TALK 910 - Eventide H910

[Nick] Sonic.

[Nick] Hello,

[Nick] everybody. Welcome to Sonic Talk episode nine ten, which is a very portentous number. Unfortunately, we've got a guest who may have some opinions on that number. I'm gonna leave that there as what they call a tease. If it's working, which I've said for the last two weeks, and then I've critically missed the last step because I don't have enough to do when I'm just launching the show, we should be streaming live to Instagram. Hello, Instagram. Can you hear me? Come in, please. I think we are. We're gonna try it. We thought we'd give it a go because we got a lot of people on on Instagram. We get a lot of traction there, a lot of followers. It seemed like a good idea. Just adds a little bit of extra frisson to the beginning of the show where I have to move between windows and hit the go live button and all of those things. I wanna say hello to our friends in the chat. Nice to see a good fulsome chat.

[Nick] You could take a drink because I used the f word there. Floppy Wing called Cheap Card Company.

[Nick] Wagyu, of course, who is there doing

[Nick] doing doing the the lord's work as it were monitoring

[Nick] and moderating and other stuff. Red walks. Floppy Winkle, James Glue. Nice to see you there. Donald Duck in Spain.

[Nick] Interesting. Tommy Kickinen,

[Nick] Awkward Teeth and Hair Productions, again, one of my favorite handle

[Nick] handles. You'll have to go faster because I can only read as they come. Yeah. Anyway, well, it's nice to see you all. Lovely and much appreciated. This is the music technology podcast. We'll be talking about synthesizers,

[Nick] drum machines, recording studios, bands, playing, performing,

[Nick] recording, synthesizers, software, the whole kind of spectrum of those things that encompass our little niche of, well, we got some great topics for you this week, at least I hope. I can say that, and that's for you to decide, obviously.

[Nick] Before I introduce our guests, I'm just gonna do a quick coming up

[Nick] plug for what's happening.

[Nick] Retrocast episode five is now online. Paul Lee Bowe's

[Nick] excellent retro vintage cast with DJ Aphrodite,

[Nick] who is a legendary jungle drum and bass maker, used the Amiga back then, some great stories back then.

[Nick] Amaya Toria PureSub patch flip is on, and all of our NOBCOMM videos are up. Thanks very much to Jim, EarMonkeyMusic. He did a great job. I think we got 13 videos up, and they seem to be very popular. So,

[Nick] well, there you go. Thanks very much. And don't forget, if you are a member either of YouTube or

[Nick] Patreon, 30 off Cherry Audio DS two, music hack space courses, and talkback.s

[Nick] e mix collaboration.

[Nick] At this point, I will plug by pressing the members video, which will promote this, and then we'll be back and introduce our guests back after this. Yes.

[Nick] Indeed. And let's get on to our guests. I'll start

[Nick] furthest away.

[Nick] Ladies and gentlemen, Charlie.

[Nick] Here he is in the studio. You got the blinky lights for us on on everything and

[Nick] and a different view. Looks lovely there. It's a very nice studio room. I didn't realize it was so big. Do you pace around

[Nick] and kind of

[Nick] in in deep thought, rushing over to a synthesizer and and performing a a a swift move on it. Is that your is that your There's not too much pacing going on unless I'm

[Charlie] unless I'm walking outside in sheer frustration.

[Nick] I'm sure that doesn't happen very often. Prolific

[Nick] Charlie, of course. Charlie has

[Nick] has been part of the Saw franchise since its inception and many other things. Nine inch nails performs live. Are you well, are you got any musical projects on the go at the moment?

[Charlie] Preparing

[Charlie] for

[Charlie] I have to take a bunch of music from the Saw franchise and

[Charlie] arrange it for full orchestra

[Charlie] for a live performance

[Charlie] in Europe in the spring.

[Charlie] So I'm kind of puzzling over how I can take these in the box productions

[Charlie] with all these simulated

[Charlie] orchestral

[Charlie] items in the mix and turn it into something that can really be played by a full orchestra with a guy waving a stick up in front. And I won't be the one waving the stick, so don't worry.

[Nick] Ah, okay. Well, that sounds really exciting. What a fantastic project.

[Nick] I mean, I imagine because you must use lots of those kind of the things that only a few people know the names for the way that they can play a violin or stringed instruments or whatever. Yeah. So you you'd be there'll be all of that stuff.

[Charlie] Yeah. That'll be the challenge. You're trying figure out how to get these yeah. All the rattling and clattering and and scraping and honking and trying to figure out what the correct Italian

[Charlie] word is for those playing techniques.

[Nick] Nice. Well, I look forward

[Nick] to

[Nick] more information as it comes. That sounds like a really interesting thing. We've also got

[Nick] Paulie Bo, who's there in Birmingham in the Noir studio,

[Nick] home of Vintage Digital and

[Nick] cooker of

[Nick] Retro Sonic Retrocast episodes amongst many other things. How are you, Paulie?

[Paulee] Yeah. Good. Thank you. The the old freelance

[Paulee] life is actually going pretty well, and I'm, you know Nice. Earning money.

[Paulee] So that's really,

[Paulee] really positive. But, yeah,

[Paulee] in fact, you know, I am kind of trying to, you know, diversify

[Paulee] income streams. That sounds terribly

[Paulee] business like, doesn't it? I opened up a cool

[Paulee] t shirt shop

[Paulee] on t public.

[Paulee] So if you go to tpublic.com/magical-synth-adventure,

[Paulee] You can find a couple of t shirts. I'm I've put up a couple yesterday.

[Paulee] One's got the magical synth adventure logo.

[Paulee] Another one

[Paulee] is a play on an old

[Paulee] pun which

[Paulee] said real coders don't eat quiche for some reason. So I've done a modern Uh-huh.

[Paulee] Play on the words, which is vibe coders eat quiche, and I've done a three d rendered quiche

[Paulee] underneath it. Nice. So if you want a a t shirt with

[Nick] feel I feel I I vibe code. I've been vibe coding a lot You do. And I eat quiche, although I haven't eaten any quiche this week, but maybe I should.

[Paulee] I'm not I'm not I don't happen to be a fan of quiche, so it fits fits my kinda life quite well. But, yeah, it's just a bit of a playful tongue in cheek stuff. But yeah, as you said, RetroCast is doing really well.

[Paulee] I'm so happy with like the the reception to it and the fact it's given us kind of, you know, like well, there's only two shows, but it's given us kind of a brand of podcast now, hasn't it? Like Yeah. Well kind of a bigger entity. I spent all that I spent all that time working on the podcast server so we could do more shows.

[Nick] And I as I said, I was thinking about doing a show about AI and generative AI and it being used, but I I feel the I feel the tide is probably not with me at the moment. I think there's probably gonna be more people getting angry about it than there are interested in it. So I'm holding off for that just now. I might do a special, but I I like the idea of some more.

[Paulee] Could still do it as a kind of, you know

[Paulee] you could still do it as a kind of Suicide mission.

[Paulee] Well, like someone who's for and someone

[Paulee] who's against, don't give me the link because I'll rush in the room going, AI is murder.

