Playing old music on new gear

We have a Helicopter Quartet gig in December. This is a momentous occasion as it’s nearly three years since we last did one! We’re really looking forward to doing this and have been rehearsing like mad.

The Problem

As I’ve mentioned occasionally in this blog, I keep changing the gear I use. In fact it’s changed more than I’ve even mentioned. When we started Helicopter Quartet the synth parts were played on a Moog Little Phatty, then we moved to a laptop running Ableton Live, then a Roland TB-3, then a borrowed Roland System-1, then a Novation Ultranova, and currently an Elektron Digitone (though the Ultranova will probably return). Added to which I have also replaced my large collection of pedals with just the Roland GT-1000 and SY-300 devices.

So, how to play pieces that were written for a large collection of differing instruments and effects without hauling them all in for the gig?

The answer is – compromise. The point is to replicate the intent of the music, rather than accurately reproduce precisely what we did the first time. Of course, we never really replicate the album tracks anyway as the content is semi-improvised, but this goes further, and in some ways were are also updating the music as well of course.

There are two main areas that need addressing: pedals and synths.

Pedals

As I’ve blogged about before I’ve replaced my huge collection of pedals with just three, The BOSS SY-300 ‘guitar’ synth, the BOSS GT-1000 multi-FX and the Pigtronix Infinity Looper.

Obviously the GT-1000 can easily replace the bread-and-butter effects of delays, reverbs, octavers etc – but not pitch-shifters. As I mentioned in my review the shifters on the GT-1000 are beyond terrible. So the SY-300 took over the duty of pitch shifter when I needed 5ths. One triangle wave oscillator tuned a 5th below and one tuned a 5th above independently switchable sorted that one out pretty quickly.

The big pedal missing for Afternoon Nightmare is the Moogerfooger MF-105 MuRF (look it up, it’s complicated!). It’s a totally unique, analogue, pedal that has no equivalent that I’m aware of – certainly not in the BOSS range. I made an approximation to this using the slicer and phaser in the SY-300. Synching these together gave a nice effect that sounds nothing like the MuRF, but has a similar ‘feel’. It gives the track a more modern harder edge than previously but I think it still works. The reason I did this in the SY-300 rather than the GT-1000 (which has more control over both phasers and slicers) is simply that the SY-300 has a different set of slicer patterns, and the one I liked most was in that device.

The other big think I am missing is the Vox VDL-1 looper. This pedal allows you to add effects to running loops, which the Pigtronix doesn’t, and I made extensive use of that feature for a while. However, GT-1000 to the rescue here as I can move the looper into it’s own chain on that device and add effects after it that don’t affect the main playing chain. This was a key feature of the GT-1000 that I knew I would need. The ability GT-1000 to move effects around (even while playing) is very helpful and allows me to replicate pretty much any pedal order I ever had – and I did move them around a lot over time!

Synths

As this was a Helicopter Quartet gig and not a CSMA one, I wanted to be carrying the smallest number of synths as possible – ideally just one. This I managed by employing the Elektron Digitone. Not only does it have a sequencer (for TB-3 and Moog effects) but also plays well from a keyboard. It’s FM rather than subtractive synthesis but it also has a filter, so by not modulating the carriers and playing with the filter I can get quite a decent subtractive sound. Added to which modern FM synths now have various waveforms in them, not just sines so the sounds are still quite complex. It’s not a Moog – but what is? It does just fine for the simple jobs it’s asked to do here – and is VERY portable!

The trig features of the Digitone work well in copying the more extreme effects of the TB-3, Using the 4 tracks I can change patterns and add notes to a sequence easily. I’m using the Softstep to control which tracks are active and which are muted so that I can do this using my feet while playing violin. Something that was not possible with the TB-3!

