Ich bin Trommler gern (und habe viel Spaß!)

Now I play drums. I guess that would qualify me as a drummer. Or something. Below is a rendered image of my kit, as any photograph I make of it turns out rather poorly.
Drums: ddrum Dominion AMX shells
24" kick
12" and 16" toms
14x6.5" AMX snare along with a 13x3.5" PDP steel piccolo snare for pingy backbeats
Sabian cymbals (XS20 14" hats, 20" ride and 14" thin crash, and a B8 18" china)
Vic Firth sticks (SD4 Combo, SD2 "American Bolero")
Pearl, Gibraltar and Dixon hardware

And Hear-Os, because I really don't want to lose more of my hearing.

Anyway, here's a short sample of me playing a funky-ass groove with brushes.

An Odd Track

I made this guy in Reason, with a bit of post-processing in Sound Forge. It's pretty simple, though it switches to 5/4, 7/4 and 11/4 in places. The electronic bleeps bubbling up in the background near the end were made in the Subtractor module using the noise waveform as an LFO, then duplicated, delayed and hard-panned to the left and right.

I call it "Carnival Parkour."

Harmony Engine isn't just for vocals

So I've been playing around with Antares' Harmony Engine software, a plugin which takes audio input and harmonizes with it. In addition to basic interval harmonies, it also responds to MIDI input to create lovely 4-part harmonies.



Of course, being the crazy dude I am, I immediately thought, "Oh exploitable!" Since it takes any audio input, you can use it on a wide variety of sounds. The first thing I thought up was drums, but it turns out unpitched sounds don't work so well. Speech was alright, but nothing to write home about. Then I thought of something: What if I used my keyboard as both the MIDI and audio signal?



For this first test, I used a simple percussive organ sound monophonically. Even though the basic tone is still there, you can hear a delightfully glitchy and unpredictable effect on the higher and lower ranges of tones. The effect is more pronounced when you turn off the plugin's velocity sensitivity, and I recommend muting the input signal in the plugin to ensure you get the full effect. Anyway, monophonic is cool, but what about polyphonic sounds?



Gloriously glitchy! Harmony Engine pitch-shifts the input sound to each MIDI note, but when that input sound is already a harmony you end up with each individual voice as a complete chord. But the bit-rate isn't high enough to fully shift everything perfectly, so the engine twitches between notes and basically just loses it. One interesting thing to try when the velocity sensitivity is off is to play a chord at full volume, hit the sustain pedal to keep the audio going into the plugin, then play with a very light touch to get the MIDI input without adding to the sustained tone.

Since the effect is so unpredictable, you may need to bounce a track to disk to preserve a particular sound for later use. (Unless, of course, that unpredictability is what you're after, in which case just go for it.)

One note: In these videos you can't hear the interesting panning effect that occurs when the engine switches between voices. It's actually even more pronounced in the first sample because each vocal line will bounce between different panning locations rather than staying with one like a normal choir recording. Even though it's not natural-sounding, it does liven up the stereophonic sound space quite a bit.

FIRST POST YO

As a sort of introduction, I figured I'd try to do one of those personality quizzes that highschoolers and attention whores fill out to tell everyone about their lives, even though nobody really cares. But since I'm a musician, I decided to come up with one that addresses issues of creativity, rather than "how many times u been kissed" and "coke or pepsi". (A full transcript of those questions is available on request.)

Name (or nickname): Chris, or Rujo King.

Age: 27

Country of origin: United States

Instrument(s) of Choice: Voice and Keyboards. My vocal range is pretty wide, centered around baritone. As far as keys go, I mainly do synths, but with a tendency to just go nuts with a good old-fashioned Rhodes sound.

How would you describe your music? Wow... Some of it is down-tempo and dark bordering on ambient, while some fits rather neatly into "drum and bass." I'm split half and half between acoustic and electronic drums, and I'll use sampled instruments as often as I use synthesized ones. I do have a fetish for glitchy sounds though, as well as odd and mixed time signatures.

How much training have you had? Some classical theory, with some extra work in medieval and modern concepts. As far as technical stuff goes, I'm entirely self-taught.

Who are your primary musical influences? Let's see, for pure beats I tend to look to guys like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, particularly when it comes to faster, more convoluted rhythms. Structurally and melodically, I take a lot of inspiration from Massive Attack, Boards of Canada and Portishead, with a mixture of Imogen Heap and Coldplay for my more accessible tracks. To round out my contemporary influences, I find myself using a lot of musical idioms from Commodore 64 and Amiga .mod files, though I don't make many "chiptunes" per se. I'm also influenced less directly by modern art music, as well as medieval melodic and harmonic structures. I've studied Harry Partch and Schoenberg, but I do prefer tonal harmony in my own works.

What other music do you listen to? The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Venetian Snares, Black Eyed Peas, Mos Def, The Streets... I'm pretty eclectic.

Any favorite web sites for music? I'll find myself going to the Computer Music magazine site as well as Music Radar for news. KVR Audio's plugin list is incredible, and most of my VST plugin folder came from their freeware section. Finally, Harmony Central's been on my bookmark list since it opened, and even though their software section is a bit anemic they do have a good deal on electronic music in general.

Sites not related to music? Something Awful. I've been a "goon," or forum member, since 2007, and I've found them to be the most consistently funny site on the web. I also get a kick out of Crank.net, particulary the "illucid" links. And as someone who just sucks up useless knowledge like crazy, Wikipedia is one of the pages I go to most often.

Platform of choice: I use a MacBook, though I'm running Windows XP on it for games reasons unrelated to music production.

Applications of choice: I use Cubase most often, with Live and Reason picking up the slack. I do a lot of sound design in Reaktor, and loop editing in Sound Forge. I've got a whole slew of plugins, so many that I actually can't remember what most of them are, though QuadraSID and Lounge Lizard are two standouts.

Hardware of choice: I've got a firewire interface from Phonic that gets audio and MIDI in and out. Plugged up to that I've got my Yamaha CS1X, which is not only a capable keyboard but also awesome and blue. I just recently got an Akai MPD24 controller that I use from drums, Live clip triggering and mixing. I use an instrument mic to record everything, since my vocals rarely go unprocessed.

Describe your typical workflow: It depends on the style I'm going for. For some heavy electronic stuff, I'll start a piece in Reason and bounce each track separately to Cubase for additional sounds and mastering. If it's more acoustic in nature, I'll start off in Cubase directly and simply add in other parts as needed. I use VSTi's much more often than samples and if I use premade loops, I try to mangle or rearrange them into something different. Finally, I'll use Live to quickly build up arrangements using my own loops and clips.

Any final words?
Get down. With your bad self.