Old 10-04-2018, 01:41 PM   #1
ashcat_lt
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Default Self Consumption - the Autophagist project

IDK if this is the best forum for this. It's really just kind of a self indulgent post about some stupid things I'm doing with Reaper to make even stupider sounds. I hope maybe it will provide some inspiration or point somebody toward a technique they may not have thought of, and might even be able to use for something less horrible.

So I started a new "band" about a month ago. It was really out of necessity when a couple of local bands dropped out of a show and left me with nothing but a touring band on the bill. I've had the band name and a really rough kind of concept for a while. Made a few false starts on "proof of concept" recordings. But that day (actually, the day before) it really all fell together. I looked around and saw that I had exactly the people I needed to make it even worse than I ever imagined. We've all played together in similar contexts, and I knew we could do it. So we talked about it, I set up the gear I thought we needed, and we did it, and it was really pretty cool.


One of the things that I set up was a Zoom drum machine with a start/stop pedal. I found a beat that I didn't hate, cranked it up to 250BPM (as fast as it gets), slammed it into an amp sim, and then would just randomly trigger it on and off for no apparent reason. Rapid retriggers for stutter effect and never really let it run long enough to sound like a real rhythmic element. I also found that depending on where I stopped it, different things would ring out. Because it's not a sample that just turns on and off, but is actually a MIDI sequence triggering sampled sounds.

But I was also trying to "play" bass at the same time, and I couldn't find a strap so I was kneeling so I had to run the drum machine with my hand, and while I have adopted a policy of never deliberately fretting anything (so only really need one hand), I didn't want to have to split my attention like that. The vocalist was saying she wanted something else to do, so at our first "practice" (after our first gig), I gave her the button. She lost interest before long and nobody else wanted to do it, so...

...I built a robot. It's actually just a chain of plugins across a few tracks that semi-randomly does about the same thing but kind of based off of what the vocals are doing. The core drum sounds come from the old Yamaha S-YXG50 - a super light general midi VSTi that sounds at least good enough for this purpose. This into basically the same amp sim as I used for the hardware unit.

The sequencer part of the drum machine is handled neatly by sequencermegababy. I actually duplicated the preset pattern from the Zoom unit right there on the grid. Set it to change pattern and resync based on midi note input. There's not way to make it stop when the project is in playback/recording, so I have to switch back and forth to a blank pattern.

The midi notes that trigger megababy are generated by the JS drum trigger plugin. That plug in turn gets audio input via a PreFX send from the vocal mic. But I don't want it to really just follow her. I wanted some memory, but also some randomness. So before that vocal feed gets to the trigger, it goes through ReaDelay with a couple of different taps and then JS Volume (actually maybe the other order, I'm not looking at it right now) with the adjustment slider parameter modulated via a random LFO.

But now, the drum trigger plug only spits out one specific note. As is, it just keeps retriggering the "drum machine", but never stops in between. So I found a plugin that lets me build a "csv" file that is just a sequence of notes which play back in order - one at a time - in place of a given input note. I'll have to look that up and post a link when I can get to my machine. Anyway, I'm wasting most of its power by just using to alternate between the "start" and "stop" notes when it gets that one note from the drum trigger. But that was just a little too out of control, cause if the last thing it did was a "start" and then the vocalist gets quiet for a long time, the thing just keeps beating away and it actually just sucks after a couple of repetitions, so I added a MIDI item that just sends the "stop" note every beat for like a couple hours. This means the thing will never actually play for longer than a second and a half.

It took some real tweaking of like every parameter in that chain. Like it's a delicate balance between almost nothing and way too much, and with all the randomness built into the system it took some doing, but it worked exactly the way I wanted it to at our last (second) live performance.

Again, kind of a specialized thing and pretty horrible, but it could as easily be triggering melodies or bass lines or chord patterns or pretty much anything else.
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Old 10-04-2018, 02:22 PM   #2
ashcat_lt
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The other thing I set up right at the beginning was a single floor tom pounding away at a constant rate of something like 49BPM. The initial concept was "industrial dirge metal", though now I realize this is more like the drum they pound as they're walking somebody to the headsman's axe. Anyway, it was originally just a single midi note repeated over and over for a couple hours, going to SuperiorDrummer and then into my JS pedal delay plug set to infinite repeat. This makes a bit more sense now that I've added some slight timing and velocity humanization, but even without it, it adds a bit of color and a just a little bit of grit.

As I was messing with things one day, I somehow accidentally sent the vocal to that drum track, and it mixed in with the drum through that delay. The way that delay works is that while it does repeat "infinitely", new layers tend to push the older layers down rather than escalating without bounds the way ReaDelay will with feedback at 0. So it was kind of repeating everything she said forever, it was constantly getting pounded down further and further by that damn drum. I thought it was kind of cool...for a while...

But I didn't actually want it to repeat everything, nor did I actually want it to repeat forever. So I pulled the feedback on the plugin down a bit, and then I used that same trick from the other thing with the randomly modulated JS Volume to only accidentally throw some of what she says to the delay. It's unpredictable, and sometimes weird. Like sometimes it will get something that's not super flattering, but all in all it works pretty damn cool for what we're trying to do.

In an effort to conserve resources in a live context, I went ahead and rendered the raw drum sound (after humanization) to a .wav file so I don't even need SuperiorDrummer instantiated. This does mean that every time we do it the "random" hits are exactly the same, but I don't think anybody else will notice.
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Old 10-04-2018, 11:39 PM   #3
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Is it still outsider art when so much technical expertise goes into it?
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Old 10-05-2018, 09:58 AM   #4
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TBH IDGAF
In fact I'm not even sure what that term means. I will say it can feel a little funny carrying a computer into a dingy basement full of drunk punks, but in the end as long as the performance is solid, most people don't care what you used to do it.

But also, about half of this "band" comes from that other side where it's cool to not actually know WTF you're doing. Just plug this into that and turn the knobs and hope. The one dude has a habit of plugging into the output of his pedal. One pedal!!! Plugged in backwards. Like they don't even want to know. They'll ask me a question "How can I...???" I start to answer and their eyes glaze over "I dont understand that stuff."

I mean, you could. You're a smart kid. The information is out there. I can help you personally and also help you find other resources. If you wanted to.

I personally don't think incompetence and ignorance are cool. If you're going to do something, especially like in front of people as though it's something important, I think you should actually have a basic idea of what you're doing and how to make it happen. Frankly it just makes things go more smoothly, more consistently, more like you wanted it to.

/rant These are actually my best friends and I love them like crazy, but...


PS - If you actually want to hear it in action (you don't), just click the YouTube link in my sig. Last week's show should be the newest upload.

Last edited by ashcat_lt; 10-05-2018 at 10:11 AM.
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