well, at least for techno - psy/goa kicks are all about a similar concept, but using a self-resonating filter as the sinewave and falling from a much higher pitch, to give it that "chirpy" sound. Problem: the SDS-800 has a single envelope for each voice. I could get long, deep kicks, or I could get short, shallow kicks. There was no possible way to get short, deep kicks - which IMHO are what rave techno is all about. Sure, I could do a great TR-808 kick, but it's not like I'm interested in making Miami Bass here... I wanted the kick-you-in-the-chest, proper, stompy, pounding, massive KICK DRUM! So, I searched around, and found a book called "The Electronic Drum Cookbook". I ordered it, devoured it, and started working on a tiny circuitboard that contained a new decay envelope (as opposed to ADSR - I only needed a decay, not an attack, sustain or a release). This was surprisingly easy, only about six parts in total - tho let me tell you, trying to explain, in Spanish, what parts you need to a Costa Rican electronics componants store is *NOT* easy! About a month later, I had added a new envelope to the VCA of the kick drum. Sure, it's not perfect, I'm definitely not a pro - there's a new knob on the front, and it's really only useful for about 1/10th of the range of the knob, but it *definitely* makes a *huge* difference in the sound! Now I can make kicks that are both short *and* deep! So yeah - I have added MIDI *and* a new envelope generator to my Simmons SDS-800, which I have repainted to be officially a Simmons SDS-812. I'm very proud of my baby (if you couldn't tell), and love nothing more than to hear her pounding relentlessly over a huge soundsystem. I've modified most of my gear in one way or another, but the Simmons is definitely my crowning accomplishment - and it sounds *awesome*. Here's some desktop wallpaper of the SDS-800, clearly showing some of the mods: http://mux.ca/images/misc/mux_deskto...r_20031018.jpg (far too big to post as an image, 1280x1024) AAaaaaanyway. Now you know why I just smile and nod when people look at my live rig and tell me "Y'know, you should just get a laptop..." ;) I've stopped fighting it - I know most people don't share my enthusiasm for gear. (now, if I could just get myself booked to play some big summer parties!!! small ones even!! c'mon, I'm open!!)
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Apr 27, 04
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Wow, that really was a long tech story. I must say modifying electronics is beyond me, props for taking that to the next level. I agree with what you said with regards to envelope/quality of kick drum sounds, good drum sounds (especially kicks) are hard to even find sampled, and must be hard to create I'm sure. Oh and the "Electronic Drum Cookbook" sounds interesting, I might try to track down a copy and check it out.
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Apr 28, 04
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Aug 18, 04
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That's older stuff anyway, I'd recommend you download this instead: http://lfo.fsck.org/~drew/mux_-_four...-_20040717.mp3
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