Category Archives: Audio

Sounds and music.

Quora Answer: Why do some people like instrumental music way over music with vocals in them?

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora.

Full question for this answer:

“I have noticed that my disinterest is turning to antipathy towards music with vocals in them, especially pop music. Most people say that vocals is extremely important to them and a song without it is just .. ‘blah’.

Is there a word for this sort of preference? How did people develop such an attraction towards instrumental music, while clearly the most heard music is with vocals in them (radio)?”

I strongly prefer instrumental music.

For me the main reason is because I can just enjoy the music and imagine/think whatever I like without being drawn into the world of the singer.

Most of the time when I’m listening to music, I don’t really want to think about someone else’s messed up relationship or dead dog. I’d rather imagine my own things and/or have my own thoughts. I like the way that sound enhances my thinking and I don’t want to give someone else control. Lyrics automatically change the subject.

I listen to a lot of genres, but the absolute worst thing is the tendency of a lot of ambient/atmospheric/psytrance electronic music to include fragments of lectures by Timothy Leary or Deepak Chopra. Stop ruining your music by trying to make idiots put ill-concieved ideas into my head. I instantly turn off anything that does that and never listen again.

Words paint a picture of a world. There are a lot of worlds I don’t want to live in. That’s why I never listen to country or gospel. But, when I’m in the mood for lyrics, the worlds are far stronger in non-instrumental music.

Words can be overwhelming sometimes. Notes, not so much.

(Player Profile) Michael Manring

Michael Manring is a pretty well-known soloist among bass players, but less so among mainstream music listeners.

He’s known for his custom fretless Zon Hyperbass guitar shown in this video performance/interview from Bass Player LIVE! 2013:

He was the youngest of four in a musical family. He took classes at the Berklee College of Music and studied with Jaco Pastorius. A very technical player,  his style includes use of the e-bow, changing tunings mid-song, slapping, popping, muting, and two-handed tapping. To understand his style, it helps to know that he considers the bass guitar a very expressive instrument. He develops techniques that expand on that expressiveness, including quite heavy use of alternative tunings.

Much of Michael’s music could be considered instrumental “calm jazz” that is often filed as New Age or Adult Alternative, but he has a variety of styles and sometimes plays loud, upbeat, bouncy, funky music. He considers his work to be genre agnostic and doesn’t worry about fitting into any particular category.

His music recordings are very prolific, with of hundreds of collaborations and guest appearances with artists such as Alex Skolnick, Montreux, Jeff Loomis, and Paolo Giordano thanks in part to his role as house bassist with Windham Hill Records. He has also released a number of solo studio albums.

Original solo work (links to Amazon):

1986 Unusual Weather
1989 Toward the Center of the Night
1991 Drastic Measures
1994 Thonk
1995 Up Close 21
1998 The Book of Flame
2005 Soliloquy

(Video) Davie504 Plays 100 Amazing Bass Lines

“Davie504” is an Italian bass player with a great selection of YouTube videos.

In this video he plays 100 famous bass riffs in 13 minutes:

There’s also a sequel “100 Amazing Bass Lines 2” that will show up as a related video.

It includes riffs from a nice variety of bands, though it does have a heavier selection of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jamiroquai.

If you want to learn a particular riff, you can click the gear on the player and change the video player to half speed. That’s a great feature of YouTube that not everyone knows about.

Quora Answer: Are analog synthesizers overrated?

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora.

To put it simply, yes. Analog synthesizers are absolutely overrated. I’m referring specifically to subtractive synthesizers.

The differences in sound quality really ARE quite minor, so don’t feel bad if you can’t much tell them apart.

That’s not to say they’re not useful. They certainly are, and I say this as someone who owns more than one. They each have their own distinctive sound, but analog sounds are quite limited. I don’t mean you can’t create a wide variety of sounds with them, but rather that the type of sounds you can create don’t vary much from one analog synthesizer to another.

Most of the love (and idolatry) for vintage analog gear comes from how groundbreaking and iconic certain synthesizers are and how important they were for music of their time and the amount of joy the music created with them has brought to listeners. Just like most vintage cars aren’t actually very good cars, the historical and nostalgia aspects of vintage analog synthesizers affect their value greatly.

From a music maker’s perspective, the analog sound is worth it to a certain degree, but vintage analog not as much. 30-40 year old synthesizers break all the time, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single player or collector who hasn’t spent inordinate amounts of time and/or money on repairs. Good luck touring with an old Jupiter or CS. Just use or create the sounds you like and don’t worry about how they came into existence. The nice things about most modern synthesizer workstations is that they all have a massive library of sample-based sounds (including the sounds of vintage analog), one or more kinds of virtual analog synthesis, and the ability to load samples. Find a friend who likes vintage gear and sample some of it, because a working sampler or virtual analog sounds far better than a broken analog.

In a way it’s good that there’s an analog fad going on right now. New analog gear is being created and can substitute very well for decaying vintage gear. A prophet 6 is a great buy when you can get it new and it has much better capabilities and stability than a prophet 5, not the least of which is a large amount of patch memory.

