penal colony: the making of unfinished business.main

I wanted to begin this section by offering up some declarators regarding the subject matter covered, as I fear that the title may be somewhat misleading. I'm using this as a soapbox to stand on and talk about the more technical aspects of making the record; much the way I did with the article I wrote back in '93 for Nexus 6 Magazine about how we went about making our first demos and "Put Your Hands Down". Crap like the writing process, what was going on in my head when I wrote some of the stuff, how I went about writing the songs, emotional/story arcs across the collection, and the like; I'm planning to cover as much of that ground as I can on the DVD that will be coming out with the limited edition release of "Unfinished Business".

Yeah, I know... By now, you're saying to yourself, "Bastards! I gotta wait for the DVD now to find out the intimate details of D's collective problems, and listen to him pontificate from here to eternity about the state of the human condition and UB's place in it?!! Just swell...". Sorry, friends. Baby's (my Daughter Bevin, to be specific) done run up her GAP card, and this brother's gotta scare up some simolians so she can stay looking cool like Avril Lavigne.

So, if this sort of coffee talk isn't your cup of, well, coffee; be sure to check out all of the other neato stuff here in the colony p.

...and in the beginning

When I first started composing music on computers - not counting work with hardware sequencers and drum machines, which began long before that - the challenges and disruption to the creative process they presented at the time became immediately apparent.

Did it make many tasks easier? Sure it did. My foray into computer music happened sometime in '89/'90. At the time, I was still in Ex-VoTo, doing drum programming for an EV side project we were working on called BUNK with Larry, the Bass Player of Ex-VoTo, and Mike Hateley, who went on to co-produce the first PC record, play guitar for a hugely popular band in the LA/Silverlake scene called Extra Fancy, now doing a thing with John Napier from Ethyl Meatplow called Baldylocks. I was the drummer of the outfit, and recorded all of my parts on Larry's trusty Atari 1040STe Running Steinberg Pro24, using a Roland Electronic Kit I had as a controller.

It was great. I could record my parts live in phrases as small or as big as I wanted, and I didn't have to record them in any logical chronological or sequential order. I could clean up mistakes. I could correct any mistakes in my timing using quantization. I could overdub individual parts without worrying about using up precious audio track space (we were using an old Otari 8 Track) or using audio tracks and having to bounce tracks and suffer with the degradation in audio quality and level lock that came with it. If I didn't like a kick or snare I used during recording because it didn't cut or sit right with everything else, I could change those or any of the other sounds used for my kit on mixdown. Having all of this flexibility was, without a doubt, life-changing. exhilarating. Just about any other related adjective you can think of.

Of course, by today's standards, the technology/process was quite crude, and it wasn't without its shortcomings...

To begin with, BUNK started out as some friends jamming, and excelled more at being a thrashy live thing than an excuse to noodle with recording/electronic/MIDI gear. Most of the songs were worked out collectively in real time, and we had already done some live shows, so the material had been rehearsed for awhile by the time we got around to committing it to tape. Intuitively, it seemed to make the most sense to record it the same way - turn the tape on and capture three guys making noise together in one room at the same time. The counter-intuitive to that paradigm was my drums. I played a completely electronic kit live, connected to a drum module and a sampler. Didn't even use live cymbals. If we recorded, I had nothing to mic. We could have recorded my drums to tape, sure; But the end result wouldn't have been nearly as good, and would have used up audio track space that would be better suited for other things. No, none of that made any sense. We had that Atari 1040 sitting over there in the corner that we used for writing Ex-VoTo stuff, and for all intents and purposes, all I was really generating when I played was a MIDI data stream. We'll just capture it on the computer.

Since I sequenced my drums, recording them in phrases, I had to know exactly what I was going to play, and I how it had to be arranged, without having the benefit of hearing it in the context of everything else. I could have had Larry and Mike play with me, but Larry spent any free time he had restoring his ultra-phat Chevy panel truck, and Mike lived in Hollywood. Didn't make much sense to waste their time to satiate my idiosyncrasies. Further, I was enjoying the luxury of working out my drums in sections - verse parts, chorus parts, etc. - and I wouldn't wish the hum drum of playing the same 8 bar phrase over and over for hours until I got "the feel" right on anybody. No, I just crawled to the corner of our rehearsal/EV commune house living room and forged ahead on my own. It didn't totally suck, but it certainly could have if I hadn't had the benefit of spending time with the rest of the band working out the material and rehearsing it.

The next thing that proved to be somewhat annoying was dealing with a pure MIDI environment and hardware, proprietary, rack-mount/tabletop/keyboard MIDI gear. All of that great flexibility didn't completely negate the need to deal with the physical world to get my drum parts into the final mix. Everything I was using had to be patched into the mixing board with patch cables. I had to make sure I had all of the power cords cascaded right to avoid ground hum. I had a much more finite set of resources for generating sound than I enjoy now. One drum machine that acted as a MIDI module, and a 12 bit sampler with 2mb of RAM. No ability to spawn multiple instances of a device when it's a physical device. No infinite bus capabilities when dealing with a mixing console. Hours of agony trying to get the drum submix normalized, and trying to figure out where that blasted ground noise is coming from. Is it coming from the Korg DDD1 snare? Nope. The Quadraverb effects sends/returns? Not there either... I don't drink anymore, but I'm craving one now just thinking about it...

Definitely, far and away, the mother f****r of all of these problems is synchronization. You got a MIDI sequence coming out of a computer and a bunch of stuff recorded onto an 8 track recorder. Two disparate sources that have to somehow play at the same time to pull everything together on mixdown. What to do?

Back then - and this never ceases to boggle my mind, but, if some of the articles I read in EM, Keyboard, and EQ are true, even now - you did this through the use of a sync box, and you had to print a time code track to one of the tracks on your multitrack recorder. Yeah, you guessed it, right out of the gate, you lost the use of one of your audio tracks. Our 8 track machine was now a 7 track machine.

SmartFSK and SMPTE were the time code standards then. SMPTE sync boxes in those days were crazy expensive, so most people, including us, used a SmartFSK box and time code, which Pro24 on the Atari would translate to MIDI Time Clock (that's MTC for those of you that want to impress your friends), and use as a means to start and playback in sync with the audio. And_it_sucked_hard.

