5u Berlin school jam

[lvoemachine]

A tribute to the man. Sequenced modular and choir pads abound. Crank it on good speakers. All done in one take with no overdubs.
http://soundcloud.com/calebcondit/klaus

[ach_gott]

Fantastic!

[Reality Checkpoint]

Lovely!

More please.

[Thaknar]

love it!

[KnobHell]

Memorizing!

Great job

[JohnLRice]

Excellent!!

[odecahedron]

killing it

[Scooter McCrae]

That's pretty great -- and even more impressive that it was done "live"with no overdubs! Best of all, it's a tribute to THE MAN without being a direct rip-off of his music, which is the highest compliment I can pay to a tribute piece to someone with as recognizable a sound as Mr. Schulze.

Scooter McCrae

[booger]

nice!

[lvoemachine]

Thanks! Improvising is my musical forte, (ask me to play you a gm7sus and I'll just gulp really hard) so this whole process of setting up a couple beats, a sequence and an arpeggiator to work on top of really hits the spot. I'm not concerned typically with exact historical accuracy with this, just thought, "Man, the dude was spot on with that damn choir sound" and found a way to fit it into a track.

That's pretty great -- and even more impressive that it was done "live"with no overdubs! Best of all, it's a tribute to THE MAN without being a direct rip-off of his music, which is the highest compliment I can pay to a tribute piece to someone with as recognizable a sound as Mr. Schulze.

Scooter McCrae

[MR-808]

Very nice!

[suitandtieguy]

speaking as someone who's been ripping KS off for years (and will continue to do so for the rest of his life) i totally must repost this observation

Best of all, it's a tribute to THE MAN without being a direct rip-off of his music, which is the highest compliment I can pay

totally.

reminds me of how Groove Holmes recorded a track called "Ode to Larry Young" which pretty much sounded nothing like Larry Young. in the album notes he said that Larry Young was really unique and did his thing, so his tribute to Larry Young was to do his own thing!

[video][/video]

(btw, synth content: groove holmes is using a bass synth thing he installed himself on the hammond. it's a waveshaper-octave-filter thing called the Nova Bass)

[NYMo]

Nice sounds and seq Ivoemachine.
And the bonus was it was live !

Cheers

[suitandtieguy]

And the bonus was it was live!

he wouldn't do it any other way.

[Paddy's Kitchen]

exceptional, thanks for sharing

[Scooter McCrae]

You and I both, suitandtieguy. I never would have purchased my first synth (a Roland JX-3p) back in 1986 if it had not been for my accidentally having heard the music of Klaus Schulze for the first time. With no musical training whatsoever and not even full comprehension of what a synth was and how it worked, I simply knew I had to have one and figure it all out later. My stuff doesn't sound like Klaus' output at all, but he is always the inspiration behind everything I sit down to record. We're lucky to have someone who has created works that inspire us to our own continued creative expression. Keep up the great work, Klaus, wherever you are out on the internet.

Scooter McCrae

[Savage]

Really nice track, Ivoemachine! You caught the spirit of Klaus without cloning him, which is always cool with me, but doing so live just warms the cockles of my heart! I am a big fan of recording live, and I try to record as much of my compositions live as possible.

The first aspect of 'live' that appeals to me is the musical challenge of it. It's one thing to lay down track after overdubbed track and get Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound". But to play all the parts while one improvises makes it far more challenging. For me, if I'm not twiddling a knob with one of my hands, I want it making music in some fashion -- a bass line, a chord, a harmony line to the lead line... something! A lot of times, I'll delegate knob twiddling to a foot to free up a hand for chords or something, so sometimes I'll have both hands and both feet doing stuff. When you have the Machine doing a lot of stuff for you, you can get so much more by having your other limbs working away at what's going on. The Machine can make one lazy if one isn't careful!

The second aspect I like about 'live' is when you record a piece live, you have the knowledge that you can play it in a live performance setting if the chance arises, too! So many times musicians will pile on tracks in the studio, and then when they attempt to reproduce it in a performance, they can't do it because they're just not physically capable of doing so.

