When I subscribed to Remix magazine a year ago under the guise of my cover band, Jen Woolfe & the Happy Pervs, I had no idea what the tech any of the articles were talking about. Since then, I've been studying Ableton's Live and Propellerhead's Reason and finally the acronyms are starting to make sense. It's a Music Tech Geek Mag. Perfect.
I've been making great strides in learning production, far greater than I expected. I still feel like I'm in the first room of my mega-warehouse of audio art supplies, but I'm finally able to recognize tools and organize ideas. I recently realized that Reason is an instrument. Sure, I read the words VST a hundred times, but it didn't click until I started playing with Dr. Rex's Loop player. (I know Reason isn't actually a VST, as that is a standard, but that's what is so confusing!). Reason is a Virtual Studio. Literally! It consists of an imaginary rack with imaginary synthesizers, drum machines, players, mixers, samplers and signal processors that look like the real thing. You can even turn the rack around and see the cables jiggling, all plugged into each other. (Yay for virtual cable management!)
So my epiphany came when I 'discovered' Dr. Rex's Loop Player. I had been trying to find a way to create a rhythm section for Live Session (our live band project emerging in the heart of the Leschi Lounge), the way Jay Rae does with his drum machine (I think its a Roland MC-303). The biggest thing I learned was that all the loops that I'd been playing as Live clips were static. Read: boring. Jay could turn the kick drum and snare drums on and off at the touch of a button, creating breakdowns and transitions on the fly. This makes the drum section dynamic and interesting.
Ok, but before I go on about Dr. Rex, I should mention another thing that I was getting stuck on. Though Reason is my instrument, I wasn't 'playing it' in the sense that Jay plays his instruments, by clicking buttons and typing keys. I was using a mouse to move sliders and click play, stop, record. Definitely not the same feel. That was because I didn't understand how to get my MIDI controller to work with Reason. I'm using an M-Audio Axiom 61. This is a big mama, with 61 keys, sliders, banks, buttons, knobs. I'll be honest - it scares me. But alas I was saved. I stumbled upon (actually I think I RTFM) drivers that M-Audio wrote to work with Reason, making it pretty 'plug-in-play'. I don't have to program anything to get the knobs and sliders on my MIDI controller to move the knobs and sliders on Dr. Rex. And I can manually assign the pads to start and stop multiple Dr. Rex's, where I'm storing the loops. Yay!! Now I have more of an instrument that I can punch, twist, roll, click without the bore & bandwidth restraints of going through a mouse. And, I make the loops dynamic by cutting the bass drum with D and S sliders on the Amp Envelope or (my newest discovery) by routing Rex into a track on Live and using Live's many many many effects. Now we're having fun!!
So the next step, of course, is to move past relying on pre-made loops and build my own rhythms. But until then, I have quite a few different genre's to play with and Jay Rae, Mel Sky, Sklobot and Aaron can build the backgrounds, melodies and basslines on top of some pretty kick ass shit.
Back to Remix, the magazine that is helping me open my eyes to possibilities. It was there that I read an article that recommended opening multiple tracks on Live and inserting different effects to each track. What a great way to try out different sounds! I still don't understand everything that the rag talks about, but the hardware centerfolds, revealing all their RCA's, XLR, quarter inch and firewire jacks sure do make my mouth water. My favorite article is where the cover artist drops their drawers, sharing with us all the tools in their studio. Underworld, Bjork, Felix da Housecat. All the pieces they use to mark their own sound and experience is music tech geek heaven. I've seen it all. And I definitely want more.