Conclusion

I think we’ve done a good job of reproducing the *intent* of the tracks using different equipment and that makes an important point that you don’t need to keep vintage equipment around just to play old songs. Yes I know this is not as extreme an example as, say playing 70s tracks on original Moog Modulars etc, but I think the point still stands. Especially if you don’t have roadies and a large stage! I do still own most of the gear that I mentioned above, but it would be ridiculously impractical to use it all for a gig – both in terms of carrying it (often just for one piece) and setting it up. I’m confident we can put on an entertaining and convincing performance by listening to what was intended, and replacing it with modern equipment that does something similar.

If you can afford to hire people to lug truckfuls of gear around for that ‘authentic’ sound then good luck to you, of course. But I have to get this stuff in my car and set it up myself on a small stage where people are actually here to watch the headliner and not us!

[Updated]

The results are now available as a downloadable album:

(apologies for the terrible formatting of this blog post. WordPress refuses to make it more readable)

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A drastic move

Five years ago I wrote this on effects pedals. To save you the bother of reading it I was basically singing the praises of having lots of pedals and how I didn’t think Multi-FX boxes really cut the mustard.

Now – I just bought a Roland GT-1000 Multi-FX pedal to replace my ‘main’ pedalboard. Possibly.

There are a number of reasons behind this decision. The first of which was that I hurt my back – I’m not sure how, it’s almost certainly music gear-related but probably not the pedalboard itself. And this got me thinking about the weight of the gear I carry around and how much I can change my current setup to be lighter. My current pedalboard needs changing anyway (just the board, not the pedals) as it’s old and worn out. I looked at new boards that would allow more flexibility but soon realised that weight was going to be a real problem.

My next thought was inspired by the SY-300 ‘guitar’ synth and that I mentioned it was good enough to be used an occasional multi-FX pedal and wondered what the latest in actual multi-FX pedal technology was like. It just so happened that Roland were about to release the GT-1000, so this would be the very latest in the technology. I did look at other competitive units, but this seemed the best fit for what I need as regards weight and flexibility and Roland have an excellent reputation for quality.

One of my original arguments against multi-FX pedals was that it made all your effects come from the same manufacturer which gave a homogeneity to the sound – then I looked at my pedalboard and noticed that 60% of them were Roland BOSS pedals anyway! Also the quality argument has, inevitably, gone away too. The quality of modern digital effects is outstanding, Roland’s ACB technology is making excellent ‘analogue-like’ synths and quite a lot of effects pedals are digital these days anyway – including my beloved RE-20 ‘tape’ delay.

Another consideration is that pedals are a part of my instrument almost as the violin is, they have a profound effect on the sound I produce. That’s true up to a point but something I’m less worried about than I used to be, to be honest. I was always adding and removing pedals on the main board (apart from the RE-20 delay) and my sound is now much more based on the violin itself and the way I play than strange noises I can make. The main sound change will probably be using the tape delay in the GT-1000 instead of the RE-20; while both are from Roland, the GT-1000 tape delay is not explicitly an RE-201 emulation so there is a detectable difference there. It remains to be seen how important that is to me. Of course there will be a huge ‘user-interface’ change for me to manage but I can handle that.

Apart from the (lack of) weight, one thing that really appealed to me about a high-end multi-FX pedal was the flexibility of having the effects soft-wired. With a discrete pedalboard you have to position the effects boxes in a way that will be of use for most cases. With a multi-FX that can change as much as you like. I don’t actually envisage changing the pedal order a lot, there is definitely an optimal order that does serve for most purposes, but there have been several times when I had wished that a pedal was somewhere else in the chain or (and this does happen fairly often these days) that I could split the chain into 2 separate streams and join them again later. This is especially useful where my ‘extension’ pedalboard is concerned.

Because the extension board serves a couple of purposes – drones from the superego and ‘odd’ effects from the more boutique pedals – it often needs to be wired in different places and often should bypass the main effects chain entirely. I only really do this when recording because of the hassle, but having that board as a ‘send’ from the GT-1000 means it can be moved around easily with just a pedal press. The same goes for the looper which can now be before the final reverb rather than after it without having more sets of leads and sockets.

