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 Back To Ampersand Index PAGE 6 - The Bottom Layer - While the lower layer is fashioned with a unique instrumentation for each piece, there is still a strong unifying palette present throughout the record. It can be summed up as a mix of old and new technology, parts of both most likely being familiar and unfamiliar. Vintage sounds of the early 1970s such as Mellotrons and Minimoogs have seen a huge resurgence of popularity in the last 5 years, especially within the context of "indie" music. When deciding to include both within the palette of the record, I wanted to find a unique way of including them, outside of their newfound functionality in modern music. A device invented in the late 1950s called a Chamberlin was the technological predecessor to the Mellotron and featured much higher quality samples than the Mellotron (which a friend of mine calls "an orchestra inside a vacuum cleaner"). For those of you unfamiliar with either, they are essentially analog samplers. Musicians were recorded playing each note within the range of their respective instruments and then a piece of tape containing each note was connected to the corresponding key on a keyboard. Real Mellotrons (and especially Chamberlins) are extremely difficult to find, maintain, transport, or keep even remotely in tune (which led King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp to once say "Tuning a Mellotron doesn't," so when I speak of using them, I am in fact referring to the collection of samples that Mike Pinder of the Moody Blues made of many of the tape sets and sells (which my parents bought me for my 20th birthday) off of www.mellotron.com. Of the Mellotron sounds, it seems that only the Mellotron flutes (think The Beatles: "Strawberry Fields"), strings (think Genesis: "Watcher of the Skies" or countless other tunes), and choir (think Spock's Beard: "The Great Nothing") were used often, which left a number of lesser known sounds to pick from. The string quartet parts written for the record were created by playing the 1st and 2nd violin parts with the Chamberlin "3 Violins" sound, and the viola and cello parts through the Chamberlin "Cello" sound (with the exception of the strings used on Dead Pixels, which were created through the Mellotron "M300 Strings"). There is a choir sound used in many places created with the Mellotron "Boys Choir" doubling a Roland VP330. Also used were the Mellotron Guitar, Organ, Brass, MKII Sax, and the Chamberlin Tenor Sax, Oboe, Trumpet, Bass Clarinet, and Flute (only in the second half of November Frontlines), as well as Mellotron MKII "fills" used on The Tundra (fills from the "Cha Cha: Swinging Flutes") and November Frontlines (fills from the "Moving Bass: Cello and Violins"). All of the above sounds were selected as artistic choices, not as solutions to recreate their original counterparts, which would have served an entirely different emotional/sonic function if used. These samples create a very unnatural, two-dimensional, and intense sound that was intentionally sought, as was sought by most progressive rock bands of the 1970s as well as the people who use Mellotrons today. In addition to these 50 year old samples, modern orchestral sample collections were tapped as well. The harp, celesta, flute, and french horns came from these, for multiple reasons. The harp parts on the record would be physically impossible to play on a real harp, so that was an easy decision, and at this point, since the record was still just Paul and I, I wanted to keep it that way. Besides, given how buried some of these instruments would be in the final mix, I wouldn't have been able to justify getting good performances out of musicians, and I don't think in 90% of the instances anybody would have been able to tell the difference. Other utilized samples included two very dated/low quality piano sample libraries, a sampled ARP String Ensemble, and my first and last encounter with the Vako Orchestron, the grossly out of tune organ which actually opens up the record. I felt that I wanted the organ to be a vintage set of samples, rather than a newer and more pleasant sounding solution. While the out-of-tune character of a Mellotron has a very charming quality, the Orchestron created quite a number of problems for me when it began to make all the other instruments sound of out of tune in comparison, (and in an unfixable way, since the lower notes gradually became more and more sharp, and the higher notes gradually became more and more flat, similar to how a piano would sound if not tuned to a Railsback curve, which I can only assume was what actually happened at some point when designing the Orchestron). Through a number of makeshift solutions for each song, which were probably still less work than recreating all of the parts, I think it worked out OK though. Analog (or in this case, analog modelled) synthesis was another large piece of the sound. From the start of the record, the only true analog synthesizer I used, the Moog Etherwave Theremin, creates a notable presence. I began playing the theremin in the winter of 2005-2006. It was invented in 1919 by Lev Sergeivich Termen, making it the first electronic musical instrument in history. Vladimir Lenin even began taking lessons on the instrument and put it into production to make it the official instrument of the USSR, before it was later discovered that the instrument was too difficult for all but very few people to play (still to this day) outside of a 1950s sci-fi/horror novelty act. I fear that I am only good enough at it for the latter, although through the convenience of a studio environment (despite that the instrument seems impermeable to editing) I was able to select my inconsistent better takes for the record. The other analog sythesizers used were all software recreations, which in listening tests cannot be distinguished from their physical counterparts. These included the vastly trendy Minimoog as well as a few instances of a Prophet-5 and some obscure other things including some newly released modern synthesizers. Another very important part of the palette was the finely textured static, digital noise, and upper frequencies of certain synthesized sounds. With the frequencies usually occupied by cymbals now somewhat vacant, there was a lot more room for other instruments and textures to flourish and fill out the spectrum of the album. Around 2003, I became very interested in listening to the details that can arise in static (unrelated to Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or EVP, the practice of trying to hear voices of the dead or other paranormal sources in static). I became very interested in patterns that I could find in some of these new sounds I was creating, as well as identifiably not being able to discern any pattern whatsoever in others. This is a practice in which I engage myself while listening to all types of music, no matter how abstract they may or may not be. I call this "conscious apophenia." Web 2.0 sources define apophenia as, "the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data." I began creating many sounds and selecting my favorites to be incorporated into the record. The newly released iZotope Trash plugin made many of those sounds possible, simulating broken amplifiers and electronic circuits which could create repeatable (and therefore tweakable) results. In the few years surrounding the start of the record, I had heard a new technique that greatly intrigued me. Newer technology began to to allow one to change the duration of a sound without changing its pitch or abstract melodic contour. One way I've heard this method used (in particular, by Steve Reich) is to lengthen the speedy inflections of human speech, to about 4x longer than normal, which then exposes and highlights the pitches of the spoken words in a fashion more similar to singing. This essentially allows any recording of spoken word to be used in a more recognizably musical fashion.  February, 2005 - Programming background parts for Crayfish from sheet music, including two Quetico sheets (the two notebook pages on the bottom left). Back To Index |