pkennethk's forum posts 2051

I'll keep you guessing, but I think I'll stick around here even after that. ;)

We both know you must complete your quest to top kkolar before you ghost. You will deny that this is something you aim for... but none of us will believe you. ;)

Very Nice!

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Holtzman_Effect

No way! I got the idea from the Haus Effect. It's a quasi-pun. Thank you both!

How much longer 'til you leave us for the world of neuroscience research?

https://djmag.com/news/ableton-announces-live-11-release-date

The few Ableton employees I've know are great people. Ableton is a small, private company intent on staying private and continuing to build a great community around Live, Push, and Max. I don't know any of the Image Line, Bitwig, Renoise, or Reaper people, but I'm sure much of the same is true for them, to some extent, too.

If you like the workflow Ableton affords, I can whole-heartedly recommend their stuff from a community/user support and longterm product health standpoint. If there is an problem with a Live release, Ableton treats it like the existential threat that it is, and they move on it while communicating progress to their users. I can't say the same for every DAW on the market.

+2 on the name... but so SO close to a great Dune reference.

Which name? Electronic State of Mind or The Holtz Effect? And how is it close to a Dune reference (I don’t know Dune very well)?

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Holtzman_Effect

Music Theory is necessary in my opinion, I wake up every morning (6:00 or 7:00 A.M. Mon-Fri) and study/practice until Noon, due to this I've noticed great improvement in my playing, speed, and soloing.

Some of the best players studied Music Theory too. People like Randy Rhoads, Cliff Burton, Richie Blackmore, and John Petrucci.

So the way I see it: Yes, time and study is necessary, but only if you want to be a good musician.

+1 to this disciplined approach.

nice name.... its a crime to throw out old 70s and 80s broadcast gear... shame, shame, ding ding ding

+2 on the name... but so SO close to a great Dune reference.

I hope you'll be raising these very affordable rates once you've got a fresh CV of projects?

“I'll have to check out Sisters. “

It’s on HboMax currently- just added it to my list too

Just finished Sisters this AM. Loved it. A thoroughly-modern early-'70s Hitchcock homage with no '60s hangover. Cheers to Jim for the recommendation.

I think I'm going to get reductive and make analogy... is it necessary for a driver to know how cars work? No...unless hes a racecar driver. Then he might need to be Shelby. At least understanding the basics and the terminology will be mprove his interactions with the pit crew even if his driving remains intuitive.

Isn't this the lesson Tom Cruise learns in Days of Thunder?

So let me boil this down, you're proposing Lizzo is not the new Debussy?

I placed her shoulder-to-shoulder with Debussy in my rambling analogy. I did not hesitate, nor did I flinch. :)

https://media.giphy.com/media/IzinVgJa1SITQ44YNS/giphy.gif

Also while looking this morning I saw where the Fender/Squier Cyclones have a Mustang body but are a quarter-inch thicker, so I might try one of those.

Nice! That's a great find.

Guess I hadn't thought about self-teaching in that way. I'm not the brightest bulb on the site, especially when it comes to theory.

I avoided music literacy and music theory for too long in my young-adult life. I didn't start taking lessons and hitting the books until I was in my mid 20s. All these words I'm throwing at it now, that's me perhaps being a bit mad at my younger self for buying into the lie that all these great artists just intuited everything, asked no questions, got no help from anyone and made great music anyway.

If it came across like I was trying to shame you or anyone else on this thread, I failed in my efforts, and i'm sorry for that.

'bout time. It's felt like this has been brewing for awhile. I was about to suggest you put yourself out there again. What are the rates?

Agreed on all points. But I think they mean theory as in the 'scientific model' definition ... it's pretty well proved and codified into a a perfectly logical model like newtonian mechanics...

That's the problem though. I'm no scientist, and I'm totally guilty of suggesting that a theory is the precursor state of some kind of higher truth/law (it's not, and you're right to politely soft-call me on it), but any analogy that suggest you can predict what chord you will move to next in the same way you can predict where a body in motion will go next is problematic. Vastly different % certainties, given the universe doesn't exhibit the same creative free will that Debussy, Martin Gore, or Lizzo flexes.