[Paulee] Artist lives. Blah blah blah. No. I wouldn't really.

[Paulee] Maybe be hidden. Hidden make a good YouTube channel. Got

[Nick] I've got plenty of contacts today. I'm still thinking about it, and it's just I know people are so it's so it's so binary. It's very very

[Paulee] yeah. It's very it's very Well, you say that, but interestingly,

[Paulee] there is a

[Paulee] and I have to get used to this now.

[Paulee] There is kind of a a breed of musician who very much doesn't want to use AI in the

[Paulee] composing process,

[Paulee] a lot of them are using it to develop soft synths or weird

[Paulee] like, for instance, there's been like a

[Paulee] million different firmwares for the Akai s 900

[Nick] released Yeah. People fixing stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

[Paulee] Which is which is really weird and I

[Paulee] I don't know where I sit on that yet. This is how all happening too quick for me, Nick. But it's like,

[Nick] that's why I made the T shirt. I think I'm having a fight. It is an interesting one, isn't it? Because all these devices now I mean, it's same with electron people are just provide unable

[Nick] to move. It's like, here's something that turns it into something completely different that somebody else's vision. Those that that stuff's really fascinating, and I guess democratization

[Nick] of music technology

[Nick] is good.

[Nick] I mean, it's better than,

[Nick] hey. You don't have to know anything about music to make music kind of era that we went through with all the apps and all that stuff. It's it's that that that was extremely depressing. So I suppose it's in a way, this is a lot better. It is. But I have a romantic notion of the

[Paulee] recluse coder

[Paulee] sitting in his own filth

[Paulee] and old takeaway boxes,

[Nick] coding some genius plug in. There's a romance in that for me. I know I'm extremely weird, but there is for me. That's interesting. Well, yeah, I've been doing a lot of that. I have been sitting in my own my own filth, but I do I do feel most of it. What I've what I've been doing this week is I'm trying to complete my

[Nick] in a in a sense of irony, I'm trying to complete my extraction

[Nick] from

[Nick] some of the big tech services by using the big tech services to write the services that I can then run on non big tech services.

[Nick] So Sure. Like, we've got a machine we've got a machine that we ingest all of our video in from shows, and that's been running on Amazon for years. And I thought, right. You know what? I can move that to Europe. I wonder how that will work. And I did it yesterday, and I've made it better. So it's like, made it better. Wow. So,

[Nick] you know, that's the so now I have the only machine that now runs in the cloud, in Amazon's cloud, is this one that runs the show, and there's not much I can do about that because I don't have all those GPUs and stuff. So so, you know, I'm doing my thing, but burning

[Nick] the planet to save my morals. Yes.

[Paulee] I was gonna mention one of the things I did. I wrote I'm writing a series of articles on extremely

[Paulee] cheap devices.

[Paulee] Like, I think I'm calling it Brokebeats instead of Breakbeats. I know. Not the Oh, Terrible puns, but I'm pun master.

[Paulee] And this is this is the Livtran NanoCore.

[Paulee] It's a 37

[Paulee] pounds, so that would be about $50 in your money, Charlie.

[Paulee] Mono USB audio interface and guitar effect. It's got in out USB rechargeable battery,

[Paulee] delays,

[Paulee] courses, amps, cabs, £37

[Paulee] of AliExpress.

[Paulee] It's it's wild what people are packing into

[Paulee] tiny little boxes, isn't it? So I'm gonna be doing some other

[Paulee] I'm not entirely sure. Software. The one that is hackable that I've got coming next week is called the

[Paulee] m five stack

[Paulee] card pewter ADV, which is like a little

[Paulee] keyboard Capture.

[Paulee] Computer. I mean, it's not that catchy, but it's got an ESP 32 inside and you can code DAWs and trackers

[Paulee] for that. So it's wild,

[Paulee] these kind of cheap little

[Paulee] devices. It's got this this NanoCore's got really good bit crusher delay on it as well. So it's worth the £37 just for that. So there we go. That's me. What fun. What fun.

[Nick] Okay. Well, we've got topics, and I I thought this is a cracky one stop. Obviously, this is episode nine ten.

[Nick] We know the Eventide Hub h nine ten is absolutely

[Nick] pivotal in music technology, but we'll get to that a bit later on. Let's start with this is an article by

[Nick] by Robbie Puricelli on

[Nick] on Gear News, and it's sort of top five

[Nick] oh, hold on. I need to change something. I haven't actually finished that. Yes. Hold on one minute. I need to

[Nick] because I can't see what I wrote in there.

[Nick] Hasn't updated.

[Nick] The top five since that sort of changed the world, and it's kind of interesting that because, you know, we've got

[Nick] Fairlight CMI,

[Nick] Yamaha d x seven preset electric piano. You know, hate it as you might, still very, very influential.

[Nick] We've got preset Korg M1, preset piano, t x eight one zed lately bass, and Korg prophecy preset three zero three. Now I've got something to play on this because I realized that I had actually used

[Nick] two of these five on one track, and I'll play it because and I teased it before the show. So let me play. I don't I don't know. I did the remix or we did the remix, but I'm trying to play the bit that only has the two elements that I'm talking about. So here we go. So

[Nick] this was a classic nineties,

[Nick] you know,

[Nick] pop and house thing.

[Nick] There's the piano.

[Nick] And

[Nick] the lately bass

[Nick] underneath it, which I think

[Nick] I think that was actually sampled and played from an Roland s

[Nick] 300

[Nick] you know, what was the little s three thirty, the little one rack sampler, which had a wicked filter in it, really good TVF.

[Nick] And that's what and it was like one note. So when he plays really high, it gets very short and pecky, which really worked in that track. So, yeah, that was forget me not. It's tongue in cheek. I think it charted in The UK

[Nick] at, you know, 20 something or other, but it was it was the week where all of the things that we'd be working on got released at the same time. So it was like we had three in the top 30

[Nick] or top 40, and that was one of them. But that and that m one piano. And I would like to say, I I feel I'm blushing now because I didn't realize I was blowing my own trumpet so much. I play the guitar riff. So it wasn't a sample. Not not the wah, but the little picked ones. So, anyway, top five but there's, you know, there was the Fairlight CME, the preset to which is the Stravinsky

[Nick] Orchestra

[Nick] Strike Firebird four, I think. I mean, there's just so many of these. I mean, Charlie, you I know you've got a large library a large collection of older

[Nick] sampling technology much like Paulie. So you've probably got much of this stuff.

[Nick] Would you would you hold the hardware still or just keep the samples? You

[Charlie] know, I still do keep

[Charlie] at hand an e max one

[Charlie] s e h d rack

[Charlie] just because that one is truly

[Charlie] barely holding on and in terms of sonic quality. Like, it just wrecks whatever goes through it. And I was such a huge fan of,

[Charlie] you know, Hank and Keith Shockley, the bomb squad, and their on Public Enemy and on Ice Cube's first record.

