idm must-haves

erm, detuned synths?

detuned reality

  hahathhat said:

if you want some inspiration, go read interviews with clark. he's said a lot of things that changed the way i think about this or that.....

Post some links please.

That is unless it's inspiring only because he's in a wheelchair..

http://www.junkmedia.org/index.php?i=828

http://www.themilkfactory.co.uk/interviews/cclark_2_iw.htm

http://www.barcodezine.com/Chris%20Clark%20Interview.htm

clark on how to do IDM:

  Quote

You have these full-on sledgehammer thunks and all these kinds of wicked digital hand-clap sounds, and everyone in the world loves them. Are you willing to reveal something about how your discovered this splendid thunk?

 

The drums were made from a combination of domestic sounds -- scissors, doors, chairs -- that created a backdrop for other 808 and 909 hits. Then these were put through the mash factory several hundreds of times. The bones were baked, the brittle ones were sorted from the juicy, tough ones. No, but seriously, I think most of the drums were put through all sorts of things that changed the dynamics and made them more fluid. Most "tidy" engineers like to separate each drum track out and have it perfectly EQed. Although this is admirable in a sort of old skool watch-your-grandma-knit-you-a-nice-beige-sweater sort of way, I find it doesn't excite me. What I tend to do is just jam stuff through as many boxes as I can, until everything sort of bleeds into itself and all its surrounding parts.

 

You can combine the artifacts introduced through the mess of all these boxes, like the background noise and the crackling desk, etc, and then just remove it all until you end up with some weird goblin drowning in an acid sort of squawk. Then maybe you could feed this back into a microphone, put this through a compressor, then put this through another noise gate inside of the sequencer that is being triggered by the delay of some granular pad sound and then maybe when this delay has it feedback rate changed it might trigger something else like a hi hat or a toilet flushing or a sample of someone having an orgasm or something. So, you see, it really ends up being quite a grey area and it can be hard to remember how or why I made my sounds in the way that I did. The processes lose their novelty, and thus lose their importance as singular, autonomous techniques. They feed into each other and often are contradicted by other "themes" within a track. So they inevitably become tiny bit parts in the wider picture of the work that I am assembling.

  Quote

Are you an artist particularly interested in breaking new ground, stretching the boundaries of electronic music?

Erm, that’s a good question. I’ve been asking myself this actually over the last few days, because I feel innovation can sometimes mask a certain sort of hollowness and you’ve got be careful of innovation through solely technology, because stuff like that can date very quickly when the mask of whatever technology has been used kind of falls away. You know, innovative stuff 10 years ago doesn’t sound innovative now, but I have been feeling recently that there’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of fusing stuff, which I actually feel my album before this [body Riddle] did a lot more, because it used acoustic sounds and fused them with electronics, and I feel like that’s something that could really be explored a lot more. I can’t really think of anyone who is doing it in the way that I’d want to do it.

  Quote

What inspires you to compose?

I guess part of it comes from feeling dissatisfied, like life would be completely cheap and grim and oppressive without music. If your life was fine and you were content then you wouldn't bother writing. It comes from mainly wanting to build these internal struggles, almost like mazes, within yourself, just so you can find your way out of them. I guess on one level it is entirely an irrational impulse.

alleys of your mind :)

didn't read the thread but pretty sure i hate it

You didn't miss much, actually.

make melodies from yer drums and the like

  hahathhat said:

i have trouble trying to do anything in particular when it comes to music. i'll say, hey, let's try to do a DNB track... six hours later i've gotten mired down in some massive 12-part string shit and deleted the DNB drums. however, it should be noted that saying "let's try and do a DNB track" is a good way to get started.

it always helps me to want to do 2 or more things because this will happen and they'll each turn into what the other was supposed to be

  xxx said:

Fact: You can play along to the whole of the RDJ album on the black keys alone. I did it on my Yamaha DJX on Christmas morning 1998 while my cousin played his new Playstation.

just got an ensoniq esq which lets you use the note pitch as a modulation source. if you modulate the osc pitch with the note pitch, by a negative amount, all the octaves get stretched out - instant saw II microtonal shit!

  hahathhat said:

http://www.junkmedia.org/index.php?i=828

http://www.themilkfactory.co.uk/interviews/cclark_2_iw.htm

http://www.barcodezine.com/Chris%20Clark%20Interview.htm

 

clark on how to do IDM:

 

  Quote

You have these full-on sledgehammer thunks and all these kinds of wicked digital hand-clap sounds, and everyone in the world loves them. Are you willing to reveal something about how your discovered this splendid thunk?

 

The drums were made from a combination of domestic sounds -- scissors, doors, chairs -- that created a backdrop for other 808 and 909 hits. Then these were put through the mash factory several hundreds of times. The bones were baked, the brittle ones were sorted from the juicy, tough ones. No, but seriously, I think most of the drums were put through all sorts of things that changed the dynamics and made them more fluid. Most "tidy" engineers like to separate each drum track out and have it perfectly EQed. Although this is admirable in a sort of old skool watch-your-grandma-knit-you-a-nice-beige-sweater sort of way, I find it doesn't excite me. What I tend to do is just jam stuff through as many boxes as I can, until everything sort of bleeds into itself and all its surrounding parts.