Edit: some of the theory you're talking about is more a crossover between philosophy (aesthetics), musicology and psychoacoustics.

exactly. It's a big mixed bag out there.

And defining it that way is both taxonomy and epistemology.

I fear we both read too many art reviews in our formative years, Jim. ;) Oh the good ol' days of picking up the latest Art Forum to see the latest in creative use of syntax... It took me 15 years in the corporate world to bleed the $6 words from my vocabulary... nobody had any idea WTF I was talking about, people's eyes would just glaze over. (In a Bill Bixby voice) Don't encourage me to be pretentious***, you wouldn't like me when I'm pretentious. :D

*** ok ok, even more pretentious than I already am, lol.

To Jim's point, self-taught usually doesn't mean "theory free".

Lately, very talented and music-degree-holding friends, as well as the internet, have held up Joni Mitchell as an example of a very successful songwriter and performer that had almost no relationship to musical pedagogy of any kind through most of their career... yet here's an excerpt from an interview she gave in 1996:

So how does Mitchell discover the tunings and fingerings that create these expansive harmonies? Here’s how she described the process: “You’re twiddling and you find the tuning. Now the left hand has to learn where the chords are, because it’s a whole new ballpark, right? So you’re groping around, looking for where the chords are, using very simple shapes. Put it in a tuning and you’ve got four chords immediately—open, barre five, barre seven, and you higher octave, like half fingering on the 12th. Then you’ve got to find where the interesting colors are—that’s the exciting part.

My Point? Well, I have a few:

• The fact that (in many parts of the music instrument/music tech world) we refer to so many different aspects of music education as "theory" does music education a huge disservice. Do we call knowing the difference between a verb, adverb, conjunction and pronoun "Language Theory"? No, we call it "learning English" or "basic grammar". One doesn't need to know the names of those concepts to say pretty and meaningful things, but would you openly opine as to how important it is to know them... or just look it up, commit it to memory, and move on?

**EDIT: see Jim's good points below re: taxonomic and epistemological concerns... I'm not trying to debate what is/isn't a theory, per the definition of the term, though I seem to keep doing that over and over... it's just that the word "theory" is usually reserved for more advanced applications in most other fields, yet in the music tech world, as of late, a plugin that can do something a simple as transpose a loop to a different key is billed as "no music theory needed"... "theory" has become synonymous with every aspect of musical communication... and, right or not, seems to be allowing ppl to categorize all forms of musical knowledge as something you can choose to know or not know, instead of treating it as basic table-stakes knowledge for effective performance and communication. A book on tape is not billed as "No English theory needed"... nobody wants to apply the "L" word... "literacy"... a good portion of what we label "music theory" overlaps with basic music literacy.

• When people ask me about learning theory (shocking that they do, given my lack of musical gifts, but they do) I advise them to first learn all the things that aren't really theoretical at all**, IMHO, but just vocabulary/vernacular facts that will help you in any possible discussion with another musician... the basic table-stakes of western musical language. Learn the underlying patterns of intervals that make up the major and natural minor scales and all the modes of the major scale. Learn to construct those scales starting on any note. Learn what it means to be in a key, and how to determine what key you're likely in. Learn how to count in different time signatures. Learn the names and underlying constructions of all the chords diatonic to a given scale, learn to add tension notes to those chords and what you call them when you add those tensions... better yet, learn to do this both on your instrument, and in written/notated form.

• None of the above really fits my definition of "theoretical"**, anymore than calling a verb a verb is theoretical.

• Once you get into things like functional harmony and proposed rules for voice leading and counterpoint... and especially when you start seeing Hugo Reimann and Heinrich Schenker's names pop up, then you're getting into what I'd consider actual theoretical** work: concepts academics have put forth to try and explain why music works the way it does and what non-obvious rules might underly it's creation. How valuable this level of academic study is to the quality of your musical thinking is more debatable... it's no longer accepted and/or relevant fact in every possible music circle... I dig it, but I don't lump it in with the table stakes.

