BassDress Blog

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…

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 MP3 / FLAC

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”

I’ve been thinking more and more about dance music recently. It’s something that I’ve had a fleeting interest in previously but not what I’d chosen to pursue. Having been trapped at home for many more months than I can recall, I thought it would be interesting to push my production in a way that I haven’t previously – as practice and development more than anything.

I got to work with my old broken synths and drums machines, trying to stay clear of cliche and and played out rhythms. I tried to keep the sound of my studio in tact too – given that it was designed with more of an ambient/avant-garde bent it isn’t particularly well suited to this style of things.

All things considered, I think this came out pretty well. There are six (admittedly quite similar) tracks which all sound original enough and interesting enough to share.

I’m happy that the sound of these records is clearly still that of my studio, and the character of that has managed to stay in tact, and that there were relatively few compromises during the whole process.

I’ve probably used most of the gear in my studio, but I think the key elements to the sounds were made using the following: Korg Polysix, Akai MPC 4000 (vocal samples), TC Electronics Fireworks, Toft ATC-2, Vermona DRM1 mkIII, DigiTech RDS 1900, Waldorf MicroWave XT, Novation DrumStation, Yamaha TX81Z, and an eclectic mix of guitar pedals. Oh, and the ART Pro VLA II on the master. Also while not usually being one for VSTs, I did try a demo of some Lexicon reverbs which I found to be wonderful – even if they stressed out the old Mac.

These are still very much demos in my eyes, but I’ve reached a point where I’ve satisfied my need to continue production with them. My plan now is really to strip them back to their individual components, rework them with simpler drum patterns and try some sort of live setup with the MPC.

I do love the artwork.

Downloads

FLAC / MP3