Of course soft wiring also gets rid of the mess of cables on a conventional pedalboard – with all the attendant reliability and noise issues. It also removes a lot of complications about powering them all adequately – which is not as simple as it might sound.

As to weight, you’ll notice that I mentioned the extension pedalboard. That might also disappear too, now I have mastered the art of making drones and other fancy effects with the SY-300. With the addition of a looper, the possibility is that I could do a full solo gig with just (shock, horror, probe) ONLY THREE pedals!

One thing I suppose I’ll miss is the “She’s got more pedals than <x>” jokes at gigs. But as nobody asks me to do gigs any more it’s not really an issue. Even if I did start gigging again (I’m available!), surely it’s more impressive to get all of that noise out of only 3 boxes. The other thing I *might* miss is looking at and playing with new pedals. Having thought about this though, a lot of new pedals these days seem to be more in the realm of ‘strange noises’ and have fairly limited application. I’ve seen this happen a lot where a supposedly interesting pedal gets one or two uses for its particular sound and then gets moved into the box of unused effects. Mostly these days I find myself concentrating on making music using the proven ‘useful’ ones rather than looking for a ‘new sound’ from a different piece of electronics.

Here’s a quick improv I did using the GT-1000 a few days after I got it

P.S.
The accessory FS-6 footswitch is insanely stupid. It has LEDs that light up when they are on in ‘latch’ mode, which sounds really useful. But it only works with the GT-1000 and SY-300 in ‘momentary’ mode – where the LEDs only light up when your foot is pushing the switch. So those LEDs are totally useless for indicating the state of the pedal effect they are connected to. But just in case you thought, “oh I won’t bother putting a battery in it then” – it needs power to work at all. Mad. Totally fucking mad. Come on Roland – fix this please, how the hell hard can it be to read the state of a switch instead of using it as an edge-trigger?

 

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RPM Finished again

So that’s the RPM challenge finished for another year. I threw away a lot more this year than previously and still managed to complete the ‘more than 35 minutes’ challenge. Aided by a 13 minutes violin improvisation of course!

I won’t ramble on about the contents of the album here, you can read that on bandcamp by downloading it (I won’t charge you, just take it if you like it). Stylistically this album – a bit like last year’s – is a bit of a transitional one, though quite where I’m going isn’t entirely clear, even to me. I mentioned on Twitter a while ago that I was having a bit of a musical crisis and that is still unresolved, so this album has 80s-style drums & synths, odd synth noises, keyboard noodling, an all-acoustic piece as well as a violin improv that could have come from any time in the last 5 years (from me at any rate). Oh and a cat snoring – if you download it for the bonus track – and a ‘classical’ piece I wrote 13 years ago rescored for electronic instruments.

Despite it being a bit ‘neither owt nor nowt’ as we say around here I’m pretty pleased with it. There’s lots I would like to have been able to do better but also plenty I think I did well, or at least well enough for an album made in 25 days. Lets see what happens next time eh?

I also did a video for the “Violin Improv”

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“Exit Review”: Vox VDL-1 Dynamic Looper

The Vox VDL-1 looper has been a major part of my violin pedal set up for some time now. I bought it in August 2011 and have rarely done a violin gig without it. This is a review based on those 6 years of use and to explain why I think I need to get something else now.

As I wrote in 2012, there’s no such thing as a perfect looper. They all have their plus and minus points. Which one works for you depends on which plus points you need the most and which minus points annoy you least. I assembled this list of pluses and minuses for the Vox looper based on those 6 years of near constant use.