SmartFSK was something developed by JL Cooper, a company that then and now, specialized in odd, niche MIDI devices. You could get their sync boxes cheap. They opened it up as a standard, and then some other companies came along and offered SmartFSK boxes even cheaper. Why did it suck? The main reason was it had no song position pointer support. SmartFSK purported to have it, but depending on the sync box/sequencer software/computer combo you were using, it either didn't work great or didn't work at all. In our case, it was a little bit of both, so we never used it.

Because of this, when Larry and Mike went to record their respective vocal and distorto bass parts, they had to do it in one pass, beginning to end. If they made a mistake, they couldn't punch in/out at that point. They had to start from the very beginning, and hope that then next pass went better. They had to do it this way because SmartFSK wasn't always smart enough to figure out where the hell the tape was at in the song, and tell the Pro24 software where to start on my my drumtrack. Want the ability to punch in/out? Not a problem. Record a scratch drum track on one of the open audio tracks you're not using yet, and do your other tracking to that until you have to use it. The part that you have to record that is forced make use of that scratch drum track still has_to_be_done_in_one_pass...

And then there's the problem with the tape stretching to the point that it causes the sync to drift. Those parts that Larry and Mike recorded to the scratch drum track would almost always, without fail, be just enough out of sync with the Atari by the time we got to mix down for it to be annoying. We'd done so much fast-forwarding, rewinding, stopping, and recording by the time we got to mixdown, and all of this stretches the tape. When the tape stretches, it can change the point that the sync box tells the computer to start, and it usually moves back, not forward. The net effect is, that scratch track that they'd played to is no longer starting at the same place in the song that the computer is. Everything is starting before the drums. Not by a huge amount, but enough for it to be noticeable. How to fix it? Hey! Steinberg Pro24 for has this great sync feature! Sync offset!!! With it, you could create a small lag between the time that the sequencer received its start message from the sync box and when the drum part in the computer would actually start. With about 4-8 hours of work, setting the offset value, starting the tape and listening to the song a million times until you arrived at an offset value that made everything sound like the drums were sitting in the pocket again - which could only be done by ear, and you had to listen to the entire song on every pass to make sure it didn't drift out farther into the song - you could correct the drift problem.

Screw sobriety. Barkeep, scotch and water please. And who's that distressed goddess down at the end of the bar?...

Things hadn't changed much by the time Penal Colony got around to recording. For our first demos and "Put Your Hands Down", the process was basically the same; the only component that changed was the multitrack recorder used. The Alesis ADAT had come out literally within weeks or months of our demo sessions, Mike worked at a place that rented them, so we got to use them before most people even knew that it was possible to record 8 tracks of 16/48 digital audio onto an S-VHS tape, and that you could go out to something like 48 if you had enough ADAT machines, since multiple machines were syncable. Love that Mike Hateley. Anyway, we were still working in the Atari 1040ST/Pro24/SmartFSK world for everything else, and while I did manage to come up with a trick that allowed the rest of the band to do their tracking live and sequence the drums all at once (something they were adamant about being able to do), it still sucked.

"5 Man Job"? still pretty much the same. The only thing that got better there was being able to use SMPTE for the 5MJ sessions, which became doable because SMPTE sync box options became affordable by then. JL Cooper came out with one that could generate/sync to both SMPTE and SmartFSK, that's what we used. The computer setup for that stuff was pretty crazy. Jason (original Drummer) owned a little Mac running Cubase by then, and was doing all of his drums in it. I still had my Atari, with the only change environment being Steinberg Cubase 2, the prodigal sequencer program son of Pro24. Cubase files were cross-platform or mergeable, so we had to slave both machines to the SMPTE track coming from the Tascam DA-88 we used, Tascam's answer to the ADAT that used Hi8 tape instead of S-VHS, which, supposedly, is a more reliable media and archives better. Surprisingly, it worked just fine.

and the beginning of the now...

Around the time we were working on "5 Man Job", I was beginning to have a dream. I was dreaming of a day that recording to two disparate sources was a thing of the distant past. Of a day when I could record all of our audio parts into a computer, using a software program that could record both audio and MIDI. I remember verbalizing this to Jason many, many times. "If I could just manipulate audio tracks in an environment that managed them the same way that, say, Cubase, manages MIDI tracks in its song arrange window, the world would be a better place. Synthesis and Sampling in a computer environment as well? Wasn't even a blip on my radar. Never even imagined that it was possible. Around that time, I began reading rumblings here and there in the music tech zines about Mark Of The Unicorn having plans to release a new version of its flagship Performer sequencing software that would include support for playback/recording of audio files. They were going to call it Digital Performer...

Friends, let me tell you that I have been a hardcore loyal user of Steinberg (Cubase) products, and still am to this day. There was only one time that I strayed, and that was when I got my hands on MOTU's Digital Performer. I didn't stray long, because, as was much the case with just about all of the audio/MIDI composition software packages that came out initially, it sucked. Managing audio in this thing was horrendous. There was no mix control over audio. Whatever level you're audio files were at when you flew them in was what you were stuck with. There seemed to be something genuinely strange going on with the programs audio engine, because all of the audio I flew into it sounded worse than it did when I played it outside of it. No ability to apply real time effects. Nothing. Just a sequencer program with some really crude, crappy audio facilities. I was bummed. As far as I can tell, MOTU has since made quantum strides in the evolution of this package, but personally, I've never liked any of the MOTU software, and this last experience I had left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I'll never consider any of their stuff again.

Charlie Steinberg, forgive me. I'll not stray again...

excuses, excuses (what George and I had in common)

Among the ground I hope to cover on the DVD is some of the myriad reasons I ended up on my somewhat involuntary 7 year hiatus from PC. One of the reasons I probably won't get into on the topic, and one I don't voice too much, is technology. If you managed to make this far into this section, you can probably tell that I got pretty frustrated with limitations attached to creating music on a computer, especially if you were me and you didn't have 10-20 grand burning a hole in your pocket needed to do the things I wanted to do with it.

When the media started talking to George Lucas at the time the last restoration/re-releases of the first three Star Wars films that he did, and shortly thereafter, again with the release of the Phantom Menace, he would frequently get presented with the questions: "What in tarnation would make you want to restore the first three films for the second time, and release them again for the third time?" "What the hell took you so long to finish the next trilogy?"

