Rolling your own in insta-culture

It all starts with sound. Before we even become fixated on turning these tones into riffs, melodies, arrangements, or full songs, it's that sound that we react to and want to capture for ourselves. In my life, that sound has been Billy Corgan's guitar tone on Siamese Dream, Scott Walker's vocal quality, Lee Hazlewood's reverb, Vince Clarke's synth arpeggios, Richard D. James' synth leads, and hundreds of other sonic inspirations throughout the years. It's currently Johnny Jewel's vocal reverb and Alan Braxe's super heavy yet non-interfering mix compression. It'll be something else next week. Sonic inspiration works this way; we fall in love with new sounds and try to recreate them for ourselves, our attempts get filtered and mutated through our own equipment, experience (and especially lack thereof), and combined with all of the other little pieces we've taken from everywhere else, and then the resulting blend that we've created becomes part of the greater conversation of how records sound and how sounds work together.

Stephin Merritt, the greatest living songwriter, didn't have the Wrecking Crew and enormous echo chambers when he turned his Phil Spector pastiche into the first Magnetic Fields records; he had cheap early digital synths, cheap drum machines, and cheap digital reverb. The resulting blend still points to what it's "trying" to accomplish, but still ends up somewhere completely different and achieves mutated brilliance in the process.

Digging deep into interviews with music makers often reveals these sorts of "we really thought were making something that sounded like this but then it turns out it ended up way over here instead." There have been literal genres built entirely around people trying to just be Richard D. James, DJ Shadow, Tangerine Dream, Kevin Shields, Portishead, Wolf Eyes, etc., wholesale, without even bringing anything new to the table. In the best, and most memorable cases, something goes wrong in the process and the output is at least more interesting for the deviation.

In the nineties (in particular), creating your own sounds was a point of pride for music makers. Even if you were just attempting to ape someone else's tones, it was universally recognized and accepted that doing it "the hard way" - buying the same gear, learning to use it in the same ways and combinations - was somehow more respectable and "legitimate" than using the same synth presets or commercial sample banks. I've long thought this was a direct result of the enormous commercial success of the Yamaha DX-7, whose presets became so ubiquitous in pop culture that you couldn't use the machine without automatically invoking countless other songs, commercial jingles, and sitcom/movie themes. There was a similar backlash with the explosion of sampling CD's in the nineties, where suddenly aspiring producers didn't have to do all of that hard work of buying vinyl records, listening to them for hours, finding cool snippets, figuring out the best way to capture them using the combination of the turntable model and sampler that they owned, then figuring out the best way to manipulate the sound using the rest of their gear. Instead, they could buy Zero G or Vinylistics and bypass all that pesky prep work and get right to making music with the exact same "great" sounds as everyone else. As Ed Stratton, the guy responsible for the "Sgt. Peppers" of sample CD's says,

"Round about 1990 I purchased a sample CD for the first time – “Climax Vocal Collection” by Masterbits. Sample CDs were a totally new idea and I didn’t really know what to expect. I was totally disappointed in it as there wasn’t a single vocal on it I could use in my music. Seventy pounds down the drain. That hurt because by this time I was skint. Then it dawned on me that I had put together a huge collection of samples over the previous 4 years and could easily put together a sample CD of my own that would blow dance producers away. I realised that sounds were going to be a really big deal in the future and saw that I had an amazing opportunity to get into something huge right at the beginning."

Stratton's ideology is endemic of the slippery slope that lead to enabling an entire generation to skip all of the hard work of sound creation and get right to making tracks.

But wait - is this a bad thing or a good thing?

Cliches wouldn't exist if they weren't true most of the time, and adages are often revealed to be almost disturbingly profound with age and life experience. One of the old saws that I've constantly experienced is "___ is about the journey, not the destination." And yet, it feels like everything in our insta-, one-click culture has come to serve the destination, the output, the product, specifically by eliding the "journey" - the process of creating - as much as possible. Press this button to create output. Repeat. Always push content. Keep "relevant" in 24/7 hype cycle A.D.D. culture with minimal effort.

Counterpoint: My therapist tells me that my middle name out to be "should" because I'm so hung up on orthodox rules about how everything "should" be, and I get frustrated when those things don't conform to my orthodoxies and then I'm miserable. Pain (frustration) + nonacceptance (railing against the things that frustrate) = legit suffering (aghghghghgh!). I work my ass off every day to practice radical acceptance in every area of my life - which, if you know me personally, you know I utterly fail at 97% of the time [but I'd probably literally be dead if I wasn't constantly still working so hard at it]. A very simplified, but effective maxim that comes out of all of this is, "Which is more important - to be right, or to be effective?" [when those things are mutually exclusive, or at least feel so] I've definitely spent my whole life being "right" at the expense of being effective, and it's cost me a lot. So much that I'd probably stick a gun in my mouth if not for that aforementioned therapist and all he's done for me. I'm working very hard, and taking way longer than I'd like, to get that ship turned around.