Not Winamp’s Fault

So, the upgrade to Vista didn’t turn out to be 100% successful.

It turns out that the Winamp crashing I experienced was caused by Vista’s epic failure in the audio realm.  Since they changed the way audio drivers run (user mode instead of kernel mode now), no driver from an earlier version of Windows will run.

I tried and failed to get the following sound cards to work:

Sound Blaster Live!
Sound Blaster Live! Value
Terratec Audiosystem EWX 24/96
M-Audio Audiophile Delta 44
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Diamond Monster Sound MX400
Yamaha YMF744B
Dynex DX-SC51

The only one that worked was the Dynex card.  It’s also the only card I paid less than $10 for new.

The moral:  Only use extra-cheap soundcards.  Hi-Fi sound is not permitted.

On an upside, all of the Basternae 3 applications and utilities run fine on Vista.

Mud Sound Protocol

Today I added the framework to support the Mud Sound Protocol (MSP). I don’t have any sounds and haven’t added support to the client yet, but when it comes time to add sound it’ll be very easy. I figure I’ll do the sound design myself and/or enlist help from some of my friends over at Darksonus and it’ll turn out quite nicely.

Review: Suicide Commando – Mindstrip (2000)

I originally wrote this review for Darksonus.com, which no longer exists.

Track List:

  1. Jesus Wept

  2. Hellraiser (Psychopath 01-Version)

  3. Body Count Proceed

  4. Raise Your God

  5. Mindstripper

  6. Run

  7. Comatose Delusion (Overdose Shot Two)

  8. Blood In Face

  9. Love Breeds Suicide

  10. Slaves

Sounds: 3.5 of 5

Vocals: 3 of 5

Composition: 3 of 5

Overall Rating: .633

My overall reaction to Johan Van Roy’s Belgian project was indifference.

The sample quality of Jesus Wept is fairly low. Yeah, industrial is supposed to sound dirty and noisy, but there’s a difference between noisy and low-quality. I like distorted vocals. Most industrial takes a few listens to really understand what the heck they’re saying. Suicide Commando may have taken it half a notch too far into the unintelligible range.

Hellraiser starts off with a great synth sound until it turns into techno. By this time I was beginning to think this was a techno or synthpop group that had picked up a distortion pedal at a pawn shop. I will say the actual sounds used in this song are quite cool and the vocal quality is a bit better than Jesus Wept.

The techno-esque extravaganza continued with Body Count Proceed. The drone synth sound made me feel like I was having a hole drilled in my skull. In a bad way. Even so, the beat was rather contagious and I couldn’t help but tap my appendages on the nearest solid surface. Since I was at work I had to keep it to a minimum. Can’t have the boss walking in while you’re tapping your bits on the monitor, you know. That’s more explaining that I’d care to do.

By the time I reached Raise Your God, something was starting to bug me about the whole Suicide Commando formula. Yet again it was an average song that didn’t particularly stand out for me. It wasn’t something I loved nor was it something I hated.

I can honestly sum up the rest of the disc fairly easily. Just like the first few songs. Nothing that stands out as overly good or bad though I would say that Comatose Delusion is the best song on the disc and Blood In Face came the closest to trying my patience. Although this is nothing but your run of the mill industrial, it is decent overall. Anything’s better than Paula Spears or Britney Abdul or whatever they’re calling that pseudo-musical genre now. Will I see them live if they come around? Yes. Will I tell all my friends to pick up this disc? No.

Suicide Commando sounds a remarkably large amount like Velvet Acid Christ, and if you like them you might as well pick this up. Overall the music isn’t terribly creative and more follows the EBM/industrial “formula”, obviously influenced by their tour with Velvet Acid Christ, though Suicide Commando doesn’t do it as well. Don’t get me wrong, I still like the stuff, but as filler rather than foreground.

Review: And One – Virgin Superstar (2000)

I originally wrote this review for Darksonus.com, which no longer exists.

  1. Virgin Superstar

  2. Wasted

  3. You Don’t Love Me Anymore

  4. Goodbye Germany

  5. Wet Spot

  6. Panzermensch

  7. My Story

  8. Life To Lose

  9. Not The Only One

  10. Don’t Need The Drugs

  11. Mr. Jenka

Vocals: 4.5 of 5

Sounds: 3.0 of 5

Composition: 3.5 of 5

Overall: .733

And One is a fairly popular EBM group whose tunes are heard on goth/industrial club nights around the world. It’s not surprising, because it’s very difficult to listen to And One without some part of your body wanting to move around. Sure, being EBM some of their stuff is a little too techno for my liking, but they are quite good overall.

“Virgin Superstar” isn’t what I would call the strongest opener. Although the vocal harmony is great (which you’ll get used to on this disc), there’s not all that much to the music.