Okay, so maybe the questions weren't presented exactly like that, but you get the idea, and anyway, you're probably a Star Wars geek like me, so you know what I'm referring to. Stay with me, I'm going to make my point very soon...

He would always respond to these questions with something to the effect of the problem was with the technology available for doing special effects. He had very specific ideas about how he wanted to do his special effects, and spent years going to market, looking for what he needed to do what he wanted to do, and came up dry. Until a few years ago, the technology just wasn't there.

At some point, he decided that he wasn't going to make another Star Wars film until he felt that hardware and software was fast and advanced enough to make one. So he didn't. What did he do in the meantime? Among other things, started a production company specializing in full-length computer animation features, and basically used the company and the projects it did as guinea pigs for bleeding edge technologies. Makes sense. If something is going to fail miserably, let it be something other than a Star Wars film, keep banging away at it on non-Star Wars stuff until Silicon Graphics can produce Star Wars-worthy hardware software solutions. Why fix up the old films again? Because the new three were going to be prequels using post-millenium bleeding-edge CGI, and if a brother wanted to watch all six in chronological order when the dust settles, 1977 special effects are going to look like crap after watching three episodes of post-2k special effects. That made sense too.

I was reading these posits King George set forth around the same time I started checking out some of the audio/MIDI that were just beginning to come out. And I like to think that, in part, I put off doing music for a long time, for better or for worse, because of what he said.

He made those statements, and deep down, I'd decided I was going to stick the same sign in a vat of cat juice: I have a very clear idea of how I want to work on a song in a computer. And the technology available to me to work the way I want to work just isn't there yet. If it is, obtaining it would probably cost me more money than I'm capable of making in a year. So, I'm not going to make another Penal Colony record until the technology is available to me to make a Penal Colony record the way I want to make it. I'm going to make it right, or I'm not going to make it at all.

That time pretty much didn't come until 2001...

the return of the chimp

Flash forward to early '98. A happy convergence of events finds me relocated to the northwest corner of the U.S., just outside of Portland, Oregon. Sparing the gory details, this happened hot on the heels of an extended stay on the poverty line, still up to my ears in debt. An old friend helped make the move happen and set me up with a real cool tech gig, working with a software development group that builds high-end print servers. This event ends up completely turning my life around. I'd been so poor for so long, and so screwed up mentally and physically, that I'd all but abandoned the idea of ever doing another Penal Colony record again.

Prior to hooking up with the Texas Vamp kids and forming PC, I was banging around on some electronica stuff with the aforementioned friend, under the moniker SimStim. I'd adopted the alias "ChimChim", taken from a character on the popular 1960's episodic anime "Speed Racer". Our first attempt at this little venture was anything but epic, but I'd long been a fan of early British Trance, Nubeat, German Hardfloor, and the Rotterdam Hardbeat/Breakbeat stuff at that point, so it was more of a fun thing to do than anything.

I got up here, and that aforementioned friend wanted to resurrect SimStim. The brother helped pull me out of the hole I was in and certain to remain in had I not gotten the hell out of Orange County, CA; who was I to say no.

Now, while it isn't of the paramount of importance to have tons of vintage and up-to-the-minute analog synths and racks of Kurzweil K2500's to generate a good collection of electronica, it certainly helps. As I said before, I had been poor for a long time up to this point. So poor that I was forced to sell off some of my music gear to feed my kids and pay the rent. I was even forced to sell the 2 32mb RAM sticks I had in my Mac, which were very, very expensive in those days. By the time I got to P-Town, I didn't have much left in the way of gear.

I get settled into my new digs, and take an inventory of what I've got at my disposal to work on this new batch of SimStim stuff:

* 1 66mhz PowerMac with 16mb of RAM and a 500mb hard drive with a 15" monitor, running Cubase Audio 2 (or 3? can't recall) and some shareware audio editors, with a cheapo 1X1 MIDI interface.

* 1 old and very thrashed Roland JX-8P synth.

* 1 Kawai XD-5 MIDI Drum Module

* 1 slightly thrashed Tascam 424 PortaStudio, in dire need of a new tape cover and tape head alignment.

* 1 home stereo receiver with a pair of crappy Pioneer bookshelf speakers for monitoring.

and that was it. I kept telling my friend I could do it, but after I got everything setup, all I could think was, "how the hell am I going to do this? There's no friggin' way!" I put off doing anything for awhile. Made excuses. I just couldn't do it with what I had. Wasn't possible.

Somewhere between the denial and endless array of b.s. I was feeding my friend, I got to thinking about a declaration I'd often used in interviews, conversations with musician friends about music, and the like. It was something I learned from playing in punk rock bands as a kid, and it was quite simple:

I don't need crap for tools to make music. stick me in a room with an old shoe, a ball of twine, and a paper clip, and I'll figure out a way to make music with it.

Music and art are about ideas. The tools and the means used to bring the ideas to fruition are irrelevant. It's about bringing the idea to life, it's not about doing it with million-dollar tools.

I had to remind myself of these posits. More importantly, while I'd always moved in ways that abided by them somewhat, for the first time since I was a scrappy teenager, I had really put them to the test. I finally sat down to write the first track, and several months later, I had a record in the can, using little more than the gear listed. Everyone that heard it liked it; many of the inquisitive tech types were taken aback when I told them what I had to work with.

From both a resource and musical perspective, I learned a great deal about myself and what I could do when I put my mind to it. The experience completely changed my approach to writing songs, and totally changed the way I arranged things, arguably for the better. What I thought was going to be an exercise in frustration and futility ended up being yet another life-altering experience.

Much of what I learned while working on that - tricks and workarounds I came up with to make up for the shortcomings of my rig, learning how to come up with tracks that were often comprised of drums from the XD-5, a couple loops, and a couple of keyboard parts, and make them somehow compelling despite their minimalism - I used to great effect by the time I began work on UB. Lots of ideas for PC material began to bubble around at the back of my head by the time we finished the new SimStim stuff. I really began to push the limits of Cubase Audio, learned a great deal more about what was possible in it (even though the version I was working with was pretty far out of date by then), and was beginning to see the potential for the dream environment envisioned back in the "5 Man Job" days.

time to settle some unfinished business part 1: the segueway

As time passed with the SimStim thing, a few of the major audio sequencer package manufacturers, as well as some new upstarts, began rolling out software-based synthesizers and samplers. Offerings in this area began to gather momentum by the turn of the century.

