Back To Ampersand Index PAGE 3 - The Sounds - The first time Paul and I listened to the record upstairs on his stereo, his dog Rocky came into the room wagging his tail and sat down in front of the speakers. Rocky usually leaves the room whenever music is playing, but I started to wonder if it was because this record has relatively so few frequencies in the extreme top end of the spectrum. It seemed fitting within the palette of other sounds from the 1970s to leave a more natural top end, compared with most records made from the 1980s onward, which have continually been getting brighter. In the nature of breaking my own rules for this project, I decided to leave other things about the record sounding very digital. Being born in 1984, I've grown up within a generation of audio engineers and musicians who seemingly all revere anything to do with "analog." Within conversation with many older audio engineers though, I've found that some of the people making these classic "analog" sounding recordings in the 60s and 70s didn't necessarily even like those sounds, they were simply the only ones available with the technology at the time. I don't know if kids 40 years from now will be crazy about the sounds of records today, but in using a lot of newly released technology, including low quality digital processing, and not trying to hide artifacts of those sounds that most people would, I can only assume the record sounds appropriate for its historical situation. I think that one the most easily accessible sources of inspiration today is simply the massive arsenal of tools now easily available to the general public. This record was started in Cakewalk SONAR 1.3, and was worked on in each version of the software until being completed in version 6. I have yet to see another digital audio workstation with the features and functionality of SONAR. Throughout the making of this record, I've implemented a lot of these new technologies into my method of working and now consider the software to be one of my "instruments." Now that I've established my own unique way of making records with these tools, I would find it difficult to make this type of record without them, the same way a 6 string bassist forced to play a 4 string bass might find it severely inhibiting to their signature style. Also, no real amplifiers or outboard gear were used in making this recording, with the exception of a Boss GT-6 on the guitar solos. In April of 2005, I bought two Universal Audio UAD DSP cards, which are these PCI cards for your computer that run a set of audio effects plugins on the cards so that your computer's processor doesn't have to. They have a huge selection of plugins that are all modelled very closely after real devices; mostly vintage, sought-after, extremely expensive rackmount units that all sound unbelievably good in their digital incarnations. While the effects probably sound the "best" by most people's standards when used in minimal doses for tweaking, I wanted to finally make a record where I got to crank up the sounds so far that they were being used as an effect in themselves. There are probably almost a hundred of these effects being used in different ways across the entire record at any single given point in time, and the sound of the record is largely achieved through those Universal Audio UAD-1 cards. The other really cool company, which is doing a kind of completely opposite approach to the plugin market is iZotope, which made both the Ozone plugin and the Trash plugin. Both were used, but Trash in particular was a plugin that I fell in love with the first time I heard it. It's a guitar amp simulator, but it has an emphasis on broken amplifiers and really messed up sounds. So many of the signature broken distortion and static sounds from the record were done with iZotope Trash. It's an amazing piece of gear to work with in an abstract way, as I did with most of the elements of this record. It seemed like whatever I'd do with it, it would come out sounding great, which let me do a lot of successful (and therefore inspiring and invigorating) experimentation. If not for these products and companies, financially deprived musicians such as myself would never be able to take part in what was previously reserved for artists with major record label budgets backing them, not to mention be able to create sounds which were previously unavailable to ANYBODY. In addition to those products, Paul and I both have very large collections of freeware VST plugins that we've found on the internet. A few of the other elements from the palette (like the broken sounding synth on The Tundra and &hearts) were selected from amongst these. A lot of them are made by kids from all over the world who just learned a little C++, a lot of them crash your computer when opened, and a lot of them sounded so terrible that they were just great. There are so many freeware plugins out there that on recent projects, it's almost been like picking a lottery ball to decide which ones I would try to implement into the palette. I'm still using the same computer I started the record on in 2002, a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 that still only has the original 500 mb of RAM it came with, and it's never given me a single problem. Obviously, no computer on the consumer market could run the hundreds of soft synths, samplers, and effects of this album in real time, (not even a fourth of them), so the record was done in phases. 1. Starting in late autumn of 2002: Writing, structuring the compositions, recording, and programming each track. 2. Starting in early 2005: With the basic compositions and instruments in place, writing things to fill in the holes and beginning to universalize the instrumentation and ideas. 3. Starting in late spring of 2006: Mixing tracks to buses, which involved a lot of creative deviations from what I was supposed to be doing, utilizing any creative idea that came to mind. 4. Starting in early autumn of 2006: Mixing buses to a stereo mix, which also involved a lot of last minute creative deviation, including recording guitar parts the week before Mastering. 5. Starting in December of 2006: Mastering of the stereo mix by John Buehler and sequencing the tracks. Paul and I have often found that many of the records we admire the most have the ability to remove one's mind from the fetters of regular, predefined, concrete thought. This experience seems to manifest itself for many people as one of sleepiness, when the mind begins to wander of its own accord, so I usually take it as a compliment when people say this record makes them feel drowsy and they don't know why (although I'll admit, it does seem counterintuitive that such bombastic sounds should make one sleepy). The record is vastly about dichotomies consisting of elements which are not neccessarily polar opposites of each other, but are simply unrelated things being used for opposite functions. My focus was also greatly on the way in which these things are bound to eachother within the dichotomy. While I will not attempt to demote most of these relationships to literary explanations, I will mention a few of the more objective and obvious examples when they arise. NEXT PAGE Back To Index