What the hell does this LiveJournal interruption have to do with Usher, Horton!?

Usher's "love in this club" is one of my favorite pop songs of the past decade. It's so good. I murder it at karaoke when I'm drunk. It feels like a beautiful, epic Euro-trance ecstasy high in cinematic slow-motion with an utterly spiritual, whiny R&B male vocal. Its only low point is Young Jeezy coming in like black Tom Waits sounding like he's going to murder everyone in the club, even as that gated trance pad soars behind him. I'M PEAKING.

Here's what's hilarious about "love in this club" - it's two Garageband preset loops. Seriously. I'll let this  excitable young man attempt to demonstrate:

Clear as day. The song's producer, Polow da Don, offers up this hilarious defense of the, uh, "beatjacking" -

That’s not where I got them from, but they’re definitely in there,” Polow said of the sounds used in “Love in This Club”.

Though everyone had a good laugh about this artistic de-pantsing, and decried Polow as a no-talent bohack, he still made a zillion dollars off of it and continues to get tons of high-profile work. XXL magazine sums it up succinctly:

The only thing you should be bitching about is the fact that you were sitting at home trying to concoct some Mozart-type melody while your hit record was sitting right on your hard drive. You just had to copy and paste it together.

My understanding is that the loops in garageband and most of these other programs are available for use, without needing a license. That’s dope, it’s like free hit records waiting to be made, and you don’t have to clear anything.

I know the common argument would be that it takes no creativity. And you’re right, it doesn’t.

Short of being able to actually get it into Usher's hands, anyone with a copy of Garageband could have assembled those two loops into the song and made a zillion. Talk about being "effective" vs. being "right!" The best craftsman, crate-digging, high-art hip hop beatmakers of all time (that would be J. Dilla, Pete Rock, and DJ Premier) have probably never made as much money in their entire careers as Polow did off of that one song (i'm not even googling soundscan numbers here).

Counterpoint to the counterpoint - this guy! Specifically the first 5 minutes, where Shawn talks about his Orthodox beat-making ideology. I don't make hip hop anymore - I was always a white corndog tourist - but I agree with him 100000% on pretty much every single word of his monologue. Then substitute pretty much any other genre of music and its most inspiring creators and classic tools, and I feel it doubly. Everything is starting to sound the same these days, and it's all too clean, too professional, and utterly lacking in individual touch or personality. It's lacking that mutation that occurs through the making process, because the process has been removed. Even Pitchfork, who is directly responsible for pushing hype cycle instaculture that demands this sort of process to keep up, is starting to take note of how it's destroying the personality and erasing the inherent sonic quality of entire genres. 

You know why DubSpot's instant trap music plugin was such a great April Fool's gag? Because it's barely a stretch compared to half of the software already out there, and there's probably literally someone actually developing that exact thing at this moment. 

But who cares about selling a zillion and making dough when we're talking about art, right? The art vs. commerce debate can go on forever, but the intrinsic value of making great shit that you're proud of cannot be compromised. Everything in my experience has taught me that taking the long way there - practicing the right processes instead of taking shortcuts, and learning how to actually make all of the sounds you want instead of just dialing up prefab ones - is infinitely more rewarding.

But it takes forever.

I mean forever - especially in a culture where it feels like everything is moving at light speed, where everyone in all mediums seems to just be crapping out content 24/7, where the hype cycle is just greedily chewing through this content and discarding it in favor of the next flavor of the week and devaluing it all and messing up our relationship to it. When you need reverb, and you're unwilling to just fire up a reverb plugin with a "record-ready preset," you have to buy a reverb unit, learn how to use it, listen to other records with the type of reverb effect you want, and then practice using it on your own song until it sounds right. Multiply this by every sound in the mix - every drum machine, synthesizer, vocal recording-  and every effect - compression, reverb, delay, distortion etc. -  and it just takes forever to learn how to use everything right and actually use it all together in a way that produces the result you want. I promise you that the end result is so worth it by the time you get there, and our musical landscape can only get better and less homogenous as a result.

But what if forever is too long, or actually, gulp, forever-ever?

I have two full-length records that are entirely finished, sitting on hard drive and 1/4" master tape. One is totally mixed and ready for release, but my stupid idiot orthodoxy means that I won't settle for releasing it on anything other than vinyl, which won't be happening any time soon. The other one is tracked but not mixed because it's everything I've been working toward for the past 17 years of making music, it's taken me the past 3 years just to track the way I wanted to, and I'm being utterly autistic about mixing it "right" (all "out of the box," mechanical reverb, optical compression, to tape) in ways that will be utterly undetectable to anyone else compared to if I just did the whole thing with plugins and bounced mp3's out to bandcamp or whatever. What if I die before this happens? What if the new flu pandemic wipes everyone out? What if we go to full nuclear war? What if nobody else ever hears the damned thing, did it ever really exist? What was the point of all of that dithering and perfectionism other than self-satisfaction that it was done the way I wanted it to be done? I...I have absolutely no idea what the right answer is, and I'm not sure if I've been "right," "effective," or "neither."