Like many new technologies, I was initially skeptical. I'd played around/attempted to write with things like QuickTime Instruments and Sound Font instruments here and there, but these were clearly technologies intended more for game/interactive developers and gamers than musicians. They all had to live outside of the host environment (in my case, that was Cubase), and there was no reasonable way to process or mix them with audio coming from the host program.

When I heard about GigaSampler, which was the first software-based sampler offering, I was just as skeptical, but decided to check it out anyway, just to see what it could do. Skepticism justified. Though very sampler-like in its functionality, it was clearly then, and still is, a program that wants to live on a machine all by itself. For most of us - including me - it was totally impractical, and ran in contrast to what the goals for my rig were. Patience was a virtue in this area, as virtual instruments developer wunderkinds Native Instruments would later create what, is in my humble opinion, one of the best samplers ever made, hardware or otherwise.

By late 2000 though, things started looking up. Cubase had its VST (stands for "Virtual Synth Technology") technology going, which was basically an API Steinberg created and opened up to third party development, that would allow anyone with the know-how to write audio effects or synthesizers that could be dropped into the Cubase Plugin folder, and once loaded inside of Cubase, connected to its virtual mixer, at which point it would behave just like any other effect or instrument that already came with Cubase. Think PhotoShop Plugins, only with audio. Pretty much the same concept.

I'd played around with some of the VST stuff, but the technology was still in its infancy. It didn't have a lot of support yet in the way of synths, and I my machine at the time was way too crappy to be running them. But I'd done enough with them to know that I had decided to augment my earlier next-Penal-Colony-record-line-in-the-sand with a new goal: I was going to do the whole damn thing in software, or get as close as I could. Guitars and Vocals would obviously be recorded from the outside, but everything else was going to come from the computer. A whole record that I wrote, recorded, and mixed entirely in a computer... how cool would that be?

Back to reality: I had a crappy P200 with 256mb of RAM, and still wasn't quite within the wherewithal to even begin to think about getting something powerful enough to achieve my goal. That would soon change...

That year was one of the boom years for the tech sector. I landed a new job, and my financial disposition improved. My vision was now looking to become a possiblity. Eventually, it did. By the time I got going full steam on the record, I had a machine fast enough to do most of what I wanted to do with synths. I ended up having to do 3 major overhauls to that system by the time I finished the record, and am now capable of building PCs from the ground up in my sleep as a result, but that's another story I'll share later.

Right now, we're talking software boys and girls.

time to settle some unfinished business part 2: the power, the glory, and the software synth

Muon Software

I want to start out by talking about the synths I used that were made by Muon Software, primarily because I met Dave, who is Muon Software, and he's a really cool guy. Well, there's also the little matter of Dave promising to add me to the "Artists" section of the Muon site, and me returning the favor by promising to to talk about the Muon gear used on the record. Can't blame a brother for wanting to do a little cross-promotion, free market and all...

I really discovered the Muon synths - which I did actually use pretty extensively on the record - by accident. I was just trolling the web one day for VST synths to check out, and stumbled onto the site. I checked out the Atom Pro, and I liked it. cost like 30 bucks. 30 bucks for a synth that could basically do most of what a Mini Moog could do... Sold to the old guy in the back.

I used it quite a bit for arpeggio parts and for little blippy lead type things. It Always worked and sounded great. Best thing about it was, It used very little processing, which is a precious commodity when you write music in software. You learn pretty quickly that there is no such thing as having a fast enough machine, and that it is real easy to eat up resources pretty quickly while working on a song, even with the fastest P4s available, if you're not careful. So, the Atom Pro was often my go-to Axe when I needed an analog synth part and was getting low on CPU, which was pretty frequently.

Towards the end of the "Unfinished Business" sessions, the Tau Pro had come out, and I jumped on it without having even heard it in any form, simply because I liked the Atom Pro so much. I knew it would be good. And it was. The basses on the Tau Pro kick_ass, and I ended up using it for bass parts on "Falling Down the Stairs", "21 Robot Man", and "Scion", just off the top of my head. I actually used it all over the place on "Scion". The bass and the lead counter-melody on the outro were all Tau Pro.

From what I have seen on Dave's site, there's a new Atom Pro to look forward to soon, and he put out this other synth after the Tau Pro called Electron that I will probably end up checking out before the next record.

top^

Steinberg/Waldorf

Being that Steinberg were the inventors of the technology, it only led to reason that they'd end up being the ones to produce some of the first synths. They rolled one into Cubase 5 whose name completely fails me now, it was so crappy. It was little more than a marginal TB-303 emulation, and it was pretty much unusable. The only real purpose I saw that it had was to display the potential of VST. The first one they came up with that was worth a damn wasn't actually made by them; it was made by Waldorf. Steinberg partnered with them, and apparently bought the rights to slap their name on it.

The synth was an emulation of the old Waldorf PPG Wave 2.2 wavetable synth, dubbed appropriately, PPG Wave 2.V. Sure enough, the thing sounded just like the old PPG Wave. A keyboard that cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 large when it came out in the early 80's was now available in the form of a 300k plugin for 200 bucks... Could life get any better?

I ended up using the PPG Wave 2.V pretty extensively. Cycling through wavetables on arpeggios made for some great dynamic arp-based grooves, and what made it even better was that the PPG Wave 2.V had it's own arpeggiator built in. This enabled me to avoid Cubase 5's Arpeggio device, which, up until Cubase SX came out, achieved new levels of suckdom in its limitations and clunky UI. The Wave worked great for pads and leads as well. I used it for pads on the verses in "Falling Down...", as well as for some of the arpeggios, and that groovy, distorted Kraftwerk-y melody line that kicks in halfway through the verses in "Don't Let Them Forget to Tag Your Symptom" was a patch I created in the Wave. It was real easy to build sounds in if you were familiar with traditional analog synths.