• Getting back to the Joni Mitchell example, even someone naturally gifted enough AND self-confident enough to barrel through a music career without relying on a whole lot of traditional music education** ... is still going to pick up the table-stakes vocabulary after years of working with other musicians (I hear there are some good stories out there re: Jaco Pastorius learning to translate's Joni's own internally-derived music vocabulary for the rest of the band) . So much of this stuff is unavoidable... so just embrace it and learn to describe the basics of what you create to others with the shared vocabulary we've developed over hundred of years.

If all of this is 100% obvious to everyone, and we're just talking about the different theories of functional harmony, etc, apologies. But in my experience, when someone asks if they need to know theory, "WTF is a Maj7th chord?" is lumped in with far more debatable theoretical observations.

pardon my ignorance, but other than the binding on vintage models, are Mustang necks that different than Jaguar necks?

Also, I see (now) that you have both a Jaguar and a Mustang already. Sorry!

See what I mean? Jim is your God for this kind of insight. Listen hard!

The other guy on here to talk to is Xaqary. Hes even more experienced than I am.

Good to know... but, with no offense to any other Wizards of EB, you're the one more likely to put in the time in this era.

I shouldn't be revealing these secrets on a public forum. The other soundguys might take ki e out a hit on me...

With no disrespect to anyone, I don't think the # of unique monthly visitors to this forum is enough to count as "public", lol. It's basically a private chat for a few regulars and a few lurkers.

No no. The audimax is program limiter. Excellent on busses.

Dang. Well then someone hurry up and make me a perfect version of a used-car-priced vintage unit for $129. Sheesh!

Real quick in defense of automatic gain reduction, it's been done for radio and done well.

A great point I had never really considered.

Most code jockeys know nothing about CBS/Thomson labs though.

That or many just can't afford to get their hands on a matched pair to study... nor do they want to spend years educating the market on why these pieces of gear not generally found in pro studios of today are worth having. They generally build what ppl already want, it's a safer bet.

If you only know the drawmer line you can be forgiven for assuming that only an AI can do auto compression... or those behringer autocoms lol. Funny sounding stuff. Not so automatic usually.

Would a perfect volumax/audimax emulation be something you'd want to use on every instrument though? Wouldn't that fall more under mastering applications?

I hear lexicon reverb too, plate setting on a PCM unit I think, top rolled off via damping freq and high passed or soemthing at the return

If you're right, and I have no reason to doubt, that's downright preternatural. You're like a human bloodhound, but for mix forensics.

I do not like any izotope gain reduction for anything but master bus work and then sued sparingly

10-4. I don't own any iZotope at the moment, but I've gotten my hands on a few projects where using the various parts of the suite led to great outcomes.

I don't like fab filter anything/ It all works perfectly and is transparent apart from the distortion which isn't meant to be transparent, but I hate the UI

Fair enough. I remember being very excited when they first hit the market in like 2007-ish... as it was like "@#$%, finally", but I didn't gel with the early product demos, both sonically, and in terms of some specifics of the UX and just kind of let it be... but I aim to give them a fair second shake in 2021.

.... or you tweak from a preset (shudder, vomit, collapse)

I was a hardline "no presets" fascist in my 20s... but coming up on this back half of my life, I've aligned more to a quote from a talented veteran musician whose name I've forgotten that I'll paraphrase to something like "the people who make good keyboard presets, that's their job, they put their whole selves into learning the device and getting the best from it... my job as a musician is to play the instrument, and if their present works, I use it. I make great music, making great patches can be someone else's job".

All that said: I'm still gonna roll my own bass synth presets from scratch til the day I die, because @#$& everyone, that's both too important and too simple to not do myself... but one has to respect the amount of care that Korg and Yamaha North America put into getting the original carts/cards of DX7 and M1 presets right (for their target audience of the era) on the first pass. And if anyone on Eric Persing's team has a preset for me to try, I'm gonna listen, listen hard, and not arrogantly assume I could to better without weeks of learning.