The song “Wasted” starts off the disc with a nice hard danceable beat. The line “Get out of my way because you know that I am totally wasted” is a classic and tends to stick in your head. Good for stumbling through a bar to.

“You Don’t Love Me Anymore” is a synthpoppy sort of tune that really fails to grab me. It’s put together well, but it just doesn’t stand out, sounding a little bland to me.

“Goodbye Germany” doesn’t stand out too much musically, and the vocals don’t do much until the chorus. All in all, this is a “take it or leave it” song, but the chorus does tend to stick in your head if you let it.

For this album, And One absorbed Annelie Bertilsson from Cat Rapes Dog and I’d bet that she was glad to get out of that pseudo-musical abomination (see our review of Trojan Whores). Listening to “Wet Spot”, It becomes obvious that Annelie has more musical talent than is deserved by Cat Rapes Dog. It starts off with an ambient feel and then the synthesizer line starts with an almost a James Bond “The World Is Not Enough” feel to it. Both vocalists sound great on this song and the man sitting behind the mixing console certainly earned his paycheck.

What can I say about the song “Panzermensch”? Well, I can say that the synth sounds are absolutely amazing and the vibe of the song is intense. It hits hard and is one of the most danceable songs I’ve ever heard (and if you’ve ever been to a club where most everyone knows this song, the dancefloor tends to go completely nuts). I’ve never been one to buy a disc based on hearing one song, but in this case I would make an exception. The lyrics are in German, but it’s my opinion that most good industrial lyrics are in German. There’s something about the language that just sounds more factory-fresh than the same phrases in English. It’s no wonder this song has become one of their hits.

“My Story” has a nice string line, but there’s not much to say about it. It’s not terribly interesting, nor terribly worth my time talking about. Too techno.

I love the crystal bell synth sound that opens “Life to Lose”, but it gives no indication what to expect for the song itself. Unfortunately it looks like very little effort went into the music, but the vocals almost make up for it.

“Not The Only One” is yet another song that has a more of the “James Bond” essence to it – in the string line at least. This song is much more synthpop than EBM, which seems to be the direction And One is moving in slowly but surely.

“Don’t Need The Drugs?” I love the song. It is a little on the Depeche Mode side, though, which isn’t my cup of tea. Even so, it is an excellent song with a great arrangement and sound all over the place.

And One does a very good job of filling up the sound palette. The vocal harmonies are very good, with Annelie blending so well with Steve Naghavi that in some places their voices might as well just be one.

If you like EBM, you’ll probably like And One, although this disc is a bit patchy with only a few of the songs qualifying as great (which seems to be an ongoing habit of And One). If you don’t like EBM and/or synthpop, it’d be a good idea to pass this disc by, because that’s exactly what this disc is.

And One is Steve Naghavi on vocals and “machines”, Rick Schah on keyboards, Annelie Bertilsson on vocals, and Joke Jay on drums. This disc was produced by Steve Naghavi and Christer Hermodsson.

And One’s website is at http://www.andone.de/

Review: Cat Rapes Dog – Trojan Whores (1992)

I originally wrote this review for Darksonus.com, which no longer exists.

  1. Trojan Whores

  2. Everything’s Gone Green (New Order cover)

  3. 909 Whores

Sounds: 3 of 5

Vocals: 1.5 of 5

Composition: 2.5 of 5

Overall Rating: .467

Most people probably have not heard of this Swedish group. The name might have something to do with it. The fact that they’re not very good might also contribute. One source refers to them as “punkelectro”, while another refers to them as industrial. Cat Rapes Dog is, however, a truly industrial band. Their early jam sessions were conducted in a factory where member Joel Rydstrom was working. At night, they would spend hours banging on sheets of metal with iron poles hoping the boss would not catch them.

While the lyrics to Trojan Whores are nothing short of brilliant with lines like “Open the doors, open the doors, I have a horse full of whores” and “This war ain’t no game anymore, this is a horse and it’s full of whores”, Everything’s Gone Green is nothing short of awful. The distortion does very little to hide how off-key singer Joel Rydstrom is (in fact, in an interview he admits that he had the idea to hide his awful vocals using distortion while seeing Ogre at a Skinny Puppy show), while the female vocalist sounds like she has had one too many Valium. In fact, either one sounds like they could throw up on themselves at any time during the song. The accompanying music is typical of European electronic dance music of the era, neither brilliant nor awful, just “average” drum-machine-and-synthesizer background. The accompanying guitar work is noticeably out of time in places, but blends into the mix fairly well.

Although they are influenced by Skinny Puppy, Cabaret Voltaire, and Einsturzende Neubauten, they somehow manage to completely fail to take the music to the next level. Had they not included the butchering of New Order’s Everything’s Gone Green, this disc would have scored higher. You may find it amusing, but Cat Rapes Dog likely to only find a permenant home in a music collection based on its novelty value. Although not very mass-marketable, the name has a certain ring to it.

If you want more information on Cat Rapes Dog, their official website is: http://crd.se/CRD.SE/HEM.html