Another Steinberg instrument (or effect, depending on how you're using it) I used some was the VoiceMachine, which is a sort of Vocoder effect. I had a few things of this variety at my disposal, but this one was by far the best of the lot when going for a more less-than-subtle sythesized effect on vocals. The otherworldy sound of the bridge vocals on "Hypothalamus Now!" owes its sound to the VoiceMachine. I like doing 2 and 3 part vocal harmonies wherever it makes sense to do them, and there were points with some songs where I wanted to do add harmonies, and I either couldn't hit the notes, initially tracked an octave harmony where a relative fifth or seventh ended up working better when I went to mixdown, or the harmony just plain didn't sit right in the context of everything else. Whenever I ran into situations like this, I reached for the VoiceMachine, and was almost always able to come up with something that made everything gel. I think one of the best illustrations of this on the new record is "21 Robot Man", which is kind of a weird, minimal, slow ballad. I recorded a low octave harmony for that section that really helped fatten the section up, but just wasn't sitting right as a human-sounding vocal. It just didn't work with the subject matter. I ran it through the VoiceMachine maxed, and dropped the entire vocal down an octave lower. This made it sound like my voice was coming out of one of those old Texas Instruments' Speak and Spell toys... I worked perfect.

The other instrument of theirs I used some was the Waldorf Attack, which is an 808/909/Simmons-sounding Drum Synthesizer/Synthesizer. From what I understand, Attack has served as the holy grail tool for the ElectroClash kids. I had alot of trouble with it under Cubase 5 for some reason, so when I used it, I would usually work up some drum phrases using it in a Cubase song by itself, record it to Audio, then fly the audio into whatever song I was working on at the time and treated it as a loop. It was a major hassle, so I didn't do it much. I had upgraded to Cubase SX by the time I got around to doing the remixes for the record, and it seemed to play much nicer in that environment, so I was able to use it extensively on the "Falling Down..." remix.

top^

Native Instruments

Knowing that I'm already getting a little out of control on the length of this section, it's taking every once of will I have to fight from writing tomes about how amazing all of the NI stuff is. Suffice to say that I used pretty much everything they had to offer at the time I made the record, thoughout the record.

I think I used Battery, their Sampled Drum module, on all but one or two songs. Before I sat down to write every song, I'd put together a collection of drum sounds and partial loops, load 'em up in Battery, use Battery's filters and mod routings to mangle a few of them, and that would be my drum kit for the song. Battery's so doggone flexible, if I ever hit a point where I needed a new sound, not a problem. I'd find the sound in my library, load it into a module, and have it up and running in a couple minutes. If I didn't like my hi-hats, I just find some collection of mod routings for them that made them sound a little more interesting, set the origin to velocity, and add a great new layer to the groove in a couple minutes. It's absolute drum module perfection. I can't imagine ever using anything else for drums.

For synths, one of their first offerings, the Pro52 (now Pro53) was part of my initial synth toolkit for the record. Much like the PPG Wave 2.V, the Pro53 is an emulation of a classic analog synth: the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5. I actually had a fair amount of exposure to the original Prophet 5, since we had one in Primal Dream, a band that I was in with Larry and Linda from Ex-VoTo prior to Ex-VoTo, and was later used sparsely in Ex-VoTo's early days. Same deal here, the Pro52 sounds just like the Prophet 5, right down to the original Prophet 5 presets. Oddly, I didn't use this one much as some of the others. Also much like the old Prophet 5, it just sounded a little too thin for most applications. I used it extensively on "Thee Unbearable...", used it for blippy melodies and arps, and pads here and there, that was about it.

With the release of the Pro53, my attitude changed towards it dramatically. Much like NI had done with their other classic synth emulation, the FM7, when they revved the Pro52 to Pro53, they basically took the Prophet 5 framework and gave it a massive steriod shot. The beefed up the oscillators and some of the filters, made some changes to the effects section. Still had that Prophet 5 vibe, but it sounded like a completely new synth. I ended up using the Pro53 quite a bit on a remix I did for Baldylocks not long after I finished the record.

The next bit of NI ammo I added to the arsenal was Reaktor, which is, from my software engineering perspective, an integrated development environment for building synthesizers and audio effects. I thought I was going to use it more than I did, but I ended up not using it much. It was still a little too clunky and creativity-prohibitive in the incarnations that were available at the time I was working on the record (v2.3.3 - 3). It was pretty firmly a standalone app that had VST support, but didn't play very nice inside of Cubase. Version 4 is coming out soon, looks like a pretty major overhaul that is leveraging some of the UIs used for other NI stuff that I like, so I think that update will have me gravitating to it a little more in the future.

When I got my laptop, I would run it from there and used it for the odd keyboard part here and there, but again, not much. I found a site that developed some great instruments for Reaktor called Dash Synthesis that got me a little more interested in it, but again, I used it so little I can't even recount any parts that it was used on in the record. I did use it some for the aforementioned Baldylocks remix, that's about all that comes to mind.

Shortly after NI came out with the Pro52, they released an emulation of the old Hammond B3 organ called the B4. If you're at all into the B3, the B4 didn't fail to impress. So much so that when Keyboard or EM - one of those mags - did a review of it, the reviewer owned an actual B3, and did a closed-eyes, side-by-side test of the thing, and 99% of the time, couldn't tell the difference. Of course, it's an organ, so what the heck am I going to do with it on an industrial record, but I got it anyway, because it was cheap, and I figured I'd find some use for it somewhere, and I did. There's a part in "21 Robot Man", towards the end, that drops out to nothing but vocals, and a very spare keyboard part. I used the B4 for that part, which made it worth every penny, because for those 8 bars, I can't imagine hearing anything else but something that sounded like a wheezy little B3 organ underneath my vocals. It couldn't have fit more perfectly. I've already got some projects in mind coming down the pipe that I know I'll be using it for quite a bit, so I'll definitely get some use out of it for other things.

Before I even started working on the record, I'd decided that I wanted to include a cover of something. It kind of felt like a tradition that began with our version of "Warsaw" by Joy Division on PYHD that I wanted to continue with UB. After thinking about it for awhile, I went with a song Alice Cooper did in the early 80's, during his poorly calculated NewRo period, called "Clones (We're All)". It's a great song, didn't have a clue as to what I was going to do with it all the way up until actually doing it. NI came out with the FM7 about the same time. I got it, and that ended up kick-starting me on the song. It's an emulation of the old Yamaha DX series stuff, but again, much like NI did with the Pro53, it's a DX7 on steriods. It a helluva lot easier to program than the DX7 was, and they added some fitering, arpeggio, MIDI implementation, and mod routing capabilities that the original DX stuff never had. The keyboards on my version of "Clones (We're All) is pretty much all FM7, except for the intro, which was FM7 layered with a couple of other synths. "Clones" was actually a song I had wanted from the early days of the band, but the rest of the band had discouraged the idea, since they'd attempted a version of it in the Texas Vamps, and never could figure out what to do with the middle 8 section of the song, which was quirky, but quirky in a rather annoying way. I solved the middle 8 problem with a great preset in the FM7 that I tweaked a little, and made that damn section my own. It was the right sound for that track, and NI couldn't have rolled it out at a better time for me.