[Charlie] And on because there was this this

[Charlie] jangly

[Charlie] sort of I I I hesitate to call it lo fi because it wasn't like this muted kind of sound. It was it was bright and and had edge to it partly because of the aliasing and the low sample rate that they would use to increase the sampling time.

[Charlie] And there was just like this a certain quality that could immediately jumped out at me whenever I heard

[Charlie] those Bomb Squad productions

[Charlie] and they were of course, it's all down to their choices of sounds and their arrangements that makes it sound like this unruly riot going on.

[Charlie] But the sound quality of the sampler itself definitely contributed to that rough edge to it. And of course, the Emax's were a big part of early Nine Inch Nails records and not just because of convenience, but because of their sort of ability to not dirtify the sound, but to sort of edgeify

[Charlie] it somewhat.

[Charlie] And Yeah. I still remember

[Charlie] watching the Depeche Mode movie, Depeche Mode one zero one and there's a brief

[Charlie] segment where Andrew Wilder

[Charlie] goes over their stage rigs and he's sort of explaining it to a civilian audience, you know, saying describing what a sampler is, and he would hit a key and say, we can have a recording and trigger it from a key.

[Charlie] But their entire rig in those days was all Emax ones, and that was kind of for me, the Andrew Wilder era of Depeche Mode was like the golden age of both of sound choices, but also sound quality.

[Charlie] And so I was sort of

[Charlie] have this nostalgic romantic attachment to the e max, which I do keep at hand. It is a pain in the butt to use, but it for certain sounds and, of course, it has analog filters

[Charlie] as opposed to the digital filters that dominated every sampler after that.

[Charlie] So it can sound quite

[Charlie] earthy and warm if you use those filters. And I just that was

[Nick] the high point What for me. What about actual presets? Because I imagine in the sort of music that you were involved in, presets were probably an anathema. Although, I'm guessing maybe in your early

[Nick] music to picture years, you know, some people expect to hear a certain

[Nick] preset or a certain thing that is certainly in the nineties, I think. Right? Or did that not happen to you so much?

[Charlie] We were always in in every

[Charlie] school of thought, I was definitely

[Charlie] I would use presets as a tool to learn how

[Charlie] some programmers had best

[Charlie] took an taken advantage of the features of a synth. So if I heard Right. Flip through the presets and if I hear something interesting, I'd be like, oh, I didn't know it could do that. Is that a dual filter array or you know? And I could sort of disassemble those to to learn more about the hardware, but I I

[Charlie] can't admit to actually using

[Charlie] presets

[Charlie] or

[Charlie] stock ish, recognizably stock samples

[Charlie] except for one,

[Charlie] which I wanna credit to Eric Persing. I think it was part of some Spectrosonics

[Charlie] sample library or something. And it's the the sample that makes every film composer roll his eyes,

[Charlie] which is called I think it's called Rusty Spoke.

[Charlie] And it's like a bode symbol patch. It has a very recognizable

[Charlie] texture and you can hear it in

[Charlie] or you can hear it or a very similar version of it

[Charlie] in

[Charlie] the score for the Robert De Niro movie

[Charlie] Ronin.

[Charlie] And there's a few scenes in some of the car chases where as the car chase kicks off, you hear this lovely Sort of gnarly bowed symbol. Yeah.

[Charlie] Nice. It's one of those ones, like, you you can use it once.

[Charlie] And then from then on, it's repetition.

[Charlie] And I did you I did manage to use it once.

[Nick] Ah, that's really interesting because those metallic sounds are extremely

[Nick] they've got a very strong signature.

[Nick] There was a I think we had an episode, like, I don't know, in the two hundreds, some time back, and it was about a sound.

[Nick] And it was the sound of a gate opening, a squeaky gate. And it must have been in one of those big Hollywood 9,000

[Nick] type libraries where it just had a very specific harmonic print. And as soon as you hear it, we go, I know that. I've got that sample on the CD somewhere. It's it's bonkers. And I still use I

[Charlie] still use sort of anything that sounds like a squeaky rusty gate or a bowed symbol. I still collect those kind of samples by the bushel.

[Charlie] But I use them as the fodder for

[Charlie] granular sense like pigment Yeah. Or alchemy or the Waldorf quantum.

[Charlie] And if you take a short little sound

[Charlie] and chuck it in your granular sense,

[Charlie] then that That's like a wave table, isn't it? Provide the base yeah. Exactly. It provides sort of the basis for these long drawn out pad type sounds that have this edgy

[Charlie] semi atonal texture and they've been very that kind of sound character

[Charlie] and that that folder on my on my hard drive has seen a lot of use in scary scenes.

[Nick] Yeah. I'd imagine.

[Nick] Paulie, I mean, any you'd add to this. I mean, this seems like a pretty good. If you're going for five and five only, I it's hard to argue against any of those, but there's gotta be I was thinking the

[Nick] the JD is it the JD or the JP 8,000 SuperSaw?

[Nick] It's gotta be in there somewhere maybe. Yes.

[Paulee] Digital

[Paulee] native dance,

[Paulee] of course. Oh,

[Nick] the fodder of

[Nick] of of, yeah, of eighties and nineties

[Nick] advertising

[Nick] campaigns.

[Nick] Yeah. God. Yeah. Yes. Dates very fast.

[Charlie] But wasn't it called don't we call refer to it as digital native dank?

[Charlie] Because I remember on the d 50, was either on the the keyboard or the rack, the name was too long to be fully displayed.

[Charlie] So the the last e was cut off. So we'd always call it digital native dank.

[Nick] Nice. I love it.

[Paulee] That's absolutely brilliant. Yeah. I think on the the the d 10 and the d 20, you didn't even get the full thing. I think it was split into two presets.

[Paulee] So you got digital native and then something else. But, yeah, that's that's one that kind of really

[Paulee] sticks out to to me. And I think in terms of kind of samplers

[Paulee] and sample fodder,

[Paulee] there was a

[Paulee] a Vince Clark

[Paulee] analog

[Paulee] synth

[Paulee] CD

[Paulee] in the nineties,

[Paulee] which I think got a lot of got a lot of kind of traction, you know, because it had some really usable kind of little patterns.

[Paulee] I think also there was

[Paulee] the first time Future Music

[Paulee] did a

[Paulee] a sample CD,

[Paulee] you know, with, like, samples

[Paulee] of,

[Paulee] I don't know, people in a in a rocket launch tower going, be ready for liftoff blah blah blah. And and, you know, people

[Paulee] saying things like, you know, cut the midrange, drop the bass, and all that kind of thing. I think that got a lot of

[Paulee] a lot of

[Nick] mileage. Gotta check this place out. Sam samples-now.com

[Nick] It's just full of all those time and space. We used to sell these

[Nick] we used to sell these things. 160 dB drum and bass, black to black,

[Nick] Brit horns. God, we had all of these things. But I was looking for the Vince Clark one, but I couldn't find it. So

[Charlie] I do remember a Vince Clark

[Charlie] CD that was

[Charlie] drum one shots that he had made on all of this analog and modular synths.