Counter-counter-point-point: William Gaddis only wrote five novels in his entire life. Grizzly Bear has almost made that many albums.

Killing yourself to live in order to live to kill yourself

Hello! Long time no post. I got shit-canned from my job in January (along with a bunch of other people) and have been in a bit of freefall since. I promise I'll be returning in earnest soon, with the full I Was A Teenage Trip Hop DJ and other normal stuff.

This past week, that Onion article took the internet by storm, and clearly cut way close to the bone for all of my creative friends. Hilariously, I read it on the way to an interview where I was about to do my dog-and-pony show to try to get a job that I wasn't personally invested in at all, but that would give me more money to put toward my "real passions" on evenings and weekends. Ha!

I've read a lot of earnest responses to the Onion gag, and my friend and sometimes bandmate Aroon's "How to work on passion projects while still having a day job" advice column over at How to be a Grownup is one of the most thoughtful and constructive. Balancing creative pursuits with having a job and being a functional adult human being is something I've thought a hell of a lot about over the past ten years since I graduated college and entered the 9-5 working world, and it's actually one of the topic/starter prompts in the file I compiled before starting this blog, so I felt compelled to jump in with some further thoughts after reading Aroon's great comments.

The reality is, there's nothing inauthentic about wanting/needing stability and there's nothing un-punk about wanting a safety net (although maybe it is un-punk and that's a good thing). You don't get a 401k for being an elder statesman. Jesus, so many of these guys - these literal gods in our personal pantheons - don't even have health insurance. That last one still makes me cry, and not in the figurate sense. It seems like every other day another beloved icon is reduced to begging for donations. And those are the guys who are actually world famous. It's even tougher when you're only "cult famous" to a small but dedicated group of fans.

Life is hard as hell and there's never enough time, energy, or money. For those that are trying to balance living the creative dream with a "day job," and feeling that weird and toxic mix of entitlement, self-loathing, frustration, and defiance, I offer up the following thoughts in addition to Aroon's.

1. You'd be surprised at how many famous, successful artists are also working day jobs. And I'm not talking about your hometown heroes, I'm talking about people that do Pitchfork interviews and are on NPR and get played overhead when your'e shopping at the Gap. People who tour the world and then return to a weird, boring job when they're done (if they're not flat-out waiting tables or changing oil). I remember being a teenager and thinking that everyone out there was "living the dream" and "doing their art as their job" - until I found out Lou Barlow was working mail order, stuffing packages between tours. Humbling. It might blow your mind how "big" you have to get before you can even sustain the same basic "middle class" lifestyle you're already enjoying off of your 9-5. 

2. The thing is, "doing your art" for a living often means doing everything but your actual real art for the bulk of your income. It's the weird paradox of "making the leap" - you're likely going to still spend most of your time and energy on doing tangential things to your "main output" in order to actually make money. Bands don't make money by "being bands" - they make money by touring and playing live venues that want to sell alcohol, and by selling merchandise that's ultimately just a souvenir that's only tangentially related to their actual creative output, which is music. A friend of mine who has semi-successfully pursued music as his main income for the past decade once told me, "I'm not a singer. I'm a traveling t-shirt, bumper sticker, and beer salesman" - and he wasn't really joking. I used to wonder why my favorite cartoonists seemed to take so damned long - often several years - between releasing new stuff, until I realized most of them spend all their damned time doing commercial art work and barely squeeze in their "real" stuff in between jobs. I have another friend - an artsy rocker - whose cultish fanbase would faint if they had any idea that he spends the bulk of his time making mood music for TV crime dramas and commercial bumper jams for lame reality shows. "Hey, Horton, it pays the bills!"

3. Sometimes the best case scenario for "making it" is that your awesome creative passion becomes...your oppressive day job. Nothing sucks the joy out of your art like turning it into something you HAVE to do. By this Friday. Or else you can't pay rent. Ask anyone who's opened a commercial recording studio and spent years recording Creed soundalikes, rappers that don't pay, and other mutants. If your art's your great escape from the turmoil of daily life...what happens when it becomes the turmoil of daily life? How do you escape then? The dream of turning your art into your day job might just turn into a nightmare as the thing that you lived for now becomes the monkey on your back. I know a TON of people that this has happened to. I bought a rare piece of recording gear off of a guy who spent 15 years making records under the gun and up to deadlines. All he wanted at that point was to get the world's most boring office job and take up fly fishing.

