Made with an Akai MPC4000, a Novation DrumStation and some Eventide stomp boxes. Easy.
Rubbish
Some short little radio edits I made this weekend. File under Juke / Footwork.
I’m not going to list all the gear this time as I can’t quite remember. It’s basically a Novation DrumsStation and a lot of rhythm writing. Oh and a Waldorf MicroWave XT, but you knew that.
Still digging down the rabbit hole. I think I’m reaching the end of the road for this sort of thing, or at least without some sort of drastic writing change. I do like this one though, and I think it’s pretty close to what I imagined.
I can’t fully remember what I used, but in essence, it was:
- Novation DrumStation (kick and shaker)
- Antares AVP-1 (used for stereo effect on kick)
- Kawai K4R (snare, misc. percussion)
- Akai MPC 4000 (sequencing, sampling vocal)
- Behringer Filter Machine FM600
- Behringer Ultra Metal UM 300 (distortion various elements)
- Lexicon Reverbs
- RNC1773 Compressor (used on kick)
- TC Electronics Fireworx (effect reverbs, delays)
- SPL Transient Designer (gentle use on each track)
- Art Pro VLA II (master)
- Voxengo Elephant 3 (fabulous limiter, and highpass filter)
- And the vocal sample is from an old RA The Rugged Man track, although it’s not RA.
I’ve taken to recording at 96kHz recently because I’ve found that some of the processors I use sound a little better at super high sampling rates like that. Also, I do a lot of sampling and pitching of my own recordings, so having it all in 96kHz give me a little more headroom for twisting them. This is then resampled to 44.1kHz 24bit once the master is complete.
I’ve been using iZotope RX8 to finalise the masters recently, it think it has the best sounding resampling algorithm I’ve tested so far. Clean and warm. if you’re interested the settings I use are shown below:
I made some significant changes to my monitoring setup recently – was finally able to settle in the sub and get a decent response down to around 20Hz. This means I don’t need to be so reliant on headphones when making music, which I think is always a huge bonus. Headphones reveal too much, and at the same time don’t really give you a full picture of what’s happening.
In order to test my new setup, I spend a while messing around with a new idea. I think sonically it cabe out really well, and hopefully solidifies the changes I’ve made.
A bit of juke / tech stuff made on the following:
- Waldorf MicroWave XT (drums and percussion, as well as pads)
- Roland M-DC1 (snare)
- Yamaha TX81Z (small textures)
- Art Pro VLA II (master)
- Toft ATC-2 (track compression and EQ)
- Vermona DSR-3 (spring reverb on pad)
- Roland RE-201 Space Echo (delay elements)
- various guitar pedals (tremolo, distortion, chorus, simple delay etc.)
- SPL Transient Designer (use on each track)
- Akai MPC 4000 (sequencing, sampling vocal)
- Lexicon Reverb (utility reverbs, mixing, placement etc.)
- Voxengo Elephant 3 (fabulous limiter, and highpass filter)
It’s kinda goofy sounding, but I’m trying to push forward into something new. I quite like it, and I think it’s one of the most cleanly produced things I’ve done in a while. There’s a handshake waiting for anyone who can name me the vocal samples (hint in the title).
You can download it here: https://www.lvcchesi.com/downloads/herbs.zip
A weird promotional LP I picked up because it’s got a track by Labi Siffre (everyone has a price… or a contract enforceable by law).
I guess this was given out free to suppliers or partners of Philips to celebrate their manufacturing of the 100 millionth television. No doubt the old, boxy, CRT-type. It has lovely ‘pop-up’ bouquet of flowers inside the gatefold (as seen below), although it does feel a little funeral-like now.
Available from all the usual suspects…
JunoRed Eye Records
Boomkat
Cold Cuts
Unearthed Sounds
HHV
DeeJay.de
If you’ve ever stumbled upon this dog shit blog of mine, it was likely in an attempt to find some weird music or pure misfortune.
If the latter is true, this guy’s blog is much better than mine
https://music-republic-world-traditional.blogspot.com/
He’s uploading unknown, weird, world music that more than likely would have been lost forever. It’s all free and discourse is encouraged.
Having been asked to make a couple of hip-hop tracks for a friend, I had to find a couple of acappellas to work with until the vocals could be recorded. God bless DOOM and ‘Gunn for including these in their Westside DOOM project.
I dusted off the MPC4000 and got to work with some old jazz records and even older session records. I like the outcome so I thought I would share it.
I also love the artwork – that’s my great uncle in the background, working the bins.
These tracks will no doubt change when I have the new vocals to work with – I may or may not post the results of those.
Download: V50X_IMX458_20201109_V2.0.zip
Unzip, put the files on the root of your SD card. Plop it in your camera and power up while holding the volume up button. The screen will stay blank for about two minutes but you will see the activity light flashing. When complete, the camera will reboot. I think the camera needs to be plugged in and charging during this process.
I’ve hacked together a way of getting my 4x MOTU 24I/Os (and likely all other MOTU PCI / PCI-E devices) working on newer version of MacOS.
I’m fucking pissed off with unnecessarily dropping support for hardware – especially stunningly expensive, niche hardware. Not only would it cost me a small fortune to replace the 24I/Os, but I’d spend weeks rewiring my studio.
Right so, to get these fuckers working on you newer MacOS device here’s what you need:
SOFTWARE
- Download MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (73220).pkg
- Download MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (83634).pkg (yes, both)
- Download Pacifist
PROCESS
Open Terminal are do the following: “sudo mount -uw /”. This mounts the System partition of MacOS and makes it writable. This is where we’ll be installing the drivers.
Open MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (73220).pkg with Pacifist. You should see the following.
Right click on “Contents of PCI_and_PCI_Express_Drivers.pkg” and select “Install to Default Location…”
If you receive any errors at this point, it’s likely that your System partition isn’t writable. Go have a look on Google to see what you need to do.
Next, we need to open the newer MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (83634).pkg with Pacifist. First thing I should draw your attention to is that those cunts have removed the PCI_and_PCI_Express_Drivers.pkg.
So now we need to install the applications by opening “Contents of Common.pkg / Applications” There you should see “CueMix FX.app”, which for my purposes is required to get my set up customised to how I needed it. The drives should work without this, but you’d be missing some functionality.
Anyway drag “CueMix FX.app” to your Applications folder and restart your computer. After a reboot you should now see that everything is working as it should.
Since we don’t have an app to allow us to change the sample rate of the device now, this can be done natively in MacOS “Audio Midi Setup”