[Charlie] And I admit that some of those little one shots are still lurking around in in my collection, and they have seen the light of day from time to time.

[Nick] If you don't Yeah. I'm

[Nick] I I I remember we we when I was doing mixes around that time that I played that track from, we mixed

[Nick] Erasure.

[Nick] I can't remember what the track was, but I I remembered it. 40 we had a 48 track. So two two two inch tapes turned up,

[Nick] and it was literally

[Nick] each each track was like one monophonic sound.

[Nick] Yes.

[Nick] And

[Nick] you would just sort of you'd have to push them all up for it all to work again, and it was

[Nick] yeah. It it I just remember being astonished at how kind of how it all fitted together. I I wish I'd kept it. I I probably got it somewhere, but I can't I don't think I've digitized it or anything. But all of those little sounds, there were loads and loads and loads of little sounds. I can't remember what the sound what the what the remix was now. It's complete. And in the end, what we did is we put a just massive,

[Nick] horrible

[Nick] kind of 140 beat because they were all very fast. 140 bpm jungle type beat

[Nick] and just absolutely

[Nick] smashed it. And it was yeah. They didn't have very much music in it. I can't remember much else. I can't remember the name of the track.

[Nick] One one that perhaps didn't didn't go very far, I think, but I just remember the multitrack being so I'd imagine he probably got as

[Nick] gigs and gigs and gigs of little sort of sequenceable

[Nick] blips and short notes because all this stuff is very

[Nick] staccato, isn't it? It doesn't he doesn't have Yeah. Pads and that sort of thing. It's all little put together. Yeah. Master. Oh,

[Paulee] the the CD I was thinking of was actually called Lucky Bastard

[Nick] from '19 Oh, yes. I do I I remember that stuff. I remember that vaguely.

[Paulee] Yeah. I've got it somewhere. A classic shit. It's really cool.

[Paulee] It's really cool to be mangled through

[Paulee] Oh, yeah. Kleptomania,

[Nick] Norman Cook, Skip to My Loops.

[Nick] Oh, yeah. Wow.

[Nick] Wow.

[Nick] Well, I because I remember back in the day when we first started out, none of this stuff was available.

[Nick] And the guy I made music with, Neil, he used to go to New York quite a lot. And every time he would go, he would go to the record stores and come back with the the breakbeat albums, which were it was breakbeat volumes, you know, and we just had loads and loads of them. They were just somebody would sample it or turntable it and then make a new track out of it that just had the loop running for two minutes. And you just have you buy albums and albums of this stuff, and there were always acapella ones as well. In fact, I vividly remember

[Nick] acapella's anonymous, which was one of what they they were sold in New York.

[Nick] And literally one whole side

[Nick] of one of the volumes

[Nick] was

[Nick] Massive Attacks Blue Lines, just all of them. It was like basically every single vocal that they sampled on the same side of one piece of vinyl. And we knew we knew. Anyway,

[Nick] patches, though. Got any favorite what other patches, Paulie? You've got a great article by by

[Nick] Robbie.

[Paulee] Yeah. I'm

[Paulee] I'm just I was thinking about the the

[Paulee] the d x

[Paulee] seven

[Paulee] electric piano the other day because

[Paulee] I think it it deserves

[Paulee] a kind of rebirth almost

[Paulee] in some kind of sinister way.

[Paulee] You know, if you like

[Paulee] Chuck a if you're doing like a pastiche kind of analog horror, I think it'd be quite cool to to have that sound play something

[Paulee] not like a ballad and a bit wobbly and a bit VHS, you know, degrading That sort of music it would actually that music box thing that you have in horror films where it feels really sinister, that sort of vibe. Yeah. But it was but it's d x seven piano instead.

[Nick] Yeah. Okay. Charlie, I I think you're the man. I mean, you know, there's your mission, should you choose to accept it,

[Nick] is to slip a d x seven sound, e p one Diminished or something. Soundtrack

[Nick] somewhere.

[Charlie] Okay. That might be a I think would be a walk frame.

[Nick] A walk.

[Paulee] You Right. I'm just gonna take choppily. Just gotta take a quick Do you Oh, sorry. Sorry. Do you still have the one rusting in your back garden, Charlie?

[Paulee] Oh, yeah. You

[Paulee] had one rust.

[Charlie] Yeah. There's one out out outside rusting. It was victim number 16 from one of the tours, and it's out there with a few missing teeth and a rusted chassis. It probably still sends MIDI though if you'd find a key that works. Sure. It still works.

[Nick] Yeah. Feels like a tank. I gotta take a quick break. We'll be back after this short message from our sponsor.

[Nick] Right.

[Nick] Gosh. I don't know where to go next. There's so much we could oops. That's not what I meant to do. There's so much we could go to. To the nineties. Let I I think this one's kind of interesting. This is an antidote to the

[Nick] to the the the pop

[Nick] things. And this is a there's a piece on Create Digital Music just about from Tempest Audio, kind of excavated some of the oldest recordings. This one really took This piece of paper is the oldest recording of a human voice ever made, and nobody heard it until 2008,

[Speaker 3] not even the man who made it. He died waiting for the technology that could play it back. It was Paris 1860,

[Speaker 3] seventeen years before Thomas Edison recorded anything. An inventor named Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville built a machine called the phonograph.

[Speaker 3] It traced sound vibrations onto soot blackened paper. He wasn't building a record player. He just wanted to make sound visible like a Every bit of information I'm gonna fast forward it. Voice was sitting on the paper. The technology just needed a hundred and forty eight years to catch up with it, and the same was true of the man who made it. The world wasn't ready for the recording. So if you're making something the world doesn't seem ready

[Nick] I just think that is absolutely mind blowing. So seventeen years before Edison, who basically famously

[Nick] he did this a couple of times, didn't he? I I think when you look into the history of Edison, he he kind of he was a bit like Apple, you know, that claimed claimed that they had originate well, they actually Apple, to be fair, don't. They they popularize

[Nick] an idea that's already been proven and and do it better, you know, which is a different thing. But he actually claimed I think Edison had a couple of things where he had one that wasn't the incandescent light bulb, somebody else's, and he just sort of, like, figured out how to manufacture it. But so so this is I just thought this was actually fascinating. So this guy, Graf Helmuth Karl von von

[Nick] von Molker, who's a Prussian general field marshal.

[Nick] He

[Nick] oh, no. He wasn't. I'm not talking about this. Edison yep. This is Edison. Yeah. Ed Edward Leon de Scott de Montevall made of an autophonograph,

[Nick] which trace paper. And that so until 2008, somebody found the paper. They brought it out and then scanned it, turned it into a waveform,

[Nick] and then played it back, and that's how he heard it. So the guy never got to hear I just think this is absolutely astonishing

[Nick] and probably is the first example of a recorded sound ever. I mean, it's just kind of amazing, isn't it, that that these things exist?

[Nick] I don't know. I I I don't know if there's any point or any discussion to it. I just thought, what an amazing fact.

[Nick] I'd take this audio also. B m

[Charlie] chuck up to a 140 b p m jungle beat under it and, know, off to the club.