I like your piece a lot! Thank you for sharing!

[emdot_ambient]

On the OP.

I'd never think "Klaus" if I heard this without context, but there is a bit of his methodology here and it works.

You can add me to the Klaus inspired musicians list. I was a huge fan of Emerson and Wakeman until I heard Vangelis, and then TD. But it wasn't until I finally broke down and bought Mirage from the import section of my local record store (knew nothing of him at the time, had never heard a track by him)...it wasn't until that moment that I knew i had to start playing.

And playing live is why I completely stopped composing on VSTs and started my seemingly never-to-be-completed modular synth DIY projects. I've not much to show for the last few years of slow labor other than a pile of PCBs and a monster of a first project that is becoming my Great White Whale...but i can't get back into softsynths. I miss tactile connectivity to my music. I think I did some great tracks on software, but the process left me cold.

So I started buying Klaus's Vie Electronique series of CDs, listening to them endlessly. Many of the early recordings in that series are from live performances. I'm fascinated not just with what he played, but mostly HOW he played it live. Yes, he used some pre-recorded tracks (sound FX mostly), but listening to these recordings you can really hear how he managed to take control of his vast live rig, transforming it into a performance instrument. His transitions were pretty fucking amazing. Even the few instances where his performance control falls apart and the tracks go to hell for a while are instructive: listen to how he recovers. Good stuff!

Anyway, I applaud your effort. There were some pretty clever transitions in this track as well.

[emdot_ambient]

The Machine can make one lazy if one isn't careful!

Exactly what I was thinking earlier today. I was watching a utube of a guy jamming with a Cyrklon sequencer and an Octatrack, and the song was pretty frigging amazing. Only something was missing: the guy was mostly just punching buttons and grooving to the beat. There was no live human element. And when the guy would go and actually play his synth live...what he added was pretty much crap (or at the very least, total meh). Because the guy obviously had been spending all his time feeding The Machine and no time being the master of The Machine.

That's my biggest critique of the DJ culture as well. So much of what gets played would be really awesome if there was just a touch of intelligent human imagination added to it. But as soon as someone reaches to play a keyboard you pretty much only get 4-note patterns that just repeat over and over. Lazy. Unimaginative.

And I'm not one to like synth wanking solos (anymore, I lost that love in about 1979). But there are rhythmic and melodic phrases that a human can play that don't sound robotic or lobotomized. And yet it seems to be something that few people even consider anymore. The Machine has made them "fat and lazy" (SNL reference).

IMHO, anyway. YMMV.

[Scooter McCrae]

emdot, I totally agree with what you say about listening to all the incredible backlog of live Schulze recordings that have been released as part of the La Vie Electronique series. The most mind-boggling thing to me is how much amazing music was simply never released until the limited edition box sets (most of which has become the basis for these new releases). So much of my favorite stuff has risen from these previously unreleased recordings, so the experience of listening to this stuff over the years has been nothing short of revelatory.

Schulze's mastery of his machines in a live situation is unparalleled in my opinion, especially when comparing his one-man-showmanship to (just as an example) Tangerine Dream. No offense on TD, but I'm amazed that with three times as many people in their line-up, their music is often nowhere near as complex or interesting (not to bad mouth them, as I do like Tangerine Dream) as what he was able to generate on his own.

But most importantly with what you said, I absolutely agree that hearing the rare mistake not only humanizes the whole process of what Schulze is doing, but makes it all the more impressive that he keeps going and fixes the mistake in real time as the performance continues. It's hard to believe that so much amazing material had not been released before because, one assumes, of small technical errors in them, leaving us bereft of so much great music all these years -- a lot of stuff that, frankly, is more interesting and arresting than many of his official releases that seem a lot more "conservative" in comparison.