4. Don't buy into the myth that if you just had the time, you'd do this stuff 24/7. You most likely wouldn't. I've been living off of severance and unemployment for the past few months, and I've probably worked on music less than when I had to squeeze it in between work, the gym, dinner, and quality time with my friends. There are a million reasons for my personal paralysis, but I find this to be true of almost everybody. Nobody's actually working on their stuff all day every day. Do you think Kevin Shields tooled away on that ramshackle mishmash that he recently released since 1991? Considering there's dated baggy beats and that awful "jungle" thing, I imagine he did a whole hell of a lot of "everything else" in those 22 years. Who knows what Portishead did in the 11 years between their self-titled and Third albums, but they put the latter together in just a few months. When the time is right, it's right, and when things are done, they're done. On the other hand, there are some artists that are incredibly prolific - they've got a new record out once a year, and an EP and more in between. I'm not going to name names, but a few of my favorite artists are this prolific, and you know what? With rare exceptions or particularly "hungry" streaks (usually when they were just getting started and trying to prove themselves on evenings and weekends), their work would be better if they took a few years between releases and condensed the best songs from their three "pretty good" albums into one "amazing" album in that same time frame. Be Johnny Jewel.

5. Live somewhere boring. I have a good friend, who also makes some of my favorite records that get released, who once said something that totally speared me when he visited me in Chicago - "This place is great, but there's always a million amazing things going on at the same time. I think if I lived here, I'd never get anything done because I'd always be distracted by all the cool things to go out and do." He's got a point. There's a great energy from living in a cool place, but there's so much distraction all the time. What if you lived somewhere boring as hell where your only refuge was your creative output? What if there were no parties, events, shows, and when there were, they were a big deal and a rarity? Life as a big fish in a small pond can be incredibly fulfilling in a way that being the latest guppy in ocean never is. The big fish still eats the most. I've totally lost my metaphor. Move somewhere boring and make amazing things on your own, then make those amazing things happen in public. Be the founder and king of your scene where there was none before, and foster others instead of dealing with warring tribes all clamoring for the same eight blocks and the same four clubs and two galleries. It's not a war, it's Thanksgiving. Ok, the quaaludes must be kicking in.

Beginner's Luck

I’m in the middle of working on a much longer piece right now (the forthcoming epic I was a Teenage Trip Hop DJ), but here’s a smaller chunk about a subject that I think about a lot in regards to music equipment, creative process, and life in general: beginner’s luck. This week, I finally got an Arturia Minibrute after being on the waiting list since April. It’s about as traditional and normal as an analog monosynth goes, with a few thoughtful additions and design idiosyncrasies that justify its addition to a studio setup like mine that’s already drowning in monosynths. I tend to approach synths in a pretty similar way, having worked with them for so long; I have my orthodoxies, habits, and shortcuts to dial up the types of sounds that I want to hear, and this doesn’t change much from one synth to another once you understand how it all works.

And yet, that first 24 hours (or mercifully longer!) with a new piece of equipment is always completely different than later on, when habits and muscle memory have set in. This is what I love about using new equipment - the weird interstitial learning and acclimation period where all sorts of wacky things seem to just occur by accident and magic. I call this “beginner’s luck” for lack of a better term - you’re still naive enough on the piece of equipment to be “free” in your exploration. You don’t quite yet know what not to do, what parameter to avoid tweaking, so you try it all. You haven’t learned that the oscillator syncing sucks, or that the portamento gets too long too quick, or that the LFO’s irritatingly reset with every retrigger when the arpeggiator is running, or that the pulse wave goes just a little too thin, or that the triangle wave has an extra-buzzy notch in it, that the default key behavior is inexplicably high-note priority, there’s a weird phase relationship in the bandpass filter...you get my point (none of these are in reference to the Minibrute, btw!). You haven’t developed habits in your relationship to the piece of gear, and so you wander and explore and end up in places that I can guarantee you are never going to end up in again later on.

When I first got my Moog Little Phatty - one of the most truly simplified synthesizers on the market - I experienced so many of these happy accidents that I was completely ecstatic. I swear at one point I had somehow dialed up a 3-note chord (the phatty only has two oscillators) that transposed nicely up and down the scale. No idea how, and of course I didn’t save it. I can think of a million other gnarly things I ended up coming up with in those first few days, the happy accidents, the weirdo combinations. But once I learned its basic toolset and got used to its idiosyncrasies, my relationship with the synth got pretty boring; I’d just dial up that “classic” (tired and ubiquitous) Moog bass sound, the big prog rock lead, the growling filter stuff. That’s mostly on me; I got boring in my approach to the synth and allowed myself to just habituate to it. It doesn’t help that it’s not the most unique or inspiring tool in the first place, and I’m also a bit of a pop formalist who’s not trying to sonically reinvent the wheel in my primary music endeavors. But then again, that freedom and weirdness and exploration is what drew me to synths in the first place.

