2nd production “should consciously emulate a particular style of music production, either from the past or from the present day”, in an ORIGINAL piece:
Provide evidence (in your blog) of the production techniques you intend to use, with links to appropriate articles (detailing those techniques) and links to tracks where those techniques are clearly demonstrated (where possible).
first session
A D T
Artificial Double Tracking
Let’s go back to those times where analog was the only one way to record the music and the sound quality was ‘crafted by hands’ with love and passion. Even in the early 50’s sound engineers knew that double tracking the vocal in a song gives a richer sound. Especially for singers without strong voice. Early pioneers of this technique were Les Paul and Buddy Holly. Before the ADT was found a double tracking was a long process with separate tracks and numbers of trying to record a second track the same. One day during the spring in 1996 a sound engineer Ken Townsend from one of the most famous recording studios in the world ‘Abbey Road Studios’ was recording ‘The Beatles’. John Lennon just hated to do a double tracking so his sound engineer got an incredibly good idea to make it easier. ‘This effect was achieved by an early use of a tape recorder’s record head being used for playback as well as recording. When played back in combination with the signal from the playback head, the gap between the two heads created a delay which could be time-varied according to the speed at which the tape was played back. This is the same principle used by the once widely popular effects unit known as the Echoplex.’ (Virgil Moorfield, The Producer As Composer:Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music, 2005, p31).
Diagram of ADT
The example of Artificial Double Tracking used in ‘The Beatles’ song ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’
This is a very inspiring interview with Ken Townsend
How I found the ADT technique
I emulated an Artificial Double Tracking without an analog. At first I recorded a simple song only with a clean guitar, bass and vocal:
Then I duplicated the vocal track, pressed on ‘ticks’ and ‘varispeed’ and simply draw a tempo line. The vocal became way richer and more consistent. This is the result:
This result really surprised me so I would like to say big thank you to Ken Townsend that he found that technique which is very useful even at these times!
second session
Frank Zappa’s Xenochrony
I was writing about that technique in my previous post so now I will post another one experiment with this technique.
These are two original tracks before swapping guitar solo
This is the result
It sounds really interesting. ‘And so the musical result is the result of two musicians, who were never in the same room at the same time, playing at two different rates in two different moods for two different purposes, when blended together, yielding a third result which is musical and synchronizes in a strange way.’ (Frank Zappa)
third session
Reverse
In a 1910 Berlin journal Die Stimme wrote about the possibilities of Grammophonmusik. Alexander Dillmann were thinking ‘if it would be possible to create music with a phonograph not by recording sound but by engraving discs manually.’
‘There is, however, something strange about this puzzling engraving on the black disc before us. Engraving: yes, that’s what it is, though an engraver could never imitate this soundwave-engraving. Really never? A crazy thought: why couldn’t we go backward just as we go forward?’ (Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, 2010, p114).
‘Much of the theoretical discussion of Grammophonmusik centered on the possibilities of inscribing records, the first actual experiments were quiet different and involved the manipulation of prerecorded discs. One of the earliest was probably a 1920 Data performance that featured eight phonograph operators simultaneously playing classical and popular discs backward and forward and at differing speeds; the effect was apparently an intentionally complex and absurd polyphony. Various sources also indicate that in Paris during the early and mid-1920s composers such as Arthur Hoeree, George Antheil, and Darius Milhaud were independently testing the compositional possibilities of the record players by reversing recorded sounds and manipulating recording and playback speed. None of these forays into phonograph music has been preserved, however, whether in score or recorded form, and little is known about them beyond the fact that they once existed.’ (Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, 2010, p 117, 118).
‘The reverse tape technique became especially popular during the psychedelic music era of the mid-to-late 1960s, when musicians and producers exploited a vast range of special audio effects.’
Prog rock band ‘Yes’ used reverse effect in the ‘Roundabout’. The song starts with reversed sound:
One of the most famous examples of reversed music is Doctor Who Original Theme from 1963 composed by Ron Grainer and released in electronic way by Delia Derbyshire.
Reversed Jimmy Hendrix’s guitar solo (from 1:33-1:50):
‘Another famous example of the use of reverse tape effects is ‘The Beatles’ 1967 single “Strawberry Fields Forever” written by John Lennon and produced by George Martin During the verses, Lennon’s voice is accompanied by a series of rapid ‘swooshing’ sounds; these are actually the sounds of Ring Starr’s drum and cymbal accompaniment. These patterns were carefully pre-recorded, the tape reversed and the reversed percussion effects meticulously edited into the master tape to synchronise with the music.’ (Wikipedia)
This is the first backwards solo in ‘The Beatles’ song ‘I am only sleeping’:
(from 2:46)
This is my original track before reversing solo guitar
This is my result of reversed guitar solo
fourth session
Reassembly
I made this piece from different songs combining sounds together. Also reversed some guitar parts.
rtmarijakon 