Loops or No Loops with that EDM (part 1)

Hate starting with an unattributed quote, but it's so good, I can't let it pass.  Some designer in some documentary I watched once said, he didn't really know what he had designed until years after the fact.  Because, he explained, for the first year a woman owns one of my garments, she wears it the way she thinks it should be worn, or the way she believes I think it should be worn.  It's only after it's been in her closet a year that she begins to wear it the way she wants to, and it's only then, when I see it on the street, that I really know what I have designed, when my customer stops caring what I think.

I don't design clothes, but this characteristic he's talking about is pervasive when engaging in any creative endeavor and I think it is closely related to the 10,000 hour rule.  I think it's especially true when it comes to new technology for creativity.

I first opened the music making program Garageband in 2005.  I hadn't really made any music in about 7 years, when the PC running my midi system died.  I had purchased a guitar in 2001, not with the idea of making music, but with the idea of learning how to play guitar.  I practiced on and off, leaning scales and chords, not songs.

I opened Garageband because I needed music for a video.  Once again, video was driving me to make music.  I was curious to try Garageband, because I knew that even non musical people could make "original" music with it, and I was curious to see how that worked.

I had seen other programs for non musical people to make music with, but they were all too limited, in the sense that, everything sounded like it came out of that program, not like it came out of the "composer".  I could quickly see how, in Garageband, you could make music with no skills at all, and how you could make something really original if you made unusual choices (say, mixing a classic rock acoustic guitar riff with a reggae drum pattern and a jazz organ loop).

At the time, I'd recently launched a business designing iPod products, but before that I'd really been concentrating on painting and photography.  I had no plans to start making music as my primary means of creative expression, but I really liked Garageband and wanted to delve deeper into it, to see how good it could be, using it as it was designed to be used by non musicians.

I built a jazz track, using jazz and "non" jazz elements.  Taking midi loops designed for one instrument, and assigning them to a different one.  Using the same midi loop between two different instruments to have them "talk" to each other.  As I built more tracks, my imaginary "band" started to take shape, the leader played the sax, the talented drummer played all styles (jazz, rock, electronica, reggae, you name it).  The bass player played all three types of bass, acoustic floor, electric, and keyboard.  And the guitarist could also double on the keys when needed.  I knew where each member of the "band" would stand during their shows and placed them there in the mix when making "my" songs.

Funny to call these "my" songs, since I didn't write a single phrase of music for them.  Thought I transposed and rejiggered some of the loops into new musical phrases, mostly they were melodies written by others, but in my songs, they became the leaping off point for some "improvisational" jams my virtual band performed.

I have a friend who really likes jazz, so I decided, at some point, I would do an entire album of these loop based jazz songs for him as a Christmas present.  A one of a kind CD that he would have the only copy of, in the world.  If Garageband was the designer's garment in my closet, the jazz album was my first 6 months with it.  I was trying to use the program to the very limit of how I thought it was intended to be used.

The next 6 months saw me realize a dream I'd long had of doing a Christmas album that blended Rock and Electronic Dance Music.  I love non-traditional Christmas albums and have a little treasure trove of them.

Now I felt like I was going to take Garageband a little bit outside of it's intended use.  Employing the same methods I'd used making the Jazz album, I began to build my Christmas tunes.  Of course, I couldn't use the musical loops in Garageband this time, because I needed traditional Christmas tunes.  However, once I had the main melodies in midi form, I constructed the tracks exactly the same way I'd constructed the Jazz tracks, but leaned the style towards the rock/EDM hybrid I was aiming for.  I was still using Garageband's loops for drums, though I had also found some additional sources of drum loops, which I was using as well.  When I finished the Christmas album, I felt I had really used Garageband up to and past the point of its intended use.  And that was important.

Because, along the way, painting and photography had become impossible to pursue, owing to the state of my apartment at the time.  The business designing iPod products had reached a successful conclusion.  And I had decided to try devoting all my free time to the making of music.  I could see the possibility of doing original music in Garageband, and getting very good results, but I had to exhaust the program first.  I had to use it to it's very limits before I could begin to go beyond its scope, which was necessary if I was to create some truly original music.  Almost more importantly, this time, video would not be driving me to make music.  It would exist for itself, a departure for me, a scary one.

To be continued.

Dave Smith and Roland are Geniuses

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm going to midi convert my Korg Monotribe.  Anyone who's not a musician probably just though, "what the hell does that mean"?  The Monotribe is this really cool little analog synthesizer from Korg, whose main drawback is a tiny keyboard that is all but unplayable by adult fingers.  Fortunately, the good people at Korg put a midi interface on the circuit board of the Monotribe, which allows you to modify the unit and connect a full sized keyboard, making the whole instrument much more useful.