We all end up with our creative habits and shortcuts. At best, it becomes our personal style or trademark and at worst, it becomes a rut that we’re stuck in. Everyone has their own techniques for staying fresh and keeping moving, whether it means applying Eno’s Oblique Strategies, imposing concepts on work or drawing restraints on the creative process, or just plain swapping out gear between projects. Ignoring for a moment that using analog synthesizers, sequencers, and primitive effects is inherently its own “oblique strategy” for making songs compared to just picking up a guitar or sitting down at a piano - you’re starting out on third base compared to John Mayer [who still probably gets to third base faster than the rest of us, if you know what I’m saying, hyuk hyuk] - I still go out of my way to work with weirder and inspiring “happy accident” tools like the Roland MC-202 with its “calculator”-style sequencer that inevitably mutates your input into something weirder and funkier than what you intended. And then I always roll tape, especially when I’m just screwing around, just “testing” something, just aimlessly jamming on an idea, just experimenting, and always when I’m exploring or learning a piece of gear for the first time to maybe catch some of that beginner’s luck. I keep a Soundcloud “dumping ground” project for the more interesting stuff that shakes out when I’m not rigidly trying to execute an idea, stick to formalist conventions, completely serve the execution of a verse/chorus/verse song. A friend of mine says he thinks this stuff is more interesting than my “regular” music. Maybe it is. It’s certainly way more effortless, natural, and free in its conception and execution. Cue Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra, I guess.

Sp-1200 pt. 2: Memory and Hagiography

So where we last left off, an SP-1200 basically fell right into my lap. A good friend of mine is a gear junkie, constantly buying, selling, and flipping pieces in the never ending search for his perfect setup. He ended up getting a great deal on a 1200 a while back, and in passing I mentioned to him that I’d always wanted one and that I’d like first refusal if he ever decided to sell it. I was secretly hoping that at some point in his ownership we’d get a chance to just get together so that I could play with it for a bit, dispel the myth, let the desire dissipate, and move on with my life (we had previously done this with the gargantuan, unusable Emulator II keyboard sampler that he briefly owned). 

My keyboard on Creatine

Naturally, he decided to sell his 1200 about a month ago just as I was going through a hardcore classic Chicago House phase and had already been looking at them on eBay again. Oops. The stars aligned, he gave me a special dude-bro deal with the caveat that he get first crack at it if I ever decide to sell it, and I got it.

There’s something about finally using iconic pieces of old studio gear that’s so truly transporting in a way that other, more universal instruments aren’t quite. Let me see if I can adequately articulate this, though I imagine most people that use vintage technology know exactly what I’m talking about. When you use a piece of vintage music technology, you experience this entire “other era” in a really acute way, down to the way that the buttons, knobs, displays, ergonomics, language, even the heat and smell of the way that the things operate - there’s really nothing in normal day-to-day life that has the same effect short of encountering a really old computer or arcade machine or something like that. When you pick up a Vintage Fender Stratocaster like Buddy Holly played in 1958, it’s a timeless design that hasn’t changed much compared to the brand new made-in-Mexico strat that you can buy today for $200, or hell, the Rock Band guitar controller. The difference is that it’s an inspired Instrument design first and foremost, with no actual need to evolve into a Parker Fly Cyber Future Guitar outside of poor industrial design taste. 

On the other hand, “gear” - that is, “studio technology” - is always evolving in a much more organic, market, and taste-driven way. There are tons of reasons for this, but the big one is that we tend to expect and demand that all technology get progressively smaller, cheaper, lighter, and more transportable because, uhh, progress and stuff. The big badass desktop computer becomes the Macbook Pro and even that’s “too bulky,” so we get the Macbook Air. The iPhone 5 in our pocket is as powerful as the Mac G5 tower that we paid $500 a day to make records on before the iPhone 1 was even released. There’s a much longer idea of mine, bordering on rant, that I’ll sidestep for now about how this trend is a direct reflection of our culture’s obnoxious insistence on having everything without actually making choices and paying the opportunity cost of choosing one thing over another, how if we can have all the music and all of the movies and all of the games and all of the books with one click and without paying anything then we should be able to also have all of the physical things without even giving up the physical space for them as well, we deserve it, damn it, and why should I have to make room in our rooms for anything at all!?

Deep breaths. Excuse me for a moment.

The SP-1200 is a instrument. A big, huge, single-purpose instrument. In a laptop world, it’s a freaking refrigerator. It comes from another time, 25 years gone, when we didn’t expect music-making gear to fit in our messenger bag, to politely scoot out of the way on our Ikea desk to make room for our Macbook. Holy crap, is it huge.