[Nick] No

[Nick] I I guess there'd be no copyright on this being as to how old it possibly is. So that's so we put we'd probably be pretty safe there.

[Paulee] I think it would be fun to, like, get the different notes and multi sample and loop them and make a really creepy choir pad.

[Paulee] Yeah. Some of the Adrian Pine Bar. I listen

[Paulee] yeah. Yeah. I listened to some of the the dolls. Did you hear any of the dolls?

[Paulee] They were absolutely

[Paulee] terrifying.

[Paulee] Think some of the lines were abused.

[Charlie] Yeah.

[Paulee] Yeah. They were brave. No one didn't even know that. Know kids were smiling

[Paulee] in those old black and white photographs.

[Paulee] They they were

[Paulee] terrified

[Paulee] at night by the dolls, but no. Absolutely brilliant. But, yeah, this is the kind of

[Paulee] this is the kind of direction

[Paulee] I'd like to take some episodes of retro casting,

[Nick] like Real old stuff. Contact

[Paulee] this person, real old stuff.

[Paulee] One one little thing I'm trying to organize at the moment is an episode with

[Paulee] someone from the Berlin

[Paulee] Spy Museum about, like, cryptology and, you know, secret messages and things like that. So I do wanna do some kind of older general interest

[Paulee] stuff that's

[Paulee] not quite in my wheelhouse, you know, which which will be really interesting for me to learn about.

[Nick] It's interesting, though. What I thought about this I mean, just the fact that he created something that it was like a megaphone with a stylus on it that just, obviously, the amplitude was quite low because there was no way of amplifying. This was just an, I mean, big cone

[Nick] wobbly bit at the end and so so scratching into soot lined paper. I mean, that's just sort of what a what a massively

[Nick] brilliant idea. I just think, you know, it's absolutely brilliant. The whole article is a great article by Peter Kern who's

[Nick] obviously written on his own CDM link. Really good. I know, Charlie, have you come across have you ever have you ever come across any hidden recordings, recordings you'd forgotten about that have just sort of blown your mind?

[Nick] You must have loads. I mean, I remember you talking about the brakes on the subway and all of that kind of stuff, but that that must be others. Yeah. I mean, I did have I did have this

[Charlie] one of the first

[Charlie] Sony Walkman cassette recorders that was all there's actually a recorder and it had stereo mics on it. And I used to carry that thing around

[Charlie] just in case of stumbling across, you know, a building being demolished or a guy with a jackhammer or something.

[Charlie] And, course, the it had, you know, the auto gain control of those early recorders. So whatever you recorded sounded just all compressed and gnarly and fat.

[Charlie] And I did, you know, I I it was probably two years ago

[Charlie] going through the storage room and cleaning things out and found that box of of dats and cassettes that I had always meant to

[Charlie] digitize and archive for the future. And I find and along with boxes of like

[Charlie] mini DV videotapes

[Charlie] from the Handycam I always used to carry around on tours. So there'd be, you know, backstage antics and shit like that. And I finally said, okay. I've got a a my collection of vintage media has sort of reached critical mass and I looked

[Charlie] around for

[Charlie] company or a guy who could digitize all this stuff from all these different formats and just give me back a a, you know, a Samsung t nine SSD drive with the movie files and WAV files of these of this and so forth. And

[Charlie] finally, bit the bullet and did that and did did discover some some gems including

[Charlie] there was some cassettes from the old Tascam two thirty four Porta Studio,

[Charlie] which, you know, was a four track that would record

[Charlie] both,

[Charlie] you know, four tracks would occupy both sides of the cassette. So I

[Charlie] I wound up with a whole bunch of WAV files, some of which were backwards because he had digitized it from a normal cassette deck.

[Charlie] But it was and also, I think the two thirty four used d b x noise reduction,

[Charlie] which Yeah. This person didn't have.

[Charlie] So Yeah. He wasn't able to decode the d b x noise reduction. So I got back these files that probably the signal that went to tape was this feeble thin little thing. But what came back after

[Charlie] not being properly

[Charlie] d b x decoded

[Charlie] was this compressed

[Charlie] gnarly

[Charlie] fat sounding

[Charlie] mess of

[Charlie] soupy audio

[Charlie] and

[Charlie] was actually probably a lot better than

[Charlie] my original recording. And of course, it was all at half speed because those TaskCams ran at double speed, I think. So I had these wonderful pitch down

[Charlie] d b x can be encoded and not decoded

[Charlie] files that were all slow and gnarly and compressed. And so those those went into the

[Charlie] to be edited and used folder on my desktop for sure. Is it can you is it actually possible now?

[Nick] Because d Dolby are famously very litigious and very protective of their licenses,

[Nick] And I can't imagine any of that stuff is is used anywhere anymore. But I want then I'm I'm also not public domain. So to be able to decode it, are there plugins or anything available to do that sort of thing? I mean, just just as a matter of There must be. I mean, I haven't dug into it too much, but I'm sure

[Charlie] that there are plug ins that somebody has developed for some multiband

[Charlie] dynamics plug in that would basically reverse the process of a DBX encoding. I do know there's a few plug ins that seek to emulate the Dolby type a and type b noise reduction that was used on, like, 24 track machines. Because that was an old trick back in the day was, you know, encoding it to tape and then switching off the that channel's unit for the decode

[Charlie] and playback process. So you'd get this sort of hyped,

[Charlie] slightly compressed signal coming back off tape where the highs were compressed more than the mids and the lows. And there are a couple of plugins that don't use the word Dolby

[Charlie] in their name, but they do say this is this is the type a trick or whatever.

[Charlie] So I'm sure there's gotta be a preset

[Nick] Yeah. I remember in

[Nick] the studio, there was nobody

[Nick] because if you had if you had 24 track if you had multitracks and you had because having Dolby on the multitracks

[Nick] was both a blessing and a curse because if somebody sent you a tape with multitrack

[Nick] doll that was Dolby, it was like, oh, I can't I can't do it unless I have the Dolby rack, and you'd have to rent a Dolby rack from FX Rentals or something like that and bring it down just to decode it, to do the mix. It was a bit of a it was a bit of a rough yeah. That was didn't didn't kinda work out kind of for that many people, I think, in many ways. And, also, it was very

[Nick] it's a bit like nowadays when you have noise reduction on your Zoom call or whatever. It it was it was quite blunt, wasn't it? I think seem to remember.

[Charlie] Yeah. And if you didn't get everything calibrated

[Charlie] just right, then things would kind of be fluctuating weirdly, and

[Charlie] I was not necessarily a fan.

[Nick] No. It was a bit of a nightmare.

[Nick] Interesting,

[Nick] though.

[Nick] I'm sorry, Paul. I've I've completely got lost of that. I can't remember whether I've already come to you about this. You you did mention it. You already came to me about this. I talked about and stuff.

[Nick] I think sample library is a really good idea. Maybe do a little bit of a decent sample thing. That would be kind of fun. Yeah. Right.

