Listening To: Hard NRG 8 : Various Artists (MOS)
Current Horn Factor :
Quote of The Day
MyBumMyChum please describe web 2.0 to me
MyBumMyChum in 2 sentences or less.
mynameizzzEarl you make all the content.
mynameizzzEarl they keep all the revenue.
If you can’t tell already (by the fact I haven’t posted anything for the last few weeks), BB07 apathy has well and truly set in for me now dear readers. I don’t know if I can see it through to the end of the series, and I definitely can’t be arsed blogging about it at the moment. Besides, this blog is about so much more than just Big Brother, isn’t it gang ? 
So instead, I’m going to tackle a completely different topic for today’s enthralling TROYL installment, namely that of “collecting”.
Whether it’s stamps, football cards (baseball cards for our seppo friends), comic books, those poxy porcelein figurines off the back of the TV guide, or explicit polaroid photographs of their numerous sexual encounters, most people have at one time or another, kept a ‘collection’ of some sort. I myself started out collecting Tintin comics when I was a young lad (still have the whole set somewhere in storage), before moving on to “Australian Plastics Modeller” magazine, and a brief flirtation with philatelly (although stamps are a lot less exciting than your average Tintin, which is why the latter was a ‘passing phase’ at best). I also went through a stage of collecting scars in the latter half of my “difficult teens” and early 20’s, but thankfully the appeal of that eventually wore off also.
Now, some would argue that these days what I mostly collect is pornography and parking tickets, but I beg to differ. “Collecting” would be far too methodical a phrase to describe the chaotic nature of my prOn stash, and the parking tickets are not something I purposefully amass, they simply come to me as a consequence of being too lazy to ride my pushbike to work, and choosing to drive instead. Rather, I like to think of myself as ‘collecting’ something far more ephemeral. This particular “pashion” (or compulsion ?) for ‘collecting’ has been with me since around the mid 1990’s, and is a direct consequence of my being a (bedroom/part-time/amateur) musician.
You see gang, the “thing” (or things) I spend a fair bit of time collecting these days are - SOUNDS !
Hold up, hold up ! Before you shut down your browser in disgust (”Sounds ? You purple-haze, hippy, motherf$ka !”), let me explain.
Back in the mid 90’s, when my friends and I first moved away from our guitars and drumkits to PC-based music production, the ‘tech of choice’ for the bedroom musician was something called “software trackers”. I can see a grin of fond memory spreading across some of the faces in the crowd (”FT2″ … “Pro Tracker” … “MMedit” …. ring a bell ?), but for the rest of you I’ll give you a very quick run-down. A software tracker (A.K.A “grid-based, sample pattern sequencing program”) was a way of arranging ultra-short snippets of sound (samples) into meaningful compositions. The upside being that the resulting music file would only save a copy of each “sample” once, along with a very simple record of the order (and pitch) at which all the sound snippets were strung together to make the actual song.
Think of it as a very early version of the humble MP3. Just like MP3’s, a lot of the resulting ‘compositions’ were nothing more than simple ‘rips’ of popular commercial tracks, streamlined for quick downloading and music piracy on the (pitifully slow … 3 hours to download a 300kb file @ 2400 baud) pre-internet data networks. However, just like ‘ground-breaking’ hip-hop and electronic musicians + DJ’s such as The Beastie Boys and The Prodigy could with their ‘hardware’ studio gear, some of us used the “tracker” software to produce original tunes. We’d grab samples from far and wide (a drumloop from an old disco record, a single note from a mate’s Juno synth, 5 seconds of dialogue from a 1970’s ‘Blaxploitation’ flick), and … viola … a cheesy 90’s ‘underground’ techno track to share with our mates in Helsinki, via the wonders of Fidonet.
Being in this ’scene’ for a few years, I think it’s inevitable that everyone starts to build up a ‘collection’ of their favourite samples (sounds), which they tend to use more than others. There’s a whole array of ‘classic’ samples from that era now, like the so-called “Amen Loop” (a drum loop used on a plethora of 90’s break-beat hits), various TB-303 acid-bleeps (coz not every uneployed teenager could afford a 303, even back then when they were still relatively cheap), and so on. Yeah, I’ve got them all, just like every other man and his dog. MY big thing though was dialogue samples. Too much time listening to obscure bands like Cabaret Voltaire, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult & Ministry, and before you knew it I was raiding the bottom shelves of Blockbuster for all the Z-Grade Roger Corman and horror movies with titles like “The Demon Bimbos from Planet X”, just to get my hands on the same original sample sources they used.