Big enough for exhaust vents and a BIG RED FUSE.

But that’s where it gets interesting. We’re so used to working on skinny, small things - portability and compactness rule everything around us - that to sit down at an SP-1200 feels like taking command of the bridge of a spaceship by comparison. It’s just so, so wonderfully big.

And it’s not like it even “needs” to be that large - look at how much negative space there actually is along the top. Four buttons next to huge lists of parameters and functions, then one knob, all taking up more surface area than an iPad. It’s brilliant. The 1200 asserts itself in space, in gravity. It comes from the era when we willfully gave up physical space in favor of the luxury of objects; we centered our spaces around them instead of expecting them to demurely fit into our lives without making much of a fuss. 

Saturday morning eternal

It’s this exact “luxury” that’s the SP-1200’s most ineffably awesome quality - the feeling of sitting down at an entire console, a workstation in the truest sense of the word - a single-purpose machine that’s been crafted to do one thing and to do that thing well. There’s just so much of it in front of you. It makes working with software and USB controllers just seem so cheap and honestly undignified by comparison. 

DJ Workaholic Dad in the "studio"

It’s not even the most ergonomic beatbox of its era - the MPC-60, with its “lay-z-boy” vinyl cushion wrist rest and soft, smashy drum pads totally wins that category -

- but it’s amazing how fast and fun the workflow is. The “calculator” approach to adjusting parameters is actually really fast and intuitive, especially when every single number command is listed on the front of the machine.  Like the worst digital synths of the eighties, every single process is buried in menus instead of being given dedicated knobs, buttons, and sliders - but ironically, by giving up so much surface space to list all of those codes on the front of the machine, no process or command ever feels out of reach. They’re all right there staring back at you at all times, and after you use the thing for a bit, it’s funny how you remember all of the important codes. It becomes muscle memory, like working a cash register. A cash register that bangs.

The sound, of course, is the original draw - what started it all for me back in ‘98. There’s so much apocrypha, hearsay, and rumor surrounding the 1200’s “magic sound” and why it can’t be achieved with bit crushing plugins or even other classic 12-bit samplers. After working with the machine, it all makes sense - an epiphany, if you will. The 1200’s sound is more than just the sampling rate, the bit depth, the filters, or anything else - it’s actually a combination of all of those things working together. I’ve made a high quality video to demonstrate this that I’ll embed below.

When I first sampled into the 1200, I was surprised at how clean it sounded. I guess I expected “magic” right off of the bat, but it just sounded...good. It only samples at 26khz - around “half” of a CD’s 44.1khz quality, and at 12 bits instead of 16 bits - but it mostly just sounds really clean and bright and normal. When you play the sample back against the source material, a little bit of the high end is shaved off and the quality is a tad bit fuzzier than what you initially put into it, but not by a whole hell of a lot. The difference definitely sounds  pleasing, but I was even taken aback at how “normal” the sample sounded - none of that grit or fuzz (aliasing) that I expected and wanted. And it makes sense - I mean, the thing was originally sold as a drum sampler with “sounds of unsurpassed brightness and clarity” and was designed to sound as realistic as possible given the technology of the time.

But then I started messing with my sample and stumbled upon the magic key - the pitch-shifting. See, the SP-1200’s pitch shifting algorithm is weird. I don’t know enough about digital signal processing or sample playback to know why, but when you start changing the pitch of your sample - which is pretty much as simple as playing it back slower (lower) or faster (higher) like with a tape - the sound quality completely changes in a way that it doesn’t on other samplers. To defer to SP-1200 user Mr. Scruff, who said it better than anyone, “as a result of that you get this nice effect on the samples which sounds like someone's sprinkled stardust all over them.”

And now, my demonstration: 


SP-1200 basic sampling, pitch shifting, and internal buss filtering from Andrew Horton on Vimeo.


As demonstrated above, to fit just about any loop into the machine’s 2.5 second max sampling time per sample restriction, you end up having to sample at a higher speed and then pitch the material back down to the “right” pitch and tempo - which means you get that “magical stardust” effect. It sounds amazing, instantly nostalgic, technicolor, vintage. It can take a loop from an mp3 of a current ultra-slick top-40 song and make it sound like a dusty break from an old disco record. When you actually start sampling old vinyl records with it, cranking them them up to 45 to squeeze in your chipmunked sample and then pitching it back down, the effect is at least doubly enchanting. Suddenly old rap and french house records just make so much more visceral sense - music informed heavily by and made out of sampling records from the past, using a tool that makes the past sound even more fuzzed and nostalgic than it already does. It’s like aural lomography. It affects sound like instagram and hipstamatic filters affect even the lamest camphone pictures.