[Nick] Excuse me. I

[Nick] I'm gonna go to the 09:10 now because it just feels like we're we're romping through the through the time and not the topics. So I wanted to do nine ten as it's episode nine ten. So I need to get it in here. And I might have to split this up because I need to do play another ad, and my other ad was a bit early. So this was this is a video from

[Nick] Funky Junk Italy,

[Nick] and it's just a bunch of so the nine ten,

[Nick] 50 years old. Is it 51, 52 years old?

[Nick] This is the heart. You could play it via a keyboard, feedback.

[Nick] And when you hear it, I mean, this is mostly on

[Nick] crazy guitars,

[Nick] but this was all over drums.

[Nick] I mean, there there's another couple of videos from them where it's just all about how it was used on drum sounds, on guitar sounds, on vocal sounds. And if you had two of them and you could get the knob so that it just

[Nick] wibbled, so it didn't it Yeah. You often see this in the studio and they fluctuate.

[Nick] And that's because you would if you got the knob in between the values,

[Nick] it would wobble, and that would give something even more it's only be a you know, not even a cent, would it? Would it be a cent or something like that? It'd be a cent, and it would just give the extra you know, all sorts of tricks that were done with it. I don't think I've ever used one. I mean, obviously, there's plenty of plug ins in here, but it was nine seventy four

[Nick] and a hundred and twelve milliseconds of delay. I just saw one on Reverb for £2,397.

[Nick] So they obviously hold their price, and they're very, very thought sort of and you'd need two, really. Would you need two to get the best from me? Because then you have pound pound one left and right.

[Charlie] I would I'd default

[Charlie] to having if something's mono, I default to having two of them and panning them left and So, yeah, that would be that would be ideal, but that sounds like a pricey

[Charlie] a pricey investment in this day and age. Yeah.

[Nick] Did you I mean, I'm guessing yeah. I mean, I I don't remember

[Nick] this being a factor because I came up through this sort of really cheap digital effects. I remember it being in studios,

[Nick] but I don't remember ever using it on anything. It wasn't the sort of sound that perhaps we were looking for at that time. I'm guessing it must have been something that you you came across for some of the earlier recordings you were working on. It's still still used now, I guess.

[Charlie] I mean, it's I remember seeing

[Charlie] it and using it

[Charlie] once

[Charlie] on some tom toms, like war tom kind of pattern because I had heard

[Charlie] I had heard it on

[Charlie] My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. There's a there's

[Charlie] on a couple of the tracks, there's sort of very obvious use of that sort of pitch envelope y effect that the nine ten can do on drums where the drum hits kinda go.

[Nick] And

[Charlie] I was very kind of upfront and noticeable on My Life in the Bush and Ghosts and I was like, oh, I gotta try that. And I tried it on some can't remember what the track was that I've used it on and it was cool and worked,

[Charlie] but it it screamed,

[Charlie] I am the h nine ten

[Charlie] snare drum effect. And

[Charlie] then but I was interested to read many years later and I can't believe it didn't occur to me ever and that I didn't automatically

[Charlie] know this was what was done when I heard the record. But that

[Charlie] that, of course, Mutt Lang used it on ACDC

[Charlie] to fatten up the snare by using that harmonizer with a little pitch envelope

[Charlie] element to it, but mixing it very far behind the main snare sound and it would just add a bit of a a very subtle kind of Ew. Little sweeping effect. Yeah.

[Charlie] Exactly. And

[Charlie] it was not overt like it was on My Life in the Bush and Ghosts, but that was when I read that that was one of the true one of the millions of tricks that Mutt Lange had used, I thought, I

[Charlie] can't believe I didn't think of that or notice that when I the thousand times I've heard those records.

[Nick] So, Paulie, the world's first digital effect unit, and I do not see one in your studio. I mean, what are you thinking?

[Nick] You've muted, I think.

[Paulee] I

[Paulee] mean, is the price Yeah. Got

[Nick] ins. Yeah.

[Paulee] Yeah. Yeah. So when you were when you were when you were playing the video for this topic,

[Paulee] and I saw it was,

[Paulee] just, you know, a picture of the rack, I was like, thank God.

[Paulee] Thank God he didn't play

[Paulee] Laurie Anderson's o Superman,

[Paulee] which has this rack on it. Because that video is the it gives me nightmares, you know, when she puts the mouth Really? Light in her mouth and go.

[Nick] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Come on.

[Paulee] It's like

[Paulee] childhood trauma. Anyway, But yeah, I I love it. It's brilliant. And yeah, it's all over Bowie's low as well, isn't it? As well as Yeah. Life in the bushy ghost. And it's on my favorite track from that album, breaking glass. Lately,

[Paulee] I've been

[Paulee] breaking glass in your room again,

[Paulee] which is brilliant. It's a brilliant track.

[Paulee] Nice. And if I could get my hands on one, of course, I would. I'm kind of obsessed with pitch shifters,

[Paulee] and the the more terrible they are or the more artifact laden they are, the better

[Paulee] in my mind. You know? I don't want, like, an octave a clean octave up. I want an octave up that stutters and grinds.

[Nick] You need an SPX 90. That's what you need. Yes.

[Paulee] Well, I've got a a Rex a Rex 50, which is like the little desktop. Even worse.

[Paulee] Yeah. Even worse. I've got I've yes. Got Some

[Paulee] I've got some I'm looking forward to trying this out this week.

[Paulee] Friend sent me a MIDI verb four.

[Paulee] Dude. That would be good. Okay.

[Paulee] So I'm gonna I'm gonna try the pitch shift on that, but, yeah, I was trying to think which which are the best ones

[Paulee] I've got. I think,

[Paulee] you know that, video I did with the the Amiga

[Paulee] with a guitar through it? Cause that's all eight bit. I think that pitch shifting sounds phenomenal

[Paulee] because it kind of clicks and stutters and

[Paulee] almost drags the sound out

[Paulee] rather than cleanly

[Paulee] shifts it. And then if you get your dry signal

[Paulee] and just add this behind, it kinda hides the clicks, you're just left with this

[Paulee] just this amazing grunge. So, yeah, of course, if I could get one, a h nine ten, then

[Paulee] Yeah. There's a I would get one, but I'm I'm at the point in my career where people are sending me midi

[Paulee] verb fours and not Ebbantides

[Paulee] Yeah. Well, that's Legacy racks. That's Maybe one day.

[Nick] I I just wanna shout out doctor Syth in the chat room, Manny. Oh god. REX 50 gives me nightness. If I recall, I think the REX 50 was the first time Yamaha

[Nick] went away from the green backlit screen to a sort of orangey one with white writing.

[Nick] And I I know Mark Tinney

[Nick] raves about his REX 50 or did maybe ten years ago, fifteen years ago possibly.

[Nick] But, yeah, it was a sort of multi effects unit. What a shout out for the the the Eventide

[Nick] on the

[Nick] it's Frank Zappa, Joe's Garage, Watermelon, and Easter Hay, which not only has the the best and the most emotive guitar solo in my opinion of all time, But also the drums, I think it's Chad Wackerman's playing. I mean, they just go.

