Last night I once again joined Sami (Bangkok Impact) in his liveset at a Electro-nation event in the new room at the Melkweg (one of the more prominent performance spaces here) and learned some lessons. See inside for details on improvised dance music, experimental turntablism and breakneck development.
A few years ago Sami& me regularly played the Bangkok Impact livesets together, creating more freeform versions (with a lot more dub-influence and the ever-popular toy keyboards) of his studio tracks. When we started doing this we were young, inexperienced, and made a big mess of it, but with regular touring and the high-intensity practice that means we got quite good at it, if I do say so myself. With the end of the elektro/disco fad and the lack of budget for many places to fly two guys in, as well as Sami getting mastery over Ableton’s Live using extensive MIDI control and me focussing on developing my own sequencer we gradually stoped doing that.
For yesterday’s event we thought we’d play together once more, which meant I needed to figure out what instruments I’d play. I saw little point to syncing up a second copy of Live and with changes to Sami’s sound (as well as him only using a stereo feed instead of multi-channel to the desk) my collection of analogue effects for some dub-wise mixing didn’t seem like the answer either.
I set out to develop some simple instruments in ChucK to be controlled by game controllers. My “Lead-Joypad” (orignally made to use as a instrument in a band) was a natural first pick so I polished that up, adding multiple sound “presets”; basically these are very simple synths brought to life by the joypad’s motion sensing and some extra modulation. Three cheers for the STK from which I borrowed some building blocks to work as a quick& easy foundation (“Stifkarp” at low notes certainly brings the proverbial noise!).
That wasn’t enough, at least not for me, and I thought I’d experiment more with digital scratching of samples, hoping to bring some extra life to the vocal samples of some of the more popular Bangkok tracks. I started experimenting with a motion-sensing PSX controller made by Gamester (the “Evolution”) that I picked up cheaply this summer. The results of this were discouraging; for some reason the sensor has quite a bit of latency which wasn’t improved by the smoothing I needed to use to get rid of jitter and to avoid the HID poll-rate causing audio glitches. Aside from the technical issues it didn’t feel right at all. Scratching imaginary turntables in the air sounds like a very good idea and maybe others will get it to work but I fear that after this (my second attempt) I’ll have to abandon it; instruments have to feel “right” and this doesn’t.
I went back to my toy turntables (the EU version of the PSX Beatmania controller). The result was rather crude. For traditional forms of scratching there is clearly a absolute need for sesnors that get the speed of the platter’s rotation. Still this experment wasn’t a total loss as I learned a lot more about about interpolation of control signals for sample playback. These get tricky when we also want to be able to jump to cue-points. I think I’ve got that technology under control now. That’s another step there; Good device. Will be used more later.
As a third and final instrument I hacked up a simple drum-sample player to be controlled by the second turntable’s buttons with the platter taking care of a extra delay’s controls in the same way that that I use in my joystick sequencer. Simple stuff, but it works and I practiced with that quite a lot already so taht made sense. On a whim I also made scratching forwards trigger the last drum sample that was played, in addition to opening the delay’s gain in cases where there wouldn’t otherwise be a signal to delay. This turned out to work very well and be intuitive fun so that’s one thing I’ll add to my sequencer, I think.
I took this chance to experiment with was sample-bank selection through spinning the turntable platter, a concept I borrowed from the way song selection works in Beatmania (some professional digital DJ systems use it as well but those are less fun and Konami was there first, I think). This turned out to be a very intuitive idea, though it could use refining and should be combined with larger fonts.
That brings us to the end of a three day hacking binge with 15 minutes to spare to down a microwave dinner before Mehdi would pickl me up. Yay deadlines.
I liked the new space at the Melkweg but on seeing this big venue again I couldn’t help but feel spoiled with the smaller spaces where I played lately. The stage was way too high for my tastes. With a high stage none of the audience can see what you are actually doing, which is a bit offputing when you try to keep things as live as I like to. I talked about this with mrPauli in the backstage and he suggested (like me in the past) that it’d be a good idea to use a overhead camera and a projection screen in such cases.
While the set itself was well received I was less than completely happy with it myself. I especially had a problem with the dynamics of my drum samples. I had set volumes so the banks were balanced amongst themselves but that meant that when I’d push the fader up far enough for the high-hats to be heard over Sami’s heavily limited and full stereo feed the snares and claps would be way too loud. I’m not sure how that sort of thing could be solved without using a second limiter on the mixer’s out with all the downsides of that. I also experienced a relative lack of a real musical dialogue and little space for additions in the already quite full tracks Sami presented. This might have been due to Sami and me not having practised together for years, but I also wonder to what degree Ableton’s Live is really suitable for that sort of thing. Ableton remains quite firmly aimed at solitary presentations of pre-prepared material and less so at free-form improvisation between multiple musicians.
In the backstage Sami pleaded that in commercial dance clubs there is a strong demand for exactly that. I don’t think I believe that. I’d rather say that it’s become the assumption that the situation is approached that way, but that there are many other options. Before disco/house (etc) there was a strong tradition of improvisation around set structures in popular dance music in the form of jazz. I still fail to see why we couldn’t have more of a real dialogue between musicians (and the audience!) in commercial dance-clubs.
I should say that to me last night was far from bad; aside from pleasant chit-chat and matching drinks it did have some moments where it all came together very well musically. Some of the dub-style additions blended in very naturally and the lead-joypad worked out for at least one song when I could figure out the correct key by ear. Many lessons were learned; in two weeks at the local Fine Fleur festival I’ll play with Rob Bothof, which should be a good chance to make use of those.