Drum hits - being individually way shorter than 2.5 seconds - don’t tend to need to be sampled and pitched down this way in order to fit, plus the fuzzy aliasing tends to take a bit of the thump and “knock” out of kicks and snares. So you find yourself sampling your melodic material/loops using the speed up/pitch down method, but then sampling drum hits in the more normal/clean way. So already, you find yourself working with two different distinct qualities/characters of sound within the machine - the magical fuzzed stardust and the thicker, cleaner thump. These two different flavors naturally sit together nicely in the mix without getting in each other’s way.

Now, here’s where it gets really interesting.

I’m going to show my cards a bit early here in order to provide context for the next chunk. The second part of the “SP-1200 magic sound” is a function of how the machine’s architecture essentially forces users to mix and “stage” (in the sense of placing in the soundstage) their sounds internally through a combination of the pitch shifting vs. not pitch shifting as described above and internally bussing the sounds through the different filters.

So, on to that second part.

The 1200 can play back eight sounds at a time - but it has eight internal channels, and only one sound can play on a channel at any given moment. If two sounds are assigned to the same channel, the second sound that plays will cut off the previous sound and steal the channel. So it’s up to you to delegate your samples to the different channels so that they can play without cutting each other off. But then, here’s where it gets extra gnarly - each pair of the eight channels runs through an internal analog filter. It looks something like this - 

- and you also saw it demonstrated in the second half of my video above. In the process of assigning out your different samples to the different channels, you’re also forced (blessed?) to choose a certain degree of filtering that will occur on each one. For example, you’ll find that it makes sense to assign “thumpier” sounds like kicks and bass notes to channels 1 and 2 so that all of their high end gets rolled off, while mid-heavy sounds like snares and hi-hats end up somewhere in the middle with some of the high end rolled off. Just by setting everything up to play back properly, you’re already doing a large amount of natural “mixing” inside the machine via the analog filters and different channels. Combined with the different sampling qualities mentioned above (straight or sped up/pitched back down), it’s like the music in the machine just “mixes itself” and comes out sounding right. Here’s another video I made to demonstrate this in action on a chopped up drum break. 


Beat chopping and internal filters on SP-1200 from Andrew Horton on Vimeo.



By the way, each of these internal channels goes directly to its own individual out on the back of the machine so you can run them into a larger mixer and track them individually, mix, effect, etc. But it’s really surprising how great everything gels together and how great it sounds coming out of that one mono output on the back after all of the aforementioned process.

Working on big, old gear like the SP-1200 is a revelation and a time machine to a different way of doing things. It’s slower and way more primitive than software. It’s also way more comfortable, hands-on, and yes, classy and luxurious. The combination of the sound, the workflow and the tactile experience - as well as the copious limitations of the machine down to the available sample time and quality - really transports the user. Records like Pete Rock’s SP-1200 classic “They reminisce over you” make sense on an entirely new level when you’ve truly felt and understood why he had to chop flip the sample the way he did, why it sounds exactly the way it does compared to the original record, why the drums do that little retrigger fill thing going into the chorus. You know exactly how he ended up there, in that sublime place, guided by the 1200’s maze of quirks and limitations, slow-cooking that beat to nostalgic, fuzzy perfection. Would that we all get the chance to meet our own magic machine and embark on our own individual quest through memory and time.

The Emu SP-1200 as Digital Retrofuture Heritage and TRUTH pt. 1: Biography

I wanted an Emu SP-1200 from 1998 until I got one about a month ago. In other words - for around 14 years or so. This is by far the longest period I’ve gone through between onset of desire for a piece of music equipment and eventually actually getting it.

Man, the wait was totally worth it. But not even for the most obvious or expected reasons. Instead of just getting a cool thing to make neat beats with, my 1200 accidentally took me on an ethnomusicographic journey inwards. It's less a beatbox and more a...tulpa facilitator? Digital memory totem machine? I seriously hate to contribute to the sheer volume of mystical cultural apocrypha that has accumulated around this machine, but I find myself with no choice. Yet, the real magic here is different, or operates on older rules than most of what you hear. I seek to write new myths.

The Funky Fax Machine is back.

  
The SP-1200 is one of the very first sampling drum machines. It came out in 1987, when I was seven years old. It samples at 12 bits, with a low sampling rate, for only 10 seconds of total sampling time - and yet even then in only 2.5 second (maximum) chunks at a time. Man, it sucks.

It’s also one of the most truly magical pieces of gear ever created - and not necessarily for the reasons that most people think and talk about. But we'll get to that.

The SP-1200 is best known as the classic Golden Age Hip Hop machine - and to a somewhat lesser extent, the classic French House Music machine. In other words the machine’s devotees tend to not people that tend to get all introspective and nerdy about which SSM filter chips were used in the internal mix buss, why we like flawed representation of the “real” in our art, why digital aliasing sounds instantly nostalgic and reminds us of a lost Arcadian vision of hazy cold war youth, and so on.