[Nick] Just so beautifully spacey and brilliant.

[Nick] If you don't if you get a chance, Joe's Garage,

[Nick] Watermelon and Easter Hay, absolutely fantastic

[Nick] guitar solo. What's that? Oh, that's the Rex 50.

[Paulee] Yeah. But the thing is you can Modded. Circuit

[Nick] Yeah.

[Paulee] With a clock. So you can make it really, really grungy, or you can actually make it better quality than it originally was.

[Nick] And then there's two What what happens to the example time? You turn you turn it up and then you get what? The reverb Yeah. You can actually

[Paulee] it it actually speeds up the clock over the CPU that's trying to calculate the reverb. So the reverbs get shorter but better quality

[Paulee] or they get really really really grungy.

[Nick] So That sounds quite good. Guts.

[Paulee] It is pretty good for if if you are, you know, able to circuit bend stuff,

[Paulee] it's a good £60

[Paulee] punch because because it works on the distortions and everything

[Paulee] else as well, and, you know, it's one of my favorite

[Paulee] circuit bend devices. I've got a an early called Chaos Pad which is circuit bend two,

[Paulee] which is amazing. But this one, cheap and cheerful, add a switch.

[Nick] Job done.

[Nick] Nicely done. Excellent. Oh, glad to hear it. I'm gonna wing in with another quick ad because I'm I'm running out of time. So back after this.

[Nick] Yes. Indeed.

[Nick] Well, I think in that case, let's go back because I know you had a you were you're waxing about this in our Discord, which I encourage people to go and join. It's a good little community of people there. Artoria Mini Freak five point o gets a new firmware update. Arturia are Hi. Brilliant at doing updates. This video, I walk you through the Mini Freak update five point o.

[Nick] We'll look at the Wavetable and sample import. How

[Paulee] to update your hardware,

[Paulee] and how to work with new sample and wavetable import.

[Nick] Sadly, not so much information in the actual video until much later on, but as an initiative point.

[Nick] And it allows, I think does it add granular synthesis to user wavetables and user samples and stuff? Paulie, I know that you

[Nick] you you grasped this with both hands

[Nick] as it were. And and when you said it was great.

[Paulee] It's

[Paulee] I'm I'm gonna have to do a video or something because the dystopian

[Paulee] stuff that pours out of it now is just absolutely

[Paulee] next level.

[Paulee] Essentially,

[Paulee] main the main things are,

[Paulee] it's a 12 bit sampler, I believe.

[Paulee] So it's got a nice sort of grungy sound.

[Paulee] You could use factory

[Paulee] a factory kind of, I guess, set of rumples or samples before.

[Paulee] And

[Paulee] now you can add your own samples and wavetables.

[Paulee] And with the samples,

[Paulee] it's not it's not like just sample playback

[Paulee] or just granular playback. There were different forms of sampling and granular, so there's like hit grains for percussive sounds where the grains are so like brutally, you know, in your face with attack.

[Paulee] But it's got even a just a standard looping mode,

[Paulee] which kind of does an auto crossfade loop.

[Paulee] Literally,

[Paulee] you you put a sample in which isn't even looped,

[Paulee] and then you just tweak the knobs, and it just is so easy to make it sound perfect.

[Paulee] I don't know how they've done it, like,

[Paulee] behind the scenes. You do not have to manually loop your samples at all. You just put your one shots in and just just tweak these loop points. But the Are they single are they single sample, or can you put in kind of key key ranges and whatnot? You you can't put multi samples in, but you can put a

[Paulee] fair chunk

[Paulee] of

[Paulee] samples in. I think it it's something like a hundred and seventy to two hundred seconds of mono

[Paulee] Wow. Samples in, and each sample can be up to six seconds long.

[Paulee] And the the thing that absolutely

[Paulee] kills it for me is that

[Paulee] on oscillator

[Paulee] two,

[Paulee] there is a a ring mod and an FM.

[Paulee] So you can

[Paulee] put the sample in oscillator one, and then slightly FM it or slightly ring mod it, whilst modulating

[Paulee] it,

[Paulee] and then run it through the effects with a cycling envelope and stuff like that. Run it through the bit crusher.

[Paulee] There's a really nice reverb,

[Paulee] and then, like, go to town with modulation

[Paulee] in a

[Paulee] in a kind of staggering way, you know, as I said, there's the cycling envelope.

[Paulee] It's all really playable,

[Paulee] and it kind of it's

[Paulee] for me, it's kind of rivaling

[Paulee] some of the the old weird samples I have, you know, like the Ensonic EPS

[Paulee] 16 that does weird things with samples and trans waves.

[Paulee] I guess, you know, it's also kind of coming toe to toe with the the Polyvera

[Paulee] a little bit now,

[Paulee] even though the Polyvera has filter FM and is,

[Paulee] you know,

[Paulee] quite quite

[Paulee] has special Mirage

[Paulee] Yeah. And sonic Mirage modes and stuff. But this, honestly, update your Mini Freaks

[Paulee] and pop some samples in and just go to town. It's absolutely

[Paulee] the most fun I've had in a while.

[Nick] Blew me away. Saying something.

[Nick] I'd I actually, I didn't I see someone who also had written

[Nick] a new operating system for for Mirages as well that I guess minecoded or ported or something. That was yeah. I can't remember the details. I just remember seeing it in the past. Yes. Wild, isn't it? It has SysEx now.

[Paulee] So

[Paulee] if you ever wanted to

[Paulee] buy a Mirage with standard.

[Paulee] Massos,

[Paulee] then you could then now you can edit it from

[Paulee] Those are the days. Soft synth kind of window.

[Nick] Those are the days.

[Nick] Ah, Charlie. I saw you. You're sort of glazing into sort of

[Nick] sepia distance there, Charlie. I mean, I don't know. Have you got any of your Tory stuff? These minis are the freaks. They've absolutely

[Nick] blown them out of the water. You know, the the the Vocoder updates, and now the sub there's just so much stuff they put in these things, and it's still coming. It's a really testament to

[Charlie] the company. I

[Charlie] only have the code the obviously, the full collection of the plugins, but they're the software versions of MiniBrute and MiniFreak

[Charlie] It's and I don't know if those are retaining

[Charlie] feature

[Charlie] parity with the hardware versions but

[Charlie] They are. That'll be my first that'll be my first check after we finish here is boot up the are

[Paulee] they? Yeah.

[Charlie] Yep.

[Paulee] It's awesome.

[Charlie] I I promise I will immediately.

[Nick] Okay. Well, that's good. Let's have a look. Was I think we're oh gosh. It's five to five. I can't believe how quickly it's gone. I think what I'm gonna do is gonna save those last couple of topics because

[Nick] this summer of

[Nick] this famine of summer topics is it seems to be extending into the autumn period at the moment, and I think it's possibly to do I I it's not I think it's because there's less hardware being put out because it takes more time, effort, resources,

[Nick] and, you know, manufacturing

[Nick] skills.