Anyway, so glad to see so much passion for music being discussed in this thread. I think I need to sit down and work on some Berlin-school sequencing this coming weekend to focus the fire I feel building up in my brain from reading all these great comments.

Scooter McCrae

[lvoemachine]

I think what happens sometimes, is that artists realize that working with others on content can sometimes hold back on their specific quest for X sound/vision. My thing is that I'm professionally a photographer and used to being the boss and my process is a big reason why people hire me. I make people chill out and get real infront of the scary camera and make them look cool. When it comes to music, I've had some great experiences with people playing specific things but when it comes to my vision, very few people are even remotely in the same place musically who live remotely close to me, so I'm making it all on my own.

And yeah, this track is more about Klaus Shulze's process. And use of the choir sound . It's about doing a take and getting it right on keyboards. Hell, i could have sequenced the whole damn thing in Ableton and sent it to all those boards and my modular but I wanted to play as much as possible. And yeah, there was a preset sequence and arpeggiator going, but both of those sounds were adjusted as I went along to make it what it was. Because honestly, I come from a background where I played with an acoustic guitar and played my "songs", and before that it was trumpet in a jazz band. You didn't learn songs to sequence them in a machine and push a few buttons to get chicks to sleep with you. You learned an instrument because you loved music. That was why I did it. And that continues now.

Anyway, I'm so glad you all like this and it's inspiring conversation. I've gotten a lot from the conversations here on muffs and I'm glad to be part of this. It's not just gear sluttery around here but also people considering interfaces and how that helps to ultimately create good music.

[suitandtieguy]

Exactly what I was thinking earlier today. I was watching a utube of a guy jamming with a Cyrklon sequencer and an Octatrack, and the song was pretty frigging amazing. Only something was missing: the guy was mostly just punching buttons and grooving to the beat. There was no live human element. And when the guy would go and actually play his synth live...what he added was pretty much crap (or at the very least, total meh). Because the guy obviously had been spending all his time feeding The Machine and no time being the master of The Machine.

considering i've spent 2 days trying to get a good take of a live chicago acid house style cover of "love on a real train" which _mainly_ consists of me turning knobs and hitting buttons i must take issue with the idea that a performance like this lacks "live human element."

if i was completely inside of two mega-boxes like the octatrack and the cirklon, yeah, that could be boring.

however when you're controlling 3 voices on a modular synth, 3 drum machines, x0xb0x, JP-8000 RPS sequence, and 3 2-note chords fed into an EDP from a Korg Z1, things get much more difficult because of the variety of UIs and the space you have to cover just to move from one voice to another.

[emdot_ambient]

Suit, don't get me wrong. It sounds like what you're doing is very different from what I was ranting about. The dude in the video spent much of his time just bopping to the groove and drinking a soda. His interaction was not with the instruments, but with the mix and what patterns were playing. And though that can be an artistic activity--and his mix did sound wonderful--there was no chance for the musical tracks to become responsive to what else was going on. They could not change. They could not refer to or contrast with each other in real time. They could simply be muted or activated, made louder or softer.

I mean, I love Chris Franke's sequencer work. He made it breathe. He made it respond to what else was happening. I love Schulze's sequencer work as well. So I'm not talking about all that. I'm talking about the mentality of "Well, this groove's going pretty good. That's all that needs done for now, so I'll dance to it a bit. OK, time to throw in a little change up, drop this, add that...new groove established, rinse and repeat." The laziness part comes with thinking that once you've got a good beat and some percussive synth patterns running with a bass line, that's all it can/should be. That's loop thinking and it is very lazy.

What I want to hear and usually don't, is someone playing live over top all that, grabbing phrases on the fly from the various tracks and mixing them together, or playing counterpoint to them. Call and response kind of thing: intuitive, creative, live playing.

[suitandtieguy]

i figured the video you were talking about wasn't nearly as involved as what i was doing last night hahaha.

[bananeurysm]

Nice track Ivoemachine! What is supplying the choral pads? (Or did I miss that...)