Nope, they’re way too busy just making totally dope beats on the thing for that. All that other mess is my territory, for better or worse.

Hey, you’re here too, right?

I caught the SP-1200 bug in 1998 via two albums that I had just gone crazy for - the Beastie Boys’ Hello Nasty and Daft Punk’s Homework. While those two albums in particular clued me in to the 1200’s existence and role in their sound, it was simultaneously the missing link in my music production education that suddenly made an entire world of sound make sense. See, I had just graduated from high school and obtained my first two pieces of music gear - a Roland Groovebox and accompanying sampler - but I didn’t understand why they didn’t sound like the records that had inspired me to buy them in the first place, and which I was attempting to emulate. They sounded too clean, too professional, too bright, too slick - nothing like Portishead’s Dummy, Tricky’s Maxinquaye, the Beasties’ Ill Communication, and a bunch of super embarrassing records that I won’t even mention here and will instead hoard for my forthcoming I Was A Teenage Trip Hop DJ article (seriously).

Through reading tons of interviews and talking to older DJ’s on internet mailing lists, I soon learned about 12-bit sampling and the role that the degraded sound quality of the SP-1200, Akai MPC-60, Sequential Circuits Studio 440, and other primitive samplers from the eighties played in creating “that sound” - darker, thicker, lower quality but all the more vibe-laden because of it. It was the hip hop analog to the Lou Barlow 4-track cassette recordings that I had gone crazy over the previous summer. Less “studio,” more bedroom. And, of course, totally impossible to achieve with my expensive, hi-tech Groovebox. It’s like I had bought one of those embarrassing eighties no-headstock future guitars to try to make a Jandek record.

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Malkmus.

Coincidentally, just a few months later Fatboy Slim would make a zillion-selling worldwide hit record with little more than a 12-bit sampler (the Akai S950) and an old Atari computer triggering it. 

 

“I like this cut a lot. Just straight up hip hop. Like a lot of our songs, it's arranged like a hardcore [punk] song. Mathematical. Intro - verse - chorus - verse - chorus - break - chorus - verse - chorus - end. Nice. The flute line is from the elusive Jeremy Steig. Off the SP1200 it sounds nice.” - Ad-Rock, The Sounds of Science liner notes for the Beastie Boys song “Sure Shot”

I think it was actually this moment - reading the liner notes to the Beastie Boys’ The Sounds of Science retrospective - that cemented the SP-1200 as “the one” for me. Ill Communication was my first real rap record, and I spent most of the nineties frustrated that I couldn’t find other rap records that sounded like it. To be fair, I was too busy buying Letters to Cleo albums (Kay Hanley is still hot) and didn’t know to seek out Pete Rock, Gang Starr, or A Tribe Called Quest because I was a terrified little white boy. I’d get into all of that stuff later on in a major way, but being able to finally conclusively put together the SP-1200 with “that Ill Communication sound” just made the lightbulb go off. Ka-pow! On the bucket list.

[On a side note, Ad-Rock would later go on to publicly disavow the SP-1200 in a paid promotional endorsement video for the popular computer software Reason. If you watch his eyes closely at 2:23, as the corporate training film muzak plays, you can actually see his soul wither and die. It can’t be a coincidence that the Beasties’ Reason-fueled To the 5 Boroughs was a completely irrelevant, mediocre, and just plain dull record.]

But it was ultimately Madlib’s album Quasimoto -The Unseen that truly cemented the 1200 in my heart. The entire record was made on the SP, and I went completely crazy over it in the summer of 2000. I’ve listened to that record more than many others, and I maintain that it’s the perfect SP-1200 record, showcasing everything that makes the machine great - the “crunch” that it imparts on drums, fuzzy lo-fi digital aliasing that creeps in on anything melodic, and the primitive way that its capacity and workflow pushes users to chop and flip samples into new combinations because it can barely do anything else, damn it, and you have no choice but to innovate.

In the intervening years between 1999 and present, my personal musical endeavors moved entirely away from sample-based music and anything resembling hip hop in favor of creating the ultimate voltage-controlled analog synth studio to end all voltage-controlled analog synth studios. But I never stopped carrying the torch for the SP-1200. Whenever I listened to those french house records, old rap records, more modern experimental uses of it - to say nothing of revisiting The Unseen at least once a year - I just wanted to check one out. I wanted to mess around with it, to see where the magic came from. I wanted to feel the sliders and buttons, hear the floppy disk drive whir. I wanted to hear that fuzz and crunch applied to whatever I decided to feed into it, just for the hell of it. But they’re hard to come by - I’d never even encountered one in person. And considering that it doesn’t even really fit into my all analog synth studio, and how hellaciously expensive they are, I could never justify actually buying one just to have that experience.  

And then one basically fell into my lap.

Onward and upward to Part 2