Last but not least in the NI additions to my quiver were Kontakt and Absynth, which both came out about the same time (Absynth had been out for awhile for Mac, but only recently came out for PC). Hands down, Kontakt is the best sampler I think I've ever worked with - hardware or otherwise - and Absynth is maybe second only to the Alesis Andromeda as one of the most amazing, innovative synths I have ever heard, again, hardware or otherwise. Unfortunately, they came out too late for me to really do anything with them for the main part of the record, but I they were my main keyboard axes for the remixes I did of "Unfinished Business" and "Falling Down the Stairs".

If you've ever worked with a rackmount sampler, you know how nasty navigating around them can be. Kontakt is closest thing to a direct connection to the right hemisphere of the brain. It is so_intuitive. Everything lives where it should. there graphical UIs for everything, tasks that would take me hours to perform on the EMU ESI 4000 sampler we used in SimStim took minutes to do in Kontakt. It's a usability engineer's wet_dream. They obviously spent a significant amount of time thinking about how it needed to look. Sans for what you have to go through to create layered parts - which is only a little convoluted, it has this Reason-like notion of a rack that you load sampler instances into; creating layered parts means loading up, and more importantly, managing, as many instances as you want to have in the way of layers - it is perfect. Perfect! It's just incredible. I used it for all of the weird vocal stuff at the beginning of the "Falling Down..." remix, among other things.

As for Absynth, I'd have to refer back to the NI product page to describe what it's doing. I can't fully explain it. It's an analog synth. It's an FM synth. It's a waveshaping synth when loaded with audio files, leveraging their formants in conjunction with extensive filter capabilities that make it capable of turning the drum loop from James Brown's "Funky Mr. President" into the most horrendously beautiful string patch you've ever heard. It can do anything, and everything it does is incredible. Version 2's coming out soon, and I can't wait. Absynth can be heard all over the place on the UB remixes.

top^

Bitheadz

Back near the end of the last decade, Bitheadz was right there with Nemesys, among the first to enter the software synth sampler marketplace. I'd see these adds in Keyboard and EM all the time, where they'd purport to possess the ability to produce a limitless array of vintage analog and FM with their Retro-AS1. I'd see bits and blurbs here and there about the Unity-DS1 sampler. I scoffed at all of this for a very long time. No way could anything generating sound using a computer's resources sound any good. As soon as I had my hands on hardware fast enough, their stuff was among the first that I checked out. I was pretty impressed with both, but again, much like the Gigasampler, they wanted control of_your_entire system. No room for running programs that would actually allow you to do something useful with them, no sir. Then I found out that they produced a VST plugin version of the Retro-AS1.

Thankfully, it worked just like the standalone version, and it wasn't a huge CPU hog, so I got it. I ended up using that one_alot on the record, primarily because, for a long period of time there while I was working on the record, there wasn't much else available. Having something like Absynth early on probably wouldn't have changed my decision making much, because the Retro was capable of generating some truly wicked noise. I read somewhere recently that Charlie Clouser designed some of the patches for it, I can only assume some of the patches I liked were his handiwork.

The best example of this little monster's wickedness can be revered through the main keyboard figure running through the chorus of "Hazing (The Underlings with your Broken Stickpin)". It's a big, mangled, portamentoed, distorted mess, and Retro AS1 at its best. I also used it quite a bit for basses and arps. Good little all around synth with a character all its own. Too bad they stopped supporting it after the patch release they did for v1.0.

They've got something out now that looks like it might be a souped up version of it now - the Unity-AS1 - but it also looks like another one of their standalone monstrosities, which I've now grown suspicious of. Another big turn-off for me with them was when they tried to tell me that it wouldn't run under XP, even though I'd been running it under XP for months. I told them it had been running fine for me, never heard from them after that. Oh well, plenty of fish in the sea out there now...

top^

Antares

I'm guessing that some of you know what I'm going to talk about here, if your at all familiar with Antares and what they are most known for.

Auto-Tune.

Yeah, that's right. I used it. I used it quite a bit. I worked with a lowly, crude v1.0, and still used it. I spent a good couple weeks during mixdown sessions for "Thee Unbearable Lightness Ov..." working with it on the outro vocal parts alone. I can hear you, no need to even express it verbally. You know what? I could give a rat's ass about any rant any of you can offer about being able to "hear the processing in the vocal tails", "It makes everything sound fake and over-produced." "No integrity in using Auto-Tune. I like to keep the sound real." blah blah blah. Screw all of you. If that's your position, oh well. I could care less what you have to say about it. Go off and make your "real" records with "real" vocals, Mr. Punk Rock, because only you know what Punk Rock is all about. Keep it real, man. Do it to it.

In the punk rock scene where I come from, you did whatever you saw fit to get the job done. By any means necessary. If you need to Auto-Tune here and there to match your mind's ear, so be it. You wanna take it to the extreme and use it as a vocoder-like effect? It's a free country. I did that on "Hazing (The Underlings with Your Broken Stickpin)". I liked what it did to the vibe of the song. And I'll let all of you trainspotting jackholes in on something else: 99% of the people that you're playing to don't hear it and don't give a rat's ass whether you're using it or not, assuming you used it either where you needed it or did something unique with it, and didn't go crazy with it the way all of these Pop/Country/R&B producers do nowadays. So get over it.

