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Let’s keep on with the music posts, but make a sharp left hand turn: Howard Jones
I don’t want to overstate the case — I mean he’s not the Art of Noise, or Falco :) — but I always thought highly of him. Loved New Song, liked many of the others. Certainly enough, at least, that I paid attention to an early Keyboard Magazine interview, where he mentioned a practice that struck and stuck with me. He described some program or other mechanism he had that allowed him to color, thicken, and “humanize” his sounds with random subsonic elements that duplicated the main tone at varying detuned pitches.
Now I’m sure that these days you can download some ungodly number of cubase/protools/whatever plugins that accomplish this sort of thing a thousand different ways in ten thousand flavors — and don’t get me wrong, that’s awesome. But I was more taken by — well I don’t know if philosophy, or maybe just aesthetic goal is proper — the very idea of using technology to its fullest, while at the same time subverting it, in the margins where the technology’s imperfections meet our own, in order to make it our own and make it real. Very attractive to a pre-teen hacker wannabe in the process of discovering his real muse. (And not a terribly inaccurate way of describing what I do now at the day job…)
But all that’s sort of a tangent. OK, so Sunday night, Kate and Karsten dropped by to help me smash a champaign bottle across the annual turning of my odometer. Now you’ll have to forgive the fragmented nature of the files my head kept from the night — the drives definitely crashed. Anyway, at some point I introduced them to my rig (and no, that’s not a euphemism), and I seem to remember Kate and I discussing the pros and cons of a mostly outboard setup (eg, sythns, drum machines, effects, etc, all in separate boxes running through a mixer) vs an all-digital/all-virtual system recording inside a studio software suite and/or a program like GarageBand.
And I’m pretty sure I was too wasted to have said anything intelligible about the subject, so let me try again here.
OK, well the thing is first of all I don’t consider it either-or; my boxen fed into a Cakewalk studio, where I would then mix in with digital sounds & samples on the pc. Of course, available quality on the pc side has probably gone up exponentially since then. Knowing this, if forced to choose either/or then I would choose the all virtual path in a second. My setup actually did evolve from such a virtual setup — but Cakewalk for DOS on a 386 only gets you so far, even when you smpte sync to a four track for the live sounds. So I started collecting boxen :)
But by the time I got to a place where I had a reasonable access to both paths — well I’d spent a lot of time sculpting sounds with the tech I had. And one of the things that I came to believe is that every physical thing which touches your sound — changes it. Every wire, chip, jack, cable, diode… every single thing changes the sound, in the unique, if maybe or almost imperceptible way that a unique object can and must.
Two synths of the same make and model made to the same specifications playing the same note programmed to the exact same settings will not sound the same. Maybe not so much that you can hear it, but absolutely enough that when they combine, they make a thicker, more imperfect sound than merely playing simultaneous digital copies of the same .wav from the same source.
In the end I found that most music produced within and from a single homogeneous environment sounded to me like it had a certain “sameness” to it. Almost like a technical frame I could always see wrapped around the sound. Which is very good, for many purposes. But it’s not punk rock. I wanted to try and punch through the walls of those frames. More real world components equals more chaos, more entropy — more noise, and more humanity — to channel back into the sound. More imperfection.
Then again, the computers really are much more powerful now..
Well the most important thing I think is that I got all the way through the Howard Jones post without saying anything about “No One Is To Blame”. I suppose that’s probably a good thing…
