Amplesamples

Just finished my first podcast - you can subscribe to the feed here!

Any comments will be gratefully accepted.

If you want me to play your music, contact me on podcast@amplesamples.co.uk.

Suddenly very fashionable, with some people getting a bit bored of dubstep (or maybe trying to anticipate the next big thing?). Anyway, whatever the reason that people are suddenly loving Bassline (and I’m certainly no expert on it), it’s cool party music, and that’s good enough for me.

Lower End Spasm has a bassliney mix here:

01 * ? - set your body free [CROOKERS remix] / DJ TAMEIL - i smell pussy
02 * L-VIS 1990 - change the game
03 * STICKY - dr who
04 * FAGGATRONIX - broken promises
05 * DND - got myself together
06 * THE OUTHERE BROTHERS - wiggle wiggle
07 * UNKLEJAM - lova ya [HERVE remix]
08 * DIZZEE RASCAL - stop dat [BOK BOK's SE5 refix]
09 * STARKEY - noreaster riddim
10 * ACID JACKS - mookie
11 * STICKY & GAPPY - inna da dancehall [D&G mix]
12 * DROP THE LIME - come 2 life
13 * FLO-RIDA - birthday
14 * CROOKERS - aguas de parco
15 * LIVE O - dirty skankin
16 * DJ ASSAULT - kill the bitch
17 * DEXPLICIT - good for me
18 * DROP THE LIME - big malice
19 * DJ TRAJIC - 1 2 3 4 all the ladies on the floor
20 * I ROBOTS - frau [BOYS NOIZE remix]
21 * WES FIF ft B.O.B - haterz everywhere
22 * J MIXER - let it all go
23 * H20 - what’s it gonna be ft Platinum
24 * T2 - salsa
25 * Keisha Tara Shonda Sabrina Crysta Daronda Theresa Felicia Tenisha Sha’von Monica Monique Christina outro

I’ve been following the work of Kenneth James Gibson - one of his (many) names is Eight Frozen Modules, who’s Crumbling And Responding album is probably one of my favourite albuma ever. His music can range from very funky stripped back techno (in his apendics shuffle guise), to some very esoteric breakcore/idm with 200BPM breaks and twisted vocals. It’s hard to describe the music without hearing it, so I’ve got some links below for his music.

Live Set at the Getty Museum

LA DJ Set 2007

Below are two tunes from his apendics shuffle moniker.

Dirty Hood

Feel Me

Some really good mixes here from control to chaos

Although the control to chaos podcast is not being developed anymore, there’s loads of good music here, a lot from tobias and dj fishead.

The mixes encompasses loads of styles, not just techno, but the quality is really high throughout all the mixes.

Enjoy!

Core News has a lot of cool stuff up at the moment. Stuff about Mary Anne Hobbs Christmas special - and some nice breakcore stuff more recently.

There’s a mix by Donna Summer (aka Jason Forrest) here

You can find more stuff about Jason Forrest at Cock Rock Disco - he runs the label (I think, not sure about that). There’s loads of free MP3s to download.

Buy Terminal 11’s Illegal Nervous Habits album on there because it’s a work of genius. He’s had another album out since this one - it’s called Fractured Sunshine - there’s a Boomkat link here.

There’s loads of free MP3 stuff on there - I’ll put the links up to all this stuff in due course.

Recently discovered the mixing skills of DJ Steady - he’s been doing some really good mixes - you can find his artist page here

I’ve been listening to a lot of grime and dubstep this year. I was living in South London last year when I start to listening to dubstep - it seems a style of music that more suited to the South London atmosphere, now I’m elsewhere and it just aint the same.

Am considering putting some of my own mixes on the web - only problem at the moment is that I don’t have software/hardware to do any mixes! Not sure whether to use Traktor or Live. Will have a think about it, hopefully some mixes up on here before long.

Being such an advocate of music technology and technology in general, I thought I’d go back in time and recount my first experiences of sampling.

A lot of musician’s first experiences with sampling are with something like an Akai s950 (back in the day!), or more likely these days, an earlier version of Reason or Halion.

My first experience was with a piece of hardware on the Amiga 500 called StereoMaster. This was a cartridge that plugged into the port. It had 3.5mm jack at the end, so you would connect the the headphone output of your music to 3.5mm input jack.

There was some included software which had a perfectly serviceable editor, with variable zoom, and allowed you to save in different bit rates and formats. This must have been about 1992 - with hindsight, this program seemed quite ahead of it’s time .

So I used this along with a tracker called Octamed. Octamed was one of the big trackers of the time, and is still used by some people. Rather than the conventional left-to-right timeline in sequencers such as Logic/Cubase, trackers (including Octamed) run down the page, and they look very spreadsheet-like.

Although the user interface is quite uninviting, the program was quite stable (an important factor too was that it was free from CU Amiga. If I hadn’t picked up that copy when I was 14, my life would probably be very different). It was great for programming stuff in very quickly, and I was able to get loops going for the first time - me and my friends would make very bad rave tunes.

After that, I went to uni, and learned how to use an Akai s950. Looking back now, it seemed like a retrograde step. The sample memory was minute, the interface was clumsy. I’d been used to editing samples and zero-crossing points on a computer screen - to be doing the same task with a tiny LCD screen was a little frustrating, to say the least.

After uni I bought a PC and started to use Cubase. I started to mess around with audio regions, and tried to program drums by doing stuff in Reaktor 2.3, exporting it to audio, then chopping it up in Cubase. Unfortunately, I was rubbish at it, and eventually I ended up getting a Mac a few years later and learning how to use Logic. Soon after that I bought an Emu (E4000 I think). Lovely sampler, but still too fiddly for my tastes.

