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As of March 31st, I am now officially an unemployed bum a professional musician. We got a few months of severance pay, so I figure I can take these months and spend a fulltime dayjob's worth of effort in the studio, learning how to translate the ideas in my head and in my sequencers into finished, polished, sale-worthy recordings. Ideally, I'd like to start shopping some tracks around to labels, but with the way vinyl has been going lately, I'm wondering if it's better to put that time into developing a netlabel. Regardless, since work technically tapered off a couple of weeks ago, I've been spending a lot of time in the studio already, and have been inviting folks over to hang out...
See, one thing that I've been worried about lately is that my "sound" is sounding pretty dated. I have a special place in my heart for that mid-90's acid tech/trance stuff that made me go off hard on the dancefloor at so many parties. Still, it's not exactly a modern envelope-pushing sound, even if the 90's revival is ostensibly right around the corner. I kinda feel like I've pushed that sound to the limits of my ability, and now I'm just rehashing ideas and formulas that worked for me. Stephan from Male Model Machine said something the other day that made me think - I can't remember his exact words, but the gist of it was something like "the best way to break out of that kind of box is to collaborate with other folks, the result of adding two artists together is never just 1+1, it's always something completely new and unexpected". With that in mind, I've been inviting old friends over to spend time in the studio. The formula goes something like this: arrive at 10am, have coffee and shoot the shit for a few minutes, then hit the studio and start making music without any direction at all. Break for lunch, then hit the studio again with fresh ears and decide whether the morning's stuff is valid, and if so, what direction to take it in. Work on music until 6-7pm, then break for the evening. So last Wednesday, I had Jason 'Stormchild' Sims over. Jason makes soulful 'steam car' house music and tasteful atmospheric drum and bass, with a few releases on compilations and a track in the Reason 3.0 tutorials. Strangely, when we mixed our ideas together and screwed around with sounds and synths and drums for a while, we ended up making this bizarre, challenging, glitchy dubstep thing. Deep synth basses, lots of skittery, sketchy percussive bits, a slow 808-based breakbeat, and even some guitar and a few vocals. Weiiiiird - it didn't sound like anything either of us would have made otherwise. Thursday, I had Jeff 'Anisotropic' Griffiths over. Jeff makes progressive tech/house, and has several vinyl releases on labels here and in Australia. You can definitely hear the progressive background in the thing we made, which, oddly enough, sounds like 120bpm breaks. Our session wasn't as productive as the one with Jason, but I blame that on the fact that Jeff and I don't get to hang out nearly enough, and we spent a lot of time just catching up, shooting the shit, enjoying each others company. The most interesting session so far, however, was with Rich 'Konketsujin' Hamakawa, on Sunday. Rich and I have talked a lot over the years about possible collaborations, but I've just never had time to work on any new projects. Rich has been around for a long time, playing his first live-pa at a party in '93 or '94, being half of the Mad Knob Technicians and half of Max Power, both live-pa acts that had a good deal of success here in Vancouver in the last five years or so. Rich brought over his Future Retro 777, and we spent a lot more time just jamming than we did actually producing anything, but we still came up with the best loop of all three sessions! What made the Rich session particularly interesting was the techniques we used, different than anything we'd done before. I had a pile of breakbeat loops, which I dropped into the MPC1000 for the first time and used the new JJ-OS 'auto-slice' feature, mapping 8th-note chunks of the breakbeats to pads on the MPC. I then made some sequences using the breakbeats in a straightforward session, then in random orders, making a kind of 128bpm break-core. We sync'd my x0xb0x and Rich's FR-777 to the MPC, with the x0xb0x playing basslines and the 777 playing leads, and proceeded to have a good, long acid wanking session. We were both very impressed with how actually great it sounded! The output was very dynamic and polished, but there was hardly any pre-sequencing involved, which kept it fun and jammy. We resolved to retire to our studios - I will fill the MPC full of breakbeats and chop them up accordingly, he will fill his 909 with backing breaks, and the next jam will involve a much bigger soundsystem than the little Mackies in my basement. Anyway - still to come, studio sessions with Thomas 'Pleasure Frequency', Ricardo Almeida, the Male Model Machine guys, etc, etc. In a few other days in the last week, I recorded my track "Green Cheese", fully multitracked and mixed down. I'm not happy with the mixdown, or with the sync on the 303 and Nord parts, so I'll re-record those - but for now I have to get away from it. I've shelved the project for a week or so, and have started recording another track, the Vanilla Ice one. There's at least five more songs in the sequencers that I'd like to get recorded and out there in the next month or two, so I've got my work cut out for me. Fortunately, it's all proving to be much more fun and interesting than I'd expected. :) More soon...
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Sounds like you have been having a blast with the jam sessions. I never thought to do that before with others. Of course everyone I know locally are all rock musicians so when we jam, I'm either on guitar or bass.