{"id":5094,"date":"2011-07-28T23:33:06","date_gmt":"2011-07-28T22:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/?p=5094"},"modified":"2011-07-28T23:33:06","modified_gmt":"2011-07-28T22:33:06","slug":"are-analogue-electronics-really-a-good-thing-for-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2011\/07\/are-analogue-electronics-really-a-good-thing-for-music.html","title":{"rendered":"Are analogue electronics really a Good Thing for music?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So, the Mock Tudor<\/a> gig at Limehouse Town Hall went pretty well. I\u2019d been practicing and tweaking the setup every day right up to the morning of the gig, trying to clear up some of the more obvious deficiencies in the system. Right in the middle of my piece I realised something horrible: I was noodling<\/em>. I don\u2019t remember ever making that particular mistake before. Luckily, things picked up again pretty quickly and I was able to end the piece well, which is probably the most important thing when entertaining a room full of punters tooled up with smokes and tinnies.<\/p>\n

This was the first time in years I\u2019d played with analogue electronic feedback, and my reacquaintance with the technique produced some surprises. When I started making feedback circuits I\u2019d been preoccupied with just getting the thing to work, to produce variable, unstable patterns that would display a life of their own over time. In short, I wanted my setup to \u201cdo stuff\u201d. Later I worked toward producing interactive feedback paths that would create changes in timbre, either subtle or not so subtle. In short, to \u201cmake new sounds\u201d. <\/p>\n

Having more recently used this approach to music making only in the virtual realm (constructing feedback loops in digital audio processing software on my laptop) I\u2019d become aware of the potential and the limitations to using computers in this way. When performing with the computer I\u2019m conscious of the lack of spontaneity and changeability in the pieces I\u2019ve created. However, when I returned to the table of analogue gear I was struck by how difficult it was to push it beyond a limited range of sounds. I had less equipment to work with than on previous occasions, but this reinforced my belief of the computer\u2019s potential to produce timbres of a great variety and complexity, without being attached to lugging around several cases of analogue equipment. There is also the appeal of showing that the music\u2019s quality is not dependent on owning one particular piece of unique or esoteric \u201cgear\u201d unobtainable by others.<\/p>\n

Having said all that, analogue performance is a lot more fun and in the right circumstances is probably always worth the trouble of doing it. The adjustments in to moving back to an older mindset and a reduced amount of gear are probably what caused that moment of noodling, caught between the complulsions to \u201cdo stuff\u201d and to \u201cmake new sounds\u201d. The piece recovered when I regressed to the old way of thinking. Philosophically it was a cheap move, but it sounded good and we can\u2019t all be David Tudor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My next problem is how to record this music. The life of this music is in the speakers that produce (not reproduce) the sound, and the resonant space it occupies. This is another aspect which could be faked digitally, as opposed to be completely absent in a line-out recording, but it would never sound as good as the excellent PA in that cavernous hall in Limehouse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, the Mock Tudor gig at Limehouse Town Hall went pretty well. I\u2019d been practicing and tweaking the setup every day right up to the morning of the gig, trying to clear up some of the more obvious deficiencies in the system. Right in the middle of my piece I realised something horrible: I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5094"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5094"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5100,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5094\/revisions\/5100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}