If you're feeling a little brow-beaten at this point for no apparent reason, my apologies. Onto the next section.

top^

Universal Audio (Mackie)

When I wrote the record, I did it most of it in kind of an odd way. I wrote most the music first, got the arrangements all locked down, then went back through and did my vocal passes en masse. Before I did the vocal stuff, I did some research on gear, read many articles on how people were setting up and processing their vocals. The one common thread I observed among most of the big producers was, their setups were surprisingly basic. They all had their favorite condenser mics, and they all ran them through either an old Universal Audio LA-2A Levelling Amplifier, or an old 1176 Blackface compressor, depending on the application, and straight into the recorder from there. So I decided I wanted to do the same thing. Problem was, the LA-2A's and 1176 Blackfaces cost a ton of scratch. Old ones from the 50's/60's can run 10 large or more. Too rich for my blood.

About a year ago, they did something unexpected for a company known for high-end rack mount hardware. They created VST emulations of these effects, and rolled them up in a PCI DSP Card/Software package called the UAD-1. Mackie picked up the product shortly after it came out. It went way down in price awhile back, so I snagged one. Unfortunately, much like Kontakt and Absynth, I was pretty much done with the record by the time it came out, so the only thing I got to use it for was when I re-cut the vocals for the "Falling Down..." remix.

It comes with VST plugin versions of the LA-2A and 1176, plus a really nice channel strip replacement for the VST mixer, a VST guitar processor, and a killer reverb plugin, far and away the best reverb plug I have ever heard. One of these days, I'm going to get to spend more time with it.

time to settle some unfinished business part 3: hardwared and hog-tied

For many years - up until the time I finished the SimStim record - I was a hardcore Mac guy. It was at that time that I went to the dark side and went PC. Done shuddering in disgust, citizens of Appleonia?

I could devote an entirely separate section covering all of the reasons I switched, but in short, there were two main reasons: 1) The hardware's way cheaper. It is possible to build a PC with twice the horsepower of the fastest Mac available (which, to the best of my knowledge, at the time I'm writing this, is the Dual-1ghz G4) for a fraction of the cost. 2) The level of control one is afforded over PC hardware, in terms of configuration, is far greater than what you get with a Mac, and I am a control freak. I want the luxury of choosing between 10-15 different motherboards for the right solution for me. If I want to know things like whether the motherboard's chipset has dual-channel DDR memory support. I want to know if the frontside bus is truly running at 533mhz, or if it's doing some kind of asynchronus crap, constantly playing with the size of the pipe to cater to load. If I got a Mac, I don't have much in the way of choices. Daughtercards to augment CPU power that I gotta pay 700+ bucks for? Screw that. I can do a major overhaul of my box (new MoBo/CPU/memory if needed) for that kind of money. I'm a hardware nut, and I don't care if my case and monitor look really pretty. At some point, it became apparent that I'd outgrown the Mac way of doing things.

With that out of the way, I learned some very hard lessons about hardware while making "Unfinished Business". Getting the right hardware target locked down took more time to do than any other task I undertook making this record. I'd build a machine, work on a song, and find the ceiling on my CPU power by the time I was 3/4 of the way done with the song. I'd upgrade the hardware, spend a couple weeks installing the operating system and software, laying in updates, configuring. Then I'd continue working on the record. 2-3 songs in with the new hardware target, I'd find the ceiling again, and the the whole process would start all over.

Fortunately, I had a couple of very hardware-savvy people to go to when I ran into problems. Joe Badger, who did backing vocals on a couple of tracks on the record, was my main man, just like Telegram Sam. He is the PC hardware oracle. He builds and maintains massive, multiprocessor rack machines and SANS for a living. He eats, drinks, and sleeps hardware. I couldn't have achieved the goals I set for my studio without him. As good as he is, he's not a computer music hardware guy, and as such, wasn't able to help with some of my more music hardware-specific challenges. The guy that ended up helping me with that was Greg Ripes at AudioMIDI.com. Greg is the man, and AudioMIDI's one of the best online electronic gear stores out there. There were many times when Greg didn't really have to help me - I'd ping him with questions out of the blue, not at all with the intent of buying anything - and he'd always respond. I thanked him in the liner notes. He was that important to the success of the record.

Back to the hard lessons... I learned that my less-is-more, MacGyver-like approach to most things in life didn't work with hardware. Word to anyone trying to go the software route with your studio at home: Do_not chince out on hardware. 8 instances of VST synths, 4-5 instances of effects, and EQ/Compression turned on across 48 audio tracks won't happen on a 1ghz PIII or your nifty iMac. You can't get blood from a stone, brother.

I started work on "Unfinished Business" on a 733mhz PIII sitting on a FIC motherboard with the VIA 133 chipset. Big mistake. lasted maybe two weeks. I went from that to an 866mhz PIII sitting on an ASUS CUSL2-C motherboard, which fared quite a bit better. That is, until I figured out that 866mhz wasn't going to do it. I upgraded the proc to 1ghz, and stuck 512mb of PC133 ECC Registered RAM in it, and it had either Maxtor or Western Digital ATA133/ATA100 7200rpm drives in it, can't recall which. That was the configuration I used for the actual song writing phase of the record.

When I got around to mixing down, it once again became apparent that I was going to have to undergo another overhaul. I first tried upgrading to a dual-1ghz PIII (2 1ghz PIII processors running on a single motherboard) on an ACORP dually motherboard. I was running Windows ME up to that point, had to change my OS to Windows 2000 Professional, since WinME lacks dual-processor support. Got it all built up and guess what? The Win2k drivers for my RME Digi96/8 PST sound card were worthless!!! I had my computer connected to my mixer via ADAT optical lightpipe, and the drivers allegedly had some sort of intellisense that could tell whether client programs (i.e. Cubase) were using ADAT optical or SPDIF, and toggled accordingly... It didn't work. Thankfully, they've since resolved the problem, but I was in the middle of making a record, and couldn't wait for a fix. I quickly went out and picked up a 1.9ghz P4 - which had just come out at the time - and an ECS motherboard with the Intel i850 chipset, 512mb of 800mhz RDRAM, and built WinME out on it (WinXP still wasn't out at that point). That did the trick for the rest of the project, but even with that much horsepower, I was still finding the ceiling.