This was before the days of DVD as well kids - much harder to get decent sound reproduction when you’re recording at only 16-bits from a vintage early 80’s VHS player using a coax cable and your crappy 90’s (unshielded) soundcard. Just like other groups of “collectors”, my muso friends and I would trade samples between ourselves, try to ‘out-do’ eachother with particularly “good” examples of sampling, etc. To this day, I still remember feeling really cut when one particular mate of mine used a great sample I’d taken from “Return of the Living Dead”
(the line was “I love you, and you’ve got to let me eat your brain”)
in one of his online tracks, before I’d had a chance to use it in a song of my own. It was gold dammit (!) … one I’d sourced entirely myself (instead of being inspired by one of the aforementioned obscure bands). To add insult to injury, he’d only swapped me a bunch of crappy 8-bit 303 sequences for it 
I could go on and on about samples like a true obsessive, but as we all know - nothing stays the same, people and technology evolve. I got out of writing music for a few years, then started slowly moving back into the fold. Used samples & trackers again for a while initially, before discovering the newly evolving “modular studio software” technology epitomized (at the time) by “Buzz Composer”. No longer limited to simple samples, instead for a while there I was collecting “Buzz Instrument (and effect) Plugins” - which were basically little bits of independent software code that you could “plug-in” to the Buzz environment to generate sounds in REAL time (like little software versions of physical studio hardware). Buzz plugins are the pre-cursor to today’s VST plugins, basically. I’m not strictly collecting sounds (as such) at this point I guess, but sporadically gathering sound-producing tools.
Finally then we come to the present (or near present) day, when my 10+ year participation in that ‘orrible thing called the “workforce” finally starts to reap measurable ‘rewards’, and therefore my budget for spending on music production gear (not counting electric guitars, effects pedals and four-track recorders … I had THAT shit when I was a teen … over it hehe) actually becomes more than non-existent. Ergo, I finally start buying real music HARDWARE again, instead of just producing with software (and the occasional midi-controller keyboard, like the EVO mentioned in an earlier blog post). I buy my first ‘proper’ hardware synth on Ebay - a venerable 1980’s workhorse called the Korg-Poly 800. Shed-loads of tweakable parameters, lovely 80’s Depeche Mode synth-pop sonic possibilites. Unfortunately, the programming is a bitch (bugger all physical controls, just membrane buttons and lots of scroll menus). The synth comes with oodles of patch programming sheets the previous owner had squirelled obsessively from the ‘net … and
suddenly I’m back to collecting sounds again, but now they’re not samples, they’re rows of LFO settings, VCO routings, and DCO waveforms.
I get rid of the Korg after a few months of fiddling, but the ‘collecting’ bug has well and truly bitten by then. I go through a few bits of gear on ebay (the Korg, an Alesis-SR16 drum machine), lust over some brand new synths (and sounds) while I’m overseas, and eventually settle for a classic 90’s techno BEAST called the Roland Alpha Juno (gotta luuuuurve ebay !). Just like the guy who sold me the Korg, by this point I’m madly downloading patches and sysex editors for my ‘new’ pre-loved synth off the ‘net, the user groups, wherever I can find them. I’m making my own patches (the Juno being easier to program than the Korg), organizing the ones I’ve already got into “sets” … basically obsessing about all the phatt SOUNDS I can get out of this baby.
Some time after THAT, I get my Novation X-Station. Suffice to say, if i was drooling about the sonic possibilities of the Juno, I positively cream my jeans when I get my hands on the X. It’s not actually that easy to find patches/presets (i.e. sounds) for THIS baby on the ‘net, it’s only been out a few years after all … but believe me, I ALWAYS keep an eye out I’m so tragic now, I actually publically scoffed at the recent ‘new’ patch-set the manufacturers made available on their website (programmed by the keyboard player from Jamiroquoia supposedly) in one of the bigger user forums because “there aren’t enough NEW sounds in there - we’ve heard most of these patches before”.
And THAT, my friends, is my story. YOUR TURN NOW TO FESS UP - WHAT’S YOUR SECRET ‘COLLECTING’ SHAME ?
