I’ve been a big admirer of Lusine’s adept sound palette, which smartly blends minimal, techno, and ambient techniques. That, in turn, represents to me some of the best stuff the US-based label Ghostly International is turning out. Liz McLean Knight sends us this video of a conversation she had with Lusine at Detroit’s Movement Festival in May, wandering onto the city’s People Mover. (You can join in a chorus of the Simpsons “Monorail” tune if you like.)
One aside from Lusine not in the above video: he talked about sticking with stock plug-ins for stability. What he didn’t say, but what you might infer, is that this may help him keep his sound focused rather than getting distracted by other capabilities. On the other hand, speaking of rules that are meant to be broken, he’s friends with Richard Devine, who has a VST folder that could put any of us to shame and bring any VST host to its knees.
You can bet CDM will check in with Lusine when the new album comes out – and we’re eager to hear just what this vocal/”pop” direction may actually sound like.
Miguel Isaza has created a must-read new blog for anyone interested in sound design, and much to our delight has put it on noisepages. He’s being incredibly prolific with posts, covering creative projects to get your ideas flowing, terrific overviews of leading people in the field with links to interviews and resources for learning about their work, and tons of links for learning your craft technologically and artistically.
Naturally, Pixar figures prominently, with some of the best sound design on the silver screen in recent years. I’m looking forward to finally seeing UP; Michael Coleman offers the video above. See Miguel’s site for more links and interviews and an overview of the all-star team that did sound for Pixar’s latest.
Thanks for this great resource, Miguel; I’ll certainly be reading daily.
Food for thought: if we didn’t still make “albums,” we’d never know when the album was done. Sure, the delivery mechanism that spawned the album may be disappearing – “LP’s” in particular are long gone. But perhaps, like so many ubiquitous technologies, the album was a fortuitous coincidence of physical practicality and human scale, happenstance generating some unit of creativity that just makes sense to artist and listener alike.
For Imogen Heap, the beloved artist who’s just finished her latest, it’s cause to literally dance and sing, accompanied by a generative Buddha Box. (We can dance around when we get the album in August.)
Jonathan Coulton in Dublin, with – code monkeys? Photo (CC) crazyjaf.
It’s not the only approach. Geek troubador Jonathan Coulton rose to Interweb fame partly through the creation of his Creative Commons-licensed Thing-a-Week podcast, which fired up his productivity as he released 52 (get it?) tracks in the space of a year. The episodic form helped him build a following and created a new unit of musical output.
From other parts of the online world, we get a little insight from each of these favorite artists. Imogen Heap videoblogs her latest album and talks promise at top, as found via the lads of SonicState.
Jonathan Coulton talks to one of my favorite non-music blogs, Lifehacker, about staying musically productive – and keeping other productivity away from his musical process. He talks about using Google apps and MobileMe as an intelligent cloud he can share with his assistant and PR person.
He also speaks to musical process:
It’s a combination of things. I generally write when I have guitar in my hand, but, capturing ideas is like … I do use the voice recorder app on my iPhone like crazy. I’ve learned that whenever you get one of those little song fragments, out of the ether, it’s like a dream—no matter how much you’re going to remember it, you’re going to forget it, in like five minutes. And I’ve lost too many of those, so wherever I am, I take my phone out, I pretend that I’m making a phone call, so that people don’t think I’m crazy, and I sing into the voice recorder, and then I have it available later on.
If I want to do a more involved quick capture of something, my MacBook has a piece of software on it called Ableton Live. It’s meant for loop-based composition, but it does recording as well. It’s very easy to capture an idea and sort of rough something out, even if you don’t have a bunch of gear handy. You can use the built-in microphone, use your keyboard as a MIDI keyboard. It’s a nice way to put together a quick demo, and capture some ideas about arrangements.
And, comfortingly, he doesn’t have enough time for music, either, and winding up wasting time on latency problems. (Jonathan, we feel your pain. And if you came to this site and didn’t find your answer, well… sorry. I need to put together a better reference for that stuff; open to suggestions!) He dives into finance, career goals, the game Rock Band and “accidental” discovery of music – all fantastic stuff. Thanks to Kevin Purdy for a great interview – who says you need music publications for great music magazines?
Want to reignite interest in DJs who actually use their hands and fingers to slice up and juggle sounds? A cavalcade of “laptopists” is the ticket. Suddenly, at least in some corners, people are again interested in turntablism. It’s nice to see how a controller can integrate digital loop and cue points with a setup that still focuses on scratching. And Stanton’s SCS.3d turns out to be scriptable in the open source DJ software Mixxx. As some live PA musicians revert to a “push play” mentality, DJs can keep it interesting.
Working with sound is, for many of us, the experience that attracted us to working with computers. Field recordings can be the best way to get close to sound – you’re attached to sounds you’ve found in the real world, you’ve experienced and collected, even if you transform them into something very different in production.
Nick Maxwell of the excellent Nick’s Tutorials Ableton Live production site shares some free explorations with us, complete with downloads you can reverse-engineer the instruments and play with the topics the video cover. You can also use these in your own work, royalty-free.
I really like some of the work here, from a kitchen knife to a found sound bass. Here’s Nick:
“Icy Shimmer” Effect
In this video, I use a few field recordings of a kitchen knife being unsheathed as well as a door closing as the layers for the eventual sound effect. Basic things like reversing the waveforms, filtering , panning, and retuning are employed. I also go beyond that into some more interesting stuff like using a grain delay, simple delay, and an autofilter to create a little effects section to further realize the sound.
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