Playing favourites: Kenji Takimi. Ask around in Japan about house and disco, and you won't get too far without the name Kenji Takimi coming up.
There are a number of reasons for this: His label, Crue-L Records, has been at the forefront of alternative Japanese music since the early '90s, presenting acts like Cornelius and Buffalo Daughter alongside work from dance favourites Theo Parrish and DJ Harvey. The label has also been home to his own music: Takimi's projects include Crue-l Grand Orchestra, Luger-Ego and Being Borings, the latter of which was responsible for one of last year's under-the-radar gems in Love House of Love. (You can hear some of it on his label's recent collection, Crue-L Café.) DJing, though, might just be Takimi's first love. His career has taken him around the world to festivals like Electric Elephant and putting together celebrated guest mixes on Beats In Space. Alien Sex FiendIgnore the Machine (Special Electrode Mix) 1985 If I had to choose one New Wave record, it would be this one.
Yeah. Yeah. The esoteric art of great sound. Most of us understand that great sound is a pillar of an epic night's raving to electronic music: power, volume and clarity arguably matter more than in any other genre you could name.
Few of us, though, know how a good sound system actually works. That's understandable. Audio nerds tend to talk about their craft using impenetrable industry-specific jargon. Sound is obviously a science. Getting a basic handle on what makes for good or bad systems, however, isn't hard. Loudspeakers seem like a logical place to start. "Typically when you feed too much power into a loudspeaker system then it no longer behaves in a linear manner. When speakers start to behave in a non-linear manner—"distort" to you and me—the drivers of the speaker start to add their own, often unpleasant frequencies to the overall sound. In order to cover the entire frequency range of music smoothly, speaker manufacturers have to use different materials for each driver.
Bass / House. "Oh No Not Another Dubstep DJ Playing House Music.
" That was how Rob Ellis, better known as pioneering dubstep DJ Pinch, titled a recent free-for-download mix promoting his Fabriclive CD. That's right: in 2012, a dubstep DJ playing house music is no longer novel. It's something that requires a caveat. Though it used to feel like it was in a completely different universe, dubstep has never really been "on its own" for its decade-long history. Growing out of garage and initially intertwined with grime, even as the genre matured into an identifiable sound circa 2005-2006, producers like Martyn and Scuba were injecting tunes with techno influences.
A quick survey of Bristol's ever-fertile music scene tells you all you need to know. Though it might have seemed brand new to his audiences when he started playing slower material in 2010, house and techno was something Pinch had been following for over a decade. Understanding reverb. Reverb (short for reverberation), firmly resides within the A-list of effects, as it's a go-to treatment for almost all track types within any mix.
Whether you're looking to enhance dry vocals with a specific spatial type, bring drama to searing lead lines, or simply glue your mix together with a treatment which can be shared by a number of sounds within a mix, we all know that tracks mixed without reverb can sound dull and lifeless. But how much do you know about reverb and the parameters which tend to crop up within most reverb plug-ins?
And to what extent can reverb be enhanced by other plug-ins—EQ, filtering, gating, phasing—to help you create treatments which are completely suited to your tracks, rather than relying on a preset, in the hope you'll get what you need? Broadly speaking, two types of reverb plug-in are available—convolution reverbs and artificial ones. Convolution reverbs use "samples" of real spaces to apply reverb to a sound. This is also true for reverb. 1.
Monolake: Sound scientist. There is a funny set of photos of Robert Henke.
Understanding chords. It might sound like a broad term but the subject producers study as they work on their tracks and look to make mixes sound better could be called "music technology.
" Funnily enough, often it's the second of those two words we tend to focus on, always looking to improve the technical and technological parts of our productions with new techniques, plug-ins and tricks. With enough patience and care, it's possible to reach the summits of our technological goals, with mixes which burst out of speakers supported by comprehensive control over the tools within our chosen DAW. However, sooner or later, the thing which is likely to hold us back is that we haven't spent enough time learning and continuing our research into the first of those two words: music. Firstly, let's look at notes and how harmony is supported by science and, in fact, the very substance of synthesizers themselves.