(edit: to keep this very minimally on-topic, I will say that U-he does a great job with factory presets... and makers are learning that their synths will live or die by the presets they ship with... but on the whole presets for most new synths could be better)

But for compressor presets... pardon my ignorance, but how the @3$% would that even work? Makers have to ship with presets, or face the consequences in both pro and consumer reviews... but the idea that you'd click a compressor preset that said like "rock drums" and somehow it would be right for whatever mic'd acoustic kit you may be feeding it... without you having to learn the plug inside and out and know what needed to be adjusted to fit the unique qualities of what you were putting into it... IDK... until those working on realtime ML/AI-based magic compressors make something so amazing that the industry is generally won-over, presets on dynamics processors (save for maybe brick wall limiting presets) feel, to me, like they're setting up false expectations for users new to this whole thing.

What am I missing?

Any experience with DMG Audio Compassion, or current compressors from FabFilter or iZotope?

Given the kinds of process visualization software affords, a big VU meter emulation is not my first choice... I understand why such skeuomorphism is so popular in MI, and I know it's the sound that matters most*, but animations of vintage meters are not my personal/emotional pref, given I have very little time logged with vintage hardware possessing such meters.

*Anyone looking to pull an Obi-Wan and tell me that vintage UI helps you learn to trust your ears over your eyes... spare me, please. Know this already, I do... drive me to the Sith, you will. :)

That's quite an endorsement, Thank you for the knowledge-bomb, Jim! I will study-up. :)

I would bet that SSL G series is the same one they had at the time, it was probably still in production at the time. its a great baord. It has the least shrieky high shelf of any SSL.... it also has overeasy type VCA compression per channel and the bus comp we all love.

So a nice clean console like an allen and heath live board like a 2400 would be good enough and you will want a pile of dbx160a comps or alesis 3631s, RNCs will do I guess. They don't treat kick the same though. A warm audio or chameleon labs bus comp will be needed too as I guarantee you they're tickling the VCA bus comp on this mix... that's just for mixdown assuming you have the sounds going in

that snare soudns like it has something whacky on it bringing up the ring and ping for the chili peppers sound.... 1176 or gain brain maybe. Some sort of fet detection dealie I would think

everything is hitting the board pretty hard giving that glassy 80s/90s console top (or is it harsh? depends who you ask LOL)

See what I mean? Jim is your God for this kind of insight. Listen hard!

jimmarchi1 is the right person to listen to, as he is well-versed in this era of recording technology. I haven't listened to the whole thing, but I commend the artists and engineers involved for avoiding a lot of the common FX treatments of the era that would have made it sound more dated today. I mean, it still sounds like a product of the early 90s, but it does not have the kind of heavy-handed "LA Studio" dynamics one would hear on (for example) a Red Hot Chili Peppers or Jane's Addiction album of the same era.

In addition to studying the band, their gear, and their production philosophy (they self-produced this one), study up on the studio (as it was in 1992, not just what they have today) and read interviews with the Engineer.

This record was recorded here

It was engineered by this person

If the FX section of Repro is any indication, Presswerk is likely a beast.

I'm a big U-he advocate, those guys have the good ears AND the big brains, but I aspire to keep my compressor plugin stable small, and just learn to use 2-3 really really well... or at least learn to apply dynamic processors with as much confidence as I twiddle subtractive synths.

Would you, personally, put Presswerk in your top 3 DSP-based compressors?... or would it fall more under the category of "character" processor for you?

you don't need an expander.... you need to buy me one because we're the same person

Ha!

which means you're the same guy as NYC synth

If only!

I'd finally own a sweet Oberheim Xpander, and I could take the Boss SE-70 off my wishlist :D

Also, thumbs up to the brands you've been able to bring onboard thus far: U-he, Eventide, Image Line, D16, Accusonus. Solid lineup!

I doubt it was easy; must have taken most of 2020 to get those deals in place.

I see some Sugar Bytes stuff just got added today too. :)

This is why I like you... 99 tyler... my wife lived juxtapoz and high fructose though lol

I see what you did there... ohhhh the look on your face when you finally realize you and I are the same person. ;)

I thought I read some not so kind words about deadmau5 awhile back in this thread, but I came across his MasterClass and wondered if it was useful - anyone taken it ?

Back when I was in art school, at the end of the previous century, I had a friend in the program who was all about the Juxtapoz magazine scene, and painting whatever she thought looked cool, and ignoring the prevailing tastes of the faculty, who were mostly raised on CalArts conceptual art dogma of the 1970s (ideas over aesthetics, beauty for beauty's sake being quasi-immoral, etc)... and this was about 10 years before the gate keepers of high-snobbery finally started to allow street art and other such wonderful and honest things to be deemed worthy of sharing the same auctions with more traditional gallery fodder.

The Chair of the department was a merciless critic of this friend's approach, a real protector of the prevailing order, and this Chair and the general outlook of the department made things not-so-fun for her.

BUT, to the Chair's credit, this friend had a showing of her Juxtapoz-y work, and she sold a lot of stuff. My friend confronted the Chair with this good news, and the Chair told her:

"Well... I don't argue with success."

She recounted the whole interaction to me the next day, because she was so happy to finally get a positive reaction/concession from the Chair. It meant a lot to her... and I've tried to keep this outlook in mind as I roll through this lifetime of new artists, new genres and changing tastes.

Anyway, all of this is my windbag way of saying "who gives a #@$% what anyone else thinks of Joel Zimmerman's work?". If you dig his stuff, and he has some tracks you'd be happy to use as reference tracks for your own mixes, I don't see how a Deadmau5 Master Class could be a bad investment. Nobody achieves the kind of rarified financial success he's achieved without also putting out a product that moves a lot of people. If you're one of those people, then Joel's advice is worth listening to, and probably even paying for.

“I'll have to check out Sisters. “

It’s on HboMax currently- just added it to my list too

you just saved me 3 minutes of searching. thank you!

I just sourced this for a submission. I think it's awesome that we've come to a point at which Equipboard is validly its own source.

Ha! Well played, eyeseeofficial.

I was thinking more like a nicotene filmed PCB

Ha!

the other side of the wind was epic.... I love John Huston.... ever see "Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" ???

Nope. Didn't realize that was a Milius script. Might have to check that out.

on Herman scores, I decided to wtch Depalma's sisters yesterday and Heman's score still kills it.... he id like vertigo and day the earth stood still at the same time with a weird orchestra and a moog modular! plus watching it again I relize that the seen in Kill Bill where Elle Driver is in the nurses outfit with the split screen and all the pit instruments and whistling is SO 70s Depalma/Herman. Rza nailed that part with the split screen

Phantom of the Paradise is currently the earliest DePalma I've seen, but I love that goofy movie, and my love for Bernard Herman runs deep. I'll have to check out Sisters.

have you ever considered making your cosmetics look like a battered piece of equipment?

Ha! I like this forum just fine without screw head and cig burn bitmaps strewn about, thank you very much.

the soundtrack for Mank was the jam, all period music in the style of Bernard Herman....

I loved the movie too, but I;m a film buff, i lvoe Kane, I love Orson and I love that script.... it invented a whole investigative flashback style that's the most immitated film format... you don't get to quentin without it

I really appreciated Mank. Great point re: score. Mank inspired me to go back and re-watch Kane, which I hadn't really seen start to finish in like 20 years. Unbelievable that it's a movie directed by and starring a 25 year old playing all phases of someone's life...and quite effectively at that. THEN I watched The Other Side of the Wind... and finally, my Welles itch was scratched... for now... I'm lucky Transformers: The Movie wasn't streaming that day, or I might have really gone nuts. :D

that sound track was pure gold, especially nun with a motherfucking gun

Was just listening to it. Again. I kinda obsessed on it when it came out. Still trying to figure how they got certain sounds...

When I watched the first episode, and heard that track, by the time the guitars kicked in, I remember thinking "oh man, this composer is biting off Reznor SO HARD! The nerve of this person!"

Then the credits rolled... :🤦:

It feels like Reznor & Ross score half of all prestige films/shows these days, but they really sound like they're having fun on Watchmen... as if that show needed any other reasons to be great...