Good points

• Two loops. They can be either synchronised to each other or not as you want. The mode is easy to set when you record the second loop and was one of the main reasons I looked into this looper over others available at the time.
• Loop Effects. The VDL-1 has loads of effects that you can add to loops after they have been recorded. This is a great feature, you can pitch shift, add filter effects, stutters … oh all sort of things. You can also vary those effects with the footpedal while they are being applied to the loop. It’s such a cool feature. You can overdub effects over other effects too.
• Live effects. You can also apply effects to the live signal that are independent of the loop signal – though they do get recorded onto the loop if you record it. I hardly ever used this as you can only have one live effect per preset.
• Foot pedal for controlling the effects. Another great feature I think, it allows the loops to become something more than just a static background effect, they can make loops really ‘live’ and evolving.
• Stop modes fade/delay and stop. In practice I only ever used the fade and stop options as the delay sounds cheesy. Again the fade option is a major feature for me as it allows me to change sections of the music gradually rather than suddenly.
• Uses a standard 9V pedal power supply. It’s a minor point but useful when you have a lot of pedals and power bricks lying around!
• The price. It’s only £199 new. It was that price when I bought it 6 years ago and seems to be the same now. It’s very good value.

Good points that I never used

• Microphone input (with trim). It has an XLR socket on the back for a dynamic microphone. I never used it though.
• Metronome/bpm option. Actually for me this was a bad feature as it’s quite easy to switch it on by mistake and I never needed it. When it was on, it forced loops to end on a whole beat – which was useless to me as the looper never knew what speed I was playing at so it just left empty space at the end of my carefully crafted loops!

Bad points

• It has a gate built into it that you can’t bypass. When I first wrote my piece on loopers I thought it was the Vox being noisy. This isn’t true, it’s the BOSS RE-20 that hisses (it’s emulating a tape delay – rather too well). But the looper’s gate makes that noise come and go in a very conspicuous way when playing pizzicato. UPDATE: It does seem that the Vox was aggravating the RE-20 noise. Now I’m using the Pigtronix Inifinty looper it’s all gone quiet!
• For arco playing it’s much less of a big deal to be honest, but once you know about it it starts to annoy.
• No loop level control. Loops always play back at the level they were recorded at. You can assign the footpedal to control the loop level, but it counts as an effect so you can’t have any other effects applied to that loop unless you overdub the loop at a lower level and then change presets.
• Changing presets causes a momentary dropout in the live channel. This one of my biggest gripes with this looper. If you want to change preset while playing … DON’T. You’ll get a glitch of about 1/8 of a second in your playing. The loops continue to play fine so I don’t know why it can’t keep the direct channel going too. It’s really irritating.
• The effects are often of low quality. The pitch shifts and distortions are quite ropey if I’m honest. and the delays are quite basic sounding. They are nowhere near as good as the ones I have in dedicated effects pedals. For the price I suppose that’s to be expected, but it does make them less useful than you might like. Generally I mostly used the reverse, stutter and filter effects.
• It’s complex to operate. There are quite a few operations where you have to press more than one switch at the same time … with your foot … without falling over … and playing a violin. With practice I learned to do this, but it does take practice.
• It’s big. really big. Not heavy. Just big. There’s no way this would go on a pedalboard, unless it was a huge pedalboard with not much else on it. So you do have to carry it around separately. This also means it always has to be at either the beginning or end of the signal chain.
• Low build quality. I think this has become a major problem for me now. The footpedal need regular tightening to stop it just flapping around and returning down to the ‘toe’ position all the time. The push switches fall off occasionally and when that happens the tiny springs disappear into the undergrowth of the carpet or blackness of wherever you’re playing. The internal boards come loose and the whole thing stops working until you kick it … then it works for a while and you need to kick it again. Then you need to take it to bits and just reseat everything because it’s been kicked around. Its not fun.

Things that other people have mentioned not liking that never or rarely bothered me

• There’s a stupid bug where if you record a loop and don’t use it immediately (go to STOP rather than PLAY), it puts a small gap at the end of the loop, adding time to it so you lose sync. I only hit this once playing a piece written by someone else.
• Only 90 seconds total recording time. I very rarely hit this though I’ve come near to it quite often. For others it’s been a deal-breaker though.
• No way of saving loops. I always play live.