Nowadays, I use Logic EXS24, the built-in samplers inside Reason and Renoise. In some ways I find that I’ve kind of come full circle - I still like the old tracker method, although I stopped tracking for 10 years, it was easier to get used to it, there’s a logic (excuse the pun) there that just seems to work. I don’t miss the old hardware samplers at all - although some people swear by them, life without a million floppy disks or transferring stuff via SCSI (remember that?) is a much more rewarding and fulfilling life.

With hindsight, Stereomaster was a precursor to a lot of soft synths that everybody uses these days. All the sound was held in the Amiga’s RAM, so apart from the interface for recording, there was no external hardware used at all. Sounds could be edited on-screen.
In future posts I want to discuss sampling in pop music, and how it’s developed in recent years. Any comments/discussion appreciated

Only my third or fourth day of doing this blog. Merry Christmas everybody!

Here’s a link to a Burial remix of Thom Yorke that I found on Pretty Much Amazing blog.

Happy Xmas!

I’ve found a way of automating recordings of radio stations. This has been included on a dissensus forum but I thought I should include it here too, as I’m pretty darn proud of myself for working this out by myself!

Using automator you can record Resonance streams while you’re away, using no extra software.

If you use Leopard this will be of interest to you. It might work on Tiger, but I haven’t tried it out.

First go to Resonance schedule and copy the ical feed at the bottom of the page

Open up iCal, go to the Calendar menu. Choose ‘Subscribe’ and paste the feed in.

Now you have Resonance Schedule in iCal. Find something that you would like to record.

Then download these files and unzip them. Keep them somewhere sensible.

Go back to ICal - make sure your home diary is ticked and displayed, and the resonance one is too.
You can look up a show and set up a new event to start, for example, 2 minutes before the start of the show. Edit the event - call it something you can remember such as Recording. Set the ‘from’ field to 2 minutes before the show starts. Set the ‘to’ field to at [B]least a minute later[/B]. This seems weird, but the recording is not really affected by the ‘to’ time, unless the times are identical - set it to a minute later than the ‘from’ time and you’ll be fine.

Go down to Alarm and choose ‘Open File’. Underneath it might say iCal. It’s a drop-down menu - choose ‘Other’.

Navigate to the folder you downloaded and choose Resonance Record. Then underneath, choose ‘on date’. Underneath it choose the date and time of the start of the event (which is the same as the ‘from’ field earlier).

After that you should be done. All you need to do now is to set up another alarm to stop the recording. Set up a new event - set it up the same way but this time make sure that the stop time is about two minutes after the end of your desired program (just to be safe). Make sure your alarm is ‘open file’, but this time navigate to the ‘Stop’ file that was included in the download. Ensure that the alarm time is the same as the ‘from’ time.

Now your computer is set up to record the program with no further input from you! Set up as man of these as you like in iCal!

You might have to rename the resonance_hi.mp3.download file in your finder to resonance_hi.mp3, but as long as it’s an mp3 file you’ll be fine.

Make sure iCal has the options ‘Turn off all alarms’ & Turn off alarms only when iCal is not open’ [B]both unchecked[/B].

If you set up the schedule inside your energy settings to turn on your computer at a certain time, and set up your accounts so that it automatically logs in to your account when turns on, then you could set it up to record stuff days, even weeks in advance if you need to.

I’d like to post a video tutorial of this - I’ll try to do so when I’ve got some server space (anyone know of decent providers) and a program to do so!

An interesting opinion from Pop Life on MIA’s Kala album out earlier this year. I always liked MIA’s music, but I thought her first album was quite samey, and wasn’t looking forward to more of the same. Although ‘Galang’ was great, and ‘Bucky Done Gun’ had some great hooks (’London calm down, I need to make a sound!’), I wasn’t especially looking forward to it.

I was nicely surprised by the beats when I listened to the second album, but Pop Life says, “The drawls, the yelps, they fill out the sound, but do strike me as a kind of facade, the kind of tics one resorts to out of nervousness. Overall the thing which has been really bugging me about it is how, despite it’s incredible [nervous] energy, to me it feels hardly ethnic in any way, much less so than the previous album.

For me, there are three central contridictions that put me off the record. The more MIA works with other musicians, the more their individual styles are subsumed and flattened into a fairly one-dimensional sound; despite the global travelling, her sound has actually become less ‘ethnic’; and although MIA decries globalisation, this anti-globalisation is her very own global brand”

The last point is something I very much agree with - I can’t stand MIA’s rapping. I like the sound of her voice, but the lyrics are awful. ‘Hussel’ features a great solo by Afrikan Boy (of ‘Lidl’ fame) halfway through, then MIA comes back with some of the worst lyrics heard this side of a Scouting For Girls single.

” Hello my friend, hello my friend
Yes it’s me
4 by 3 ,3 buy 3 , buy 1 song get 1 free
Maybe me, a bootleg cd colour tv or dvd
We got barrels in the sea
Its big enough to take a whole family
We drum on it
Jun cha cha gegujun cha
Jun cha cha gegujun cha

This part of the record makes me cringe everytime I hear it - it’s as if she’s run out of ideas mid-song, ad libbed and then left it in the song by mistake when comping vocals.

Paper Planes is a good tune, Timbaland is reliably on form production-wise for ‘Come Around’ (although it’s marred by a rubbish opening line,” Baby girl, you and me need to go to your teepee” - but who listens to Timbaland for his lyrics?).

Nevertheless, good album - great production, enjoy the beats, love MIA’s personality (even if I think her lyrics suck)

Paper Planes vid

Boyz Vid

Go to this page on Palms Out to listen to the Kimono Kops remix of Boyz. Great Sabrina reference!

Inspiration for the remix here: