question marks
from a
dusty black box
Sometimes, a note will be in tune according to the tuner, but it'll sound more in tune when its made out of tune "by hand", a little bit. I have no idea why that is, when you tune different sections of samples, but maintain all the time durations, its strange what can happen. some parts of rhythmic samples sound much better totally out of tune. the more out of tune a noise is, the more you can use it with anything else that's in tune, or not, it fits all the chords with equal clash, the strangest thing of all is how good irrational noises sound played in tight rhythm. I can almost hear the schizoid boxfuzz backfeed talking to me from inside the beat, like some kind of malfuntion that has somehow become articulate and extremely coordinated, babbling eletro-gibberish at me like a machinegun while it blows itself to pieces, but debris and shrapnel keep boinging back in oddball blips, bloops, skreeks, short circuit wall current, and comatose duracells, arcing to ground thru a hamster's whisker that's been wired up as a low-rent tesla-coil whammy bar.
That's when I
press the NEXT button, does it do what I thought
it would do? NO? why not? WHY, and HOW, am I THIS wrong? why is this always
happening to me? sometimes I'll turn knobs and press buttons for 20 or 30
minutes, just trying to find one control, ANY control, that changes the
noise somehow... and I can't!
Sometimes a noise will start happening, and I won't like
it enough to keep on hearing it FOREVER, so I'll get really busy trying to
eliminate it, and for some fucked up reason, or perhaps layer upon layer of
lists of fucked up reasons, I can't for the life of me have any effect on the
sound, I can't turn it down even a little for relief, much less stop it cold
in its tracks. After 35 or 45 seemingly endless knob twiddlings, none
having any effect at all, I start getting very irritated, and even more in a
hurry to just end it somehow, and start with a blank slate, dead silence,
anything but wrestling an uncontrollable fungus weed spawning question marks
from a dusty black box covered with cat hair
Finally in desperation, I hit the one button
I know
will work... RECORD.
Make a loop out of it.
Hit it with every ugly plug-in stashed in the "rack mount" menu
tabs... ah, I always wanted to have 4 full length racks with over 100
effects boxes to tweak, now I have it, but what do I end up using??? good
ol' ring modulation, dude! why change a good
thing? it worked quite well 30 years ago, Fender Rhodes Stage 73 thru a
Dallas-Arbiter Fuzzface, like Mike Ratledge in the Soft Machine used to
run his Lowery thru, 2 Fuzzfaces plugged in series,
like Jimi, but not wah-wah in between, I know because I snuck up to the
stage at a Soft Machine REHEARSAL in 1970 and looked, so that's how he
does it! Play clusters of adjacent notes on the Rhodes, instant brutal
distortion and violent rumbling interference between simultaneous notes,
especially minor seconds like C and C#, in the bass octave of course...
nice dueling sawblade effect, let's make the power tools start a fire! Use
a hand drill to strike 25 kitchen matches in 1/2 second, use the air
pumping pedals from an Old West Harmonium to blow WD-40 spray across the
keyboard to the on/off switch lifted from a red and white ACETONE
organ,
mounted on top, and the pilot light is from an old water heater, that's
right, billowing clouds of WD-40 flame, ever notice how a huge ball of
blue flame makes that whooshing, sucking wind noise as it "catches
its breath" and ignites the next spray blast....
|
it begins
with a blessing, it ends with a curse |