It still doesn't get to the question of what mid is though.  Using computer terms, midi is both hardware and software that allows musical devices to communicate with one another.  The name comes from Musical Information Digital Interface.  What makes it so useful is the amount of event based data that midi can transmit, almost instantly.  And, although it was developed for musical instruments, it can be used to control any time based equipment, even old analog devices.

For example, years ago, if you went to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, mid day on a Tuesday and wanted to hear the organ, they would play you a little tape of the organ being played.  It did not convey the scale of the instrument at all, only a vague approximation.  Now, however, the organ is fitted with a midi controller, so they can record not the sound, but the performance data of any one who comes in a plays the instrument, and then they can play back that performance and the actual organ creates the sounds.  With your eyes closed, you would not be able to tell if a human or the computer was playing the instrument.  That's a big improvement over a silly tape recording.

If you ever saw the original production of Les Miserables, with that giant spinning platter of a stage where the action occurred, believe it or not, midi was controlling that platter.  Midi is great for providing time based event data with extreme precision.  If you've ever been on a motion ride at an amusement park, they are also controlled by midi.  Some have speculated that one day it will be revealed that the space shuttle was midi controlled (but don't hold your breath on that one).

Of course, people who played computer games in the 90s have a very bad feeling about midi, perhaps with good reason.  A lot of bad video game sound tracks in the 90s relied on midi and the default musical instruments that shipped with the computer or sound card.  I have heard some of these and they leave a lot to be desired.  However, midi is unfairly blamed as the culprit.  I would say the fault lies more with poor orchestrations and poor instrument quality on the sound cards of the day.  The beauty of the midi interface is you can apply the performance data to any instrument, a good one or a bad one, the instrument it was intended for or a different one.

Midi was developed jointly by synthesizer engineer Dave Smith and the engineers at Roland  Musical Instrument corporation in Japan.  There had been precursors to midi, which allowed data to be transfered between musical devices, but there were different standards and the amount of data was limited.  The development of midi standardized the information so the equipment of different companies could be connected together.  It also expanded the amount of event/performance data that could be captured.  Now the system could not only request a Middle C note, but it could specify how loud that note should be, and request it to come from any number of available channels (different devices or instruments).  Almost overnight musicians gained the ability to connect a bunch of electronic instruments together for a live performance controlled by a computer, which allowed previously impossible compositions to be realized.

As I mentioned before, back in the 90s I had a robust midi setup running out of my desktop computer.  The sequencer (which typically manages and deploys midi data) controlled three different devices I had, two synthesizers and a Rompler module that played sounds sampled from real instruments with often surprising realism.  I could compose in the computer by "writing" out notes, or I could input the notes by playing them on a keyboard.  The sequencer could control all three devices simultaneously, allowing me to make rich music without playing a single note.

At the time even experts agreed it was a bad idea to run music through your computer.  The power supplies and boards inside were very "dirty" and would create a lot of audio noise.  Yet with midi, I could produce super clean sound, because the computer was only controlling the data, not the actual audio.  I  never really understood how this was possible, why the noise inside the computer didn't infect the instruments connected to it.  Until I started to learn how to modify my modify my Monotribe for midi.

One of the items you need to perform this mod correctly is an "optocoupler", which I had never heard of, but understood instantly, it uses LED light to transmit data, and it's part of the original design of midi, as I understand it.  Completely brilliant.  Using light isn't just fast, but it also isolates the devices from each other, to avoid contamination of noise, hum even dangerous spikes that can damage expensive musical gear.  This is why my post has the title it has, because the cleaver use of the optocoupler is one of the key elements that makes midi as good as it is, and less talented engineers would have skimped or skipped that crucial step.

I should tell you, I don't use wikipedia to write these things, so the facts I get wrong are facts that are wrong in my head.  If I remember where it was I picked up one of these tidbits, I'll tell you, but for goodness sakes, don't assume any "facts" in these posts are actually true.  My version of other people's lives may be wildly inaccurate, but generally, I'm here to tell a story or make an observation based on that understanding (true or not), and hopefully the veracity doesn't really alter the observation all that much.  The previous story may not be true at all, I haven't verified it, not because I'm too lazy, but mostly because I'm too busy at the moment.  Obviously, if large portions are untrue, it kind of blows the whole thing out of the water. Apologies if that is the case.