 

You can combine the artifacts introduced through the mess of all these boxes, like the background noise and the crackling desk, etc, and then just remove it all until you end up with some weird goblin drowning in an acid sort of squawk. Then maybe you could feed this back into a microphone, put this through a compressor, then put this through another noise gate inside of the sequencer that is being triggered by the delay of some granular pad sound and then maybe when this delay has it feedback rate changed it might trigger something else like a hi hat or a toilet flushing or a sample of someone having an orgasm or something. So, you see, it really ends up being quite a grey area and it can be hard to remember how or why I made my sounds in the way that I did. The processes lose their novelty, and thus lose their importance as singular, autonomous techniques. They feed into each other and often are contradicted by other "themes" within a track. So they inevitably become tiny bit parts in the wider picture of the work that I am assembling.

 

  Quote

Are you an artist particularly interested in breaking new ground, stretching the boundaries of electronic music?

Erm, that’s a good question. I’ve been asking myself this actually over the last few days, because I feel innovation can sometimes mask a certain sort of hollowness and you’ve got be careful of innovation through solely technology, because stuff like that can date very quickly when the mask of whatever technology has been used kind of falls away. You know, innovative stuff 10 years ago doesn’t sound innovative now, but I have been feeling recently that there’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of fusing stuff, which I actually feel my album before this [body Riddle] did a lot more, because it used acoustic sounds and fused them with electronics, and I feel like that’s something that could really be explored a lot more. I can’t really think of anyone who is doing it in the way that I’d want to do it.

 

  Quote

What inspires you to compose?

I guess part of it comes from feeling dissatisfied, like life would be completely cheap and grim and oppressive without music. If your life was fine and you were content then you wouldn't bother writing. It comes from mainly wanting to build these internal struggles, almost like mazes, within yourself, just so you can find your way out of them. I guess on one level it is entirely an irrational impulse.

 

alleys of your mind :)

WOW. Never read anything from him before but I will now. Sounds very enlightening. Fuck perceived pretension. A shallow mask for insecurity.

jesus christ what a bunch of impressionable bastards you are.

black keys? any person who even remotely suggests that braindance is about the "black keys", or that playing the "black keys" will make you braindance, is a fucking disgrace to music making. you should know the keyboard like your own fingers if you want to get your thoughts out there.

go beethoven on the midi roll

  Quote

I have always thought of it as the use intense production techniques. Techniques that strain your brain, patients and skill.

I really like your definition here, I agree. good music is not saying "i'm going to make music adhering to a specific genre", it's saying "this is what music should sound like", and contributing to that. braindance excels at being a pretensious genre but at the same time sort of tounge-in-cheek. anyway, reading isn't gonna make you the next drukqs, get back to your DAWs you servile scum.

"too many sheep, not enough shepherds"

The biggest trick I think is hiding/obscuring the best elements of the track. This makes it so people need to listen a few times to really get the track.

I posted an appallingly fanboyish thread describing how autechre does this in painstaking detail, which i was quickly flamed for, and you can find it here if you really care: http://forum.watmm.com/index.php?showtopic=43750

Thats the trick to IDM though, I think. Don't have the really melodic, quality tunes very predominant and present in the track, but hide them, twist them, obscure them, alter them so that they are much harder to actually hear.

Seems to work for Ae, anyways.

  qnio said:

arly 90's idm

 

hip-hop beats

d'n'b/jungle beats

pretty, naive synth melodies

atmospheric pads

 

...

you've just listed everything that makes the IDM genre bad and predictable

  thehauntingsoul said:

Seems to work for Ae, anyways.

Ae is still one of the only bands making truely creative electronic music in the idm genre these days. using them as an example for anything related to the stereotype of today's idm is kind of pointless

  Awepittance said:

  qnio said:

arly 90's idm

 

hip-hop beats

d'n'b/jungle beats

pretty, naive synth melodies

atmospheric pads

 

...

 

you've just listed everything that makes the IDM genre bad and predictable

 

 

  thehauntingsoul said:

Seems to work for Ae, anyways.

 

Ae is still one of the only bands making truely creative electronic music in the idm genre these days. using them as an example for anything related to the stereotype of today's idm is kind of pointless

Wrong. He just listed motifs/themes of 90s idm, it is not impossible or even difficult to be experimental or innovative within those (or any) contexts. You can break down all music (yes even AE) into themes and motifs, just because you dont like a certain style doesnt make it inherently boring and derivitave.

a "can do" attitude.

  BCM said:

a "can do" attitude.

which you seem to be lacking as of late...

an overdrive pedal

  chris moss acid said:

an overdrive pedal

that's the same as distortion right? i can't stand distortion any more cause it sounds cheap coming from a synth. like it's bad quality. as opposed to a guitar, then i welcome it

  sneaksta303 said:

  BCM said:

a "can do" attitude.

 

which you seem to be lacking as of late...

absolutely. i'm a failure.

For squarepusher's numbers lucent IDM: Alpha Juno Chord Memory