Studio notes and pics of stuff in progress, plus a kind of jam blog: sound and visual experiments and sketches, featuring mostly live mixes. Mainly I make the sound first then mix visuals to it, sometimes the process is reversed, or sometimes I mix both concurrently (a high probability of mess, but fun!). I’ll also post related happenings, set-ups creating etc.
A big re-shuffle in the studio now so that everything is accessible at once, video all on one side, audio on the other. Seems obvious now but everything was mixed up before! Also, routing all the audio cables upwards makes the floor a safer place to be, plus with the new router I can have most sound inputs available concurrently rather than chopping and changing all the time.
Simple dreamy loops, a shifting mood really. The fragmented textures are a granular abstraction from recordings I made using an electric kalimba and an Old Blood Noise pedal (Minim), with a simple guitar part added using an OTO BIM; this guitar part was then used to make a texture underneath, so 3 layers. Both these recorded parts were routed through the reverb of my vintage ROLAND VX-55.
The video uses two short loops re-filmed with my old VHS camera then cut over the top of my VHS copy of Memento through the Vidiot (there are parts of another film but I cannot remember what it was!). I used the old-school mixing on my old Roland V4 to layer the dancer and the background.
I was channelling that nebulous feeling of a lost bit of dream that you keep leaving and coming back to . . .
In the true nature of these demos, there is an extremely sticky bit where the guitar peaks and clips. I might re-record at some point.
A darker mix this one. Two guitar parts make the sound texture, then I captured a short section of Metropolis VHS into the Vidiot for the mix and out via Blackmagic Shuttle. This time, instead of capturing via screen recording, I just filmed the output monitor. You can see the dust and dirt on there when I move closer (-8
I really like the result, the visuals capture the dark mood of the soundtrack.
Less ambient this time and a lot of fun with Korg Volcas and Maschine. The main track is a live jam with Korg Volca Sample, Bass and Keys, plus using Maschine to play chords on the V Keys. I then jammed some extra high V Bass lines, then manually synched - the extra bits track into the left and right channels, sounds great on headphones. Then I used a sound reactive analogue video layer from the Vidiot into my digital layers and made the video mix (some minor post-editing also). Acid techno! I think.
A still from the video
So, this is the first recorded visual mix using the live analogue input. I had a demo track “Pollen” ready to go for a couple of weeks so decided to get some visuals to work with it and am really happy with the outcome. The footage from the beginning of The Incredible Shrinking Man was perfect overlaid on other video textures and fits the music well. Winner.
So finally I’ve managed to get my analogue video synthesiser, Vidiot, to speak fluently with my digital set-up so I can now fully integrate that analogue content into my live visual digital set-up.
Had to correct the VHS signal going into the synthesiser and I looked round for ages trying to find an affordable Time Base Corrector and a lot of the even recently obsolete / discontinued devices were very costly and reading more about them not guaranteed to work with my set-up.
So I followed the alternative route of buying an old VCR-DVDr combo which was originally brought out to allow people to easily transfer their old videos to shiny new DVDs (!). The main benefit for me being the machine has Time Base Correction built in so that the wobbly tape heads can be re-interpreted for smooth DVD copying.
Picked a vintage BUSH one on eBay for £90, plus a Scart to composite adapter, sent it to the Vidiot then into a Blackmagic convertor and out into my Mac via Syphon and into my live layers and it works (-:
Got some classic sci-fi movies out of their boxes - an added bonus with the hybrid machine is that I can have two movies loaded at once - one DVD and one VHS and then switch between the two.
Can’t wait to use it for a gig (although not looking forward to lugging the big old VCR around . . .)
So, a longer one this time. This one is a much more ambient demo. The sticky definitely happened in the audio, which I didn’t notice whilst recording, but when playing back to mix visuals to I noticed two big fluffy clicks!
Still from “Submerged”
So this is the first one, did a live recording (after a couple of mishaps!) of the music, then played it back, grabbed some clips it made me think of, did a live mix. Came out pretty well I think.
One positive during the Corona outbreak has been some extended time to sort the set-up and make some new music and sound in the studio. Just getting everything working smoothly together is a bonus.
Got everything a bit more streamlined
Still a bit messy, maybe that’s a job for next week