In a nutshell - and I can't stress this enough - if you want to set up a completely software based environment, either roll your own or buy a system with the fastest processor available, and plan on upgrading your motherboard, CPU, and possibly memory when something faster comes out. If you're going Mac, get the G4 dually with a minimum of 512mb of RAM. If you're going Intel PC, get a 3.06ghz P4, but make sure you get a MoBo with one of the Intel chipsets on it. Pentium stuff just seems to run more reliably when its interacting with one of its own. If you're going AMD, go with dual MP processors, the fastest available (should be MP 2600 as of the time I'm writing this) with a MoBo running one of the AMD chipsets - 750, 751, or 761. If you're not prepared to sink that kind of scratch into your computer, then seriously, don't bother trying to run soft synths exclusively, or plan on being really frustrated.

As mentioned above, I did a ton of research on soundcards. I'd picked up a Fostex VM200 mixer, which had an ADAT optical I/O, allowing me to run 8 channels of 32bit/48k audio over lightpipe into the mixer. I needed a card that had ADAT Optical I/O, but it also had to have stereo balanced/unbalanced analog I/O's for recording Vocals and Guitar. The RME Digi96/8 PST fit the square. It has ADAT optical, SPDIF optical/coax, and analog I/O, something few cards had back then. Everything else was pretty much all analog, all digital, or analog with SPDIF coax. That was it. the Digi96/8 PST had everything, and AudioMIDI.com was selling them real cheap. It's a great card, and I highly recommend any of the RME stuff to anyone looking for a soundcard, especially if you're going to be using VST stuff and want to connect everything via one of the digital protocols. They're rock solid and have good latency.

As for peripheral gear, the only outboard stuff used on the record was a Korg MS2000 Analog Modeling Synth, an old EMU Procussion MIDI drum module from the early 90's, and I used my trusty old Roland JX-8P for the bass and arpeggios on "In Between 5 and 14". The Korg got used quite a bit for string/pad washes and basses. It's got some real good MiniMoog-like bass patches. The bass parts on the title track and "The Hand of John Kemble" are Korg; almost all the keyboard parts on 'The Hand of John Kemble" were from the Korg, sans for a couple of noise effects parts that came from the Retro-AS1.

When I first began working on overhauling my studio for the record, I knew I was going to need something to mixdown to, most likely a DAT player of some kind. I began pricing them, and at the time, a barebones, no frills DAT player could be had for around $800-$1200 bucks. $1200 bucks to master to 16/44.1 redbook audio... That wasn't going to work for me. Way too much money to spend on something that I'm not even going to use that much, that would also afford no real mastering capability.

So I thought long and hard about the problem. By this time, I had 2 computers: I kept my P200 up and running to use for day gig/school/non-music stuff, and my dedicated music machine. It occurred to me that if I stuck a good sound card in the P200 - not even a really good one, just something that had analog and SPDIF I/O and could support 24bit/96k recording, that I'd have my DAT player. When I'm ready to mix, I could just run the SPDIF out on my mixer into my little P200, fire up Sound Forge, click on record, and start the song on my music box. I slapped an Echo MIA card in that bad boy, and for 200 bucks, I had my mixdown/mastering station... After the dually setup failed as an upgrade option for the main music machine, I scrapped the P200 and used the Motherboard and processors as the foundation for a new non-music/mixdown box, which is what I ended up using for mixdown/mastering of the record, and what I still use now.

A few more changes happened to the environment towards the end. I wanted to go laptop-only for my live setup - assuming I ever actually get around to having a live setup - and picked up a Compaq Presario 2715, which is a 1.13ghz PIII with 512mb of RAM and a 30mb harddrive. It was the only thing I could find at the time that I could get with dedicated video (ATI Mobility 16 or 32mb) for under 2 grand, seemed like a good candidate. In the studio, I use it to run some of the heavier load soft synths that can run standalone like Reaktor, Kontakt, and Absynth.

The other thing that changed was the mixer. I'd seen the Event EZ-Bus right around the time I started working on the record, and just became obsessed with it. It was perfect. Very small form factor, could mix ADAT, SPDIF, and analog sources, it could act as a stereo 24/48 computer interface via USB, and double as a control surface for Cubase with the push of a toggle button. Only problem was, it ended up taking forever to come out. I definitely needed something like it, so I got the VM200. The EZ-Bus came out around the time I started working on the remixes, so I sold my VM200 and got one before I started working on them. I'm pretty sure that it will end up being the last mixer, if not one of the last mixers, I will ever own.

aftermath

As I've said throughout the article, I read the music zines like Keyboard and Electronic Musician religiously. Every once in awhile, I see these remarks dropped here and there about soft synths not being professional, and being nothing but toys. It always makes my blood boil. MIDI keyboards, workstations, MIDI modules, rack mount samplers, composing stations, are all nothing more than little custom computers. Network appliances, really. Network appliances that people shell out thousands of dollars for, that have little or no upgrade flexibility, incapable of infinite patch/library management without backing up to removable media or getting a dedicated internal/external hard drive for it, and are almost always end-of-lifed at some point. Just my opinion, but it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to get locked into something like that if you have the choice not to.

I see these pictures in these magazines of guys sitting in front of racks upon racks of gear, and it all just seems so unnecessary to me now. It always reminds me of an old bit Tim Allen used to do when he still did standup, where he talked about how guys just like to large, powerful things - cars, planes, ships, bombs, whatever. He'd do this impersonation of a president of an automobile company, rolling out the new auto line for the year at an auto show, where he'd just swagger to the middle of the stage, swoop his arm at the make-believe cars behind him, and grunt like a caveman. I look at these guys in the magazines, sitting in front of their 64 input 24 bus consoles and their racks and racks of giant AKAI samplers, giant Roland modules, and $10,000 Lexicon reverbs, and I can almost hear that same grunt... I truly don't mean to slag them for opting for that kind of environment, I just don't understand it. We live in a time where a good computer with good ATA drives - not even UW SCSI3 - can run 128+ tracks of 32/96 audio and all of the samplers, sample players, and synths one would probably ever need to use; multiple instances no less. Even if you hit your resource limit, you can always commit some tracks to audio and deprecate your synth/effect instances (something you'd probably do in a hardware environment anyway), or, with the advent of VST System Link/Cubase SX/V-STACK, you could simply add another computer to the mix and offload some of your synths/effects to it.

What can you do... This is art, and in art, there is no right or wrong way of doing things, so undoubtedly, the argument between the two schools of approach will probably go on forever. I'm just happy I managed to live long enough to finally see the day that such an argument could even exist to begin with.

Peace out.

-D 2003.04.05

Questions? Hate mail? Ping me.