So I’ve been looking around at other loopers that might take its place. Current favourite is the Pigtronix Infinity – watch this space, I might review it in six year’s time 😉

 

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“Don’t Drone Alone” – tape release

Sometime ago I was approached by small local label “Don’t Drone Alone” and asked if I would like to make a release for them. Apparently they had heard my set for “A Working Day of Drone” and liked it 🙂

Once I saw “ripples” by genesis plays in our hearts on their website I knew they were going to be my kind of people, I’m a huge Genesis fan, so I agreed.

That release is now available to buy, you can get a physical cassette or a digital download. I do recommend the cassette, if only for the awesome artwork that Christian Harrop did for it. All my albums have had ‘artwork’ done by me and as I’m no artist I’ve generally used photographs … but I’m not a good photographer either. So it’s a real delight to have quality artwork drawn by a quality artist!

Side 1 is based on the sort of show I tend to do live, it’s mostly electric violin with lots of effects pedals. I’ve used the Blofeld synth on there to fill in some textures but there’s actually a lot less synth on there than you might think on first listen … I can get some great sounds from those pedals. The title “From The Carboniferous” refers to an abandoned quarry near to where I live that allegedly has strange creatures living in it.

Side 2 is a short ‘sci-fi’ style piece played entirely on keyboards. The Yamaha Montage to be precise.

Both tracks were recorded in a single take (with a little editting to remove the occasional pedal pops and bangs) from ideas I already had. Although they were done in one take, they are not necessarily the first take!

The tapes are limited to 50 copies so be quick if you want one of those. I should have some to sell at a gig I’m playing on the 27th of July at the The Fenton in Leeds.

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RPM 2017

For my 7th RPM Challenge album I’ve take a dystopian theme – yes, even more so than usual.

Due to various personal and domestic constraints I’ve had far less chance to prepare and work on the album this year. In fact I have had no preparation at all, so what is on there is largely a set of layered improvisations. ‘Introduction’ isn’t even layered, it’s a single take at the keyboard. For most of the tracks though, I’ve laid down an ‘idea’ track and worked with it by adding other sounds and instruments to make what, I hope, is a coherent piece of music.

The backing to ‘Restart’ was a late addition when a hard disk drive failed on me (luckily only a backup drive) making a strange a persistent rhythm I felt I just had to work with. So, despite starting this month with absolutely no plan at all I still managed to get 9 tracks totalling over 50 minutes. Oh the power of improvisation … and a 15 minutes ambient drone piece 😉

For those that care about these things here are the instruments I used on each track:

1. Introduction: Yamaha Montage
2. Trails of the City: Yamaha Montage, PreenFM2, builder taking my ceiling down*
3. Cave Work: Octave electric violin with SY-300 guitar synth, Waldorf Blofeld
4. Escape Route: MakeNoise Erbe-Verb+Mutable Systems ‘Clouds’, Electric violin, PPG softsynth
5. Robot Dance: Emu Proteus, Yamaha Montage, PPG softsynth, spoons
6. In my day this all was shoe shops**: Moog Sub37, DSi Tetra, Erbe-verbe, Octave Violin
7. Restart: Failed hard disk, Yamaha Montage, Nord Lead A1,
8. The Revolution will be short: Bastl Instruments Trinity Drum,  Nord Lead A1, Emu Proteus, Electric violins
9. The End: Nord Lead A1, Moog Sub37, Emu Proteus

*I told you it had been a busy time.

**Track 6 was originally going to be called “In my day all this was Tescos” which is a better, and arguably funnier, title but I didn’t want corporate lawyers on my back.

As always, it’s a pay what you want download release on bandcamp.

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Helicopter Quartet – new video

In deep in RPM challenge mode at the moment (yes, it’s February!) as well as working on several other things at the same time (including an orchestra concert at the weekend .. eek!). But I did find time to film a Helicopter Quartet rehearsal.

This is a preview of a track we are working on for the new album, filmed live at Rock & Roll Circus in Leeds. We currently have 3 tracks recorded and mixed and we have 3 more to do – this is one of the latter. We have no date for the album release, it’ll be ready when it’s done.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this.

 

 

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