[Nick] And so people are being much more careful and much more sort of

[Nick] cautious about it. So there's less. I think we're gonna end up with a real period of craziness. As I said, we're gonna be

[Nick] at Brooklyn, so the pedal expo in New York, so there's gonna be some modular stuff there. I'm gonna be at

[Nick] Beijing Modular Commune

[Nick] and then also Music China. So first for me, I've never been to that part of the world. So I'll be sending back video stuff there. I I was saying before the show, we got our new rigs kinda sorted out, and we

[Nick] had to get these special batteries, which are designed

[Nick] for

[Nick] use in China. They have to have CCC on the back because otherwise, it won't let you on a plane. I think I'm flying between Shanghai and Beijing for the shows. Wow. And unless you've got certified batteries, they will confiscate them. So but the problem is it's bloody massive. That's probably about

[Nick] half as big again as our usual batteries.

[Paulee] So It's bigger than the phone, isn't Yeah.

[Nick] Yeah. It is bigger than the phone. But, I mean, it's only for China. I mean, obviously, we've got other batteries for that, but this is a a new rig. We've got new handles on it. We've got the p four next, which works really nicely. Oh, nice. Wow.

[Nick] And and these lovely little

[Nick] right angle XLR. So everything is just these

[Nick] these brilliant little

[Nick] things for sort of holding the the

[Nick] the things in place. Yeah. I'm quite pleased. I'm looking forward to that. That's gonna be great fun.

[Nick] So

[Nick] what's next for you, Paul? Have you got got got anything on there? Have you started your course yet? Have you started tutoring?

[Nick] And I guess it's a bit early, isn't it? That's October.

[Paulee] That's October where I go to the

[Paulee] I don't know if if you knew this, Charlie, if you'd seen me say it before, but I am I'm gonna be teaching some seminars at the music college I couldn't get into at 18, which I thought was hysterical.

[Paulee] Know how life Vengeance. So crazy and works out.

[Paulee] But I'm gonna teach yeah. Them about

[Paulee] I'm gonna teach them about,

[Paulee] scary sounds, specifically scary video game sounds.

[Paulee] But I might chuck in a couple of examples

[Paulee] from our podcast, Charlie, if that's okay. Especially your subway

[Paulee] subway screeches slowed down.

[Paulee] I'm sure they'd love to see that.

[Paulee] I think it's gonna kind of, you know, give them a different

[Paulee] slightly weird bit of musical education than their standard

[Paulee] day to day, you know. Here's another bark at you. Just gossam.

[Paulee] So, yeah, it's cool.

[Nick] But So are you are you course designing, or is that all sorted? Yeah.

[Paulee] Nice. Yeah. Yeah. No. That's all sorted. I think I'm gonna be teaching an FM synthesis one as well, but

[Paulee] then

[Paulee] after that, I'm gonna be starting the disability music stuff there,

[Paulee] which is where we'll have monthly

[Paulee] maker spaces

[Paulee] and performances

[Paulee] for, you know Oh, nice. Neurodivergent

[Paulee] and disabled

[Paulee] people in in the conservator itself,

[Paulee] but inviting

[Paulee] the community in,

[Paulee] which I think is absolutely fantastic. Because sometimes these university buildings can feel very

[Paulee] standoffish,

[Paulee] and and we wanna Kinda attainable. Part of the community.

[Paulee] Yeah. We wanna make it more attainable, basically.

[Nick] So there we go. Good.

[Nick] Well, I hope that goes well for you. That sounds fantastic. People in the chat room have been saying you should really get another Remom together, but because as we're going to New York and China at this last part of the year, it's probably not gonna happen at the moment. I'm still trying to figure out. And, Charlie,

[Nick] you've been you said you were doing some testing. I I we we spoke before the show about some plug in companies you're working with, and I'd yeah. I know you wanted to mention it. And I guess, is that an ongoing project you're working on?

[Charlie] Yeah. I mean, this is just I'll

[Charlie] buy some product

[Charlie] and love

[Charlie] it almost

[Charlie] and say, boy, this would just be great if it had just this and this in it. And then depending on my level of hubris at the moment, I I may email the developer, more so if it's a small

[Charlie] developer,

[Charlie] and say, you know, I really love your product and but it would be great if it just have you ever considered maybe adding this or this?

[Charlie] And, once in a while, those developers get back to me and they say, oh, that's a great idea. Do you have any more ideas? Which is a dangerous thing to ask because then I

[Charlie] sit at, you know, until three in the morning typing up a master's thesis on all the things I think their products should do. But there are a couple that have become,

[Charlie] that I've been super impressed with the responsiveness and the speed and thoroughness that these developers have

[Charlie] implemented my ranting and raving.

[Charlie] And

[Charlie] and I will plug them. I'm not on all these things. I'm not a partner or financial participant or anything. I'm just an enthusiastic user who then bugged the developer about them,

[Charlie] and they responded,

[Charlie] which was dangerous.

[Charlie] And one the first was this a plugin manager

[Charlie] called Pluginize

[Charlie] from sonicrepublic.net.

[Charlie] And I had bought over the years, had bought everything

[Charlie] that claimed

[Charlie] to be a plugin manager

[Charlie] that I could find. And usually these things are $30,

[Charlie] $50, maybe a $100.

[Charlie] And all of them kind of did something cool, but I wound up using like three or four different apps to manage my unruly collection of plugins. One to scan for updates,

[Charlie] a different one to enable and disable plugins in sets

[Charlie] and so on.

[Charlie] And when

[Charlie] I finally got a hold of Plugin Eyes, that's when I emailed

[Charlie] the the developer and said, oh, it's really great, but it'd be great if it did this. And that kicked off a a multi week

[Charlie] back and forth on a private Discord where he really did implement amazing features and it is for anybody has a unruly

[Charlie] plugin collection or tests plugins and needs to manage moving sketchy things in and out of folders.

[Charlie] It's very complete, very

[Charlie] sturdy.

[Charlie] And if I enable all the plugins,

[Charlie] new, WAVs, UAD, everything on my system,

[Charlie] I'm ashamed to admit that it's a total of 8,477,

[Charlie] which includes,

[Charlie] you know, each each plugin counts as three in many cases, an AAX,

[Charlie] an AU, and a VST three.

[Charlie] So that number is misleadingly

[Nick] large, but this It's still by the sizes. Manager.

[Charlie] It's ridiculous.

[Charlie] It I admit I really admit that it's ridiculous.

[Charlie] But that's what happens after forty years of fiddling and twenty five years of collecting plugins.

[Charlie] Yeah. And this PlugInize handles that

[Charlie] massive collection without breaking a sweat.

[Charlie] And for anybody who's become frustrated with their plugin folder and dealing with it, it's highly recommended. It is Mac only, but it's a very sturdy

[Charlie] solution

[Charlie] to the And

[Charlie] I also stumbled across this

[Charlie] program that I think has no equal

[Charlie] nor equivalent. It's it's called Remiq, r e m I q

[Charlie] from

[Charlie] iCindy Sound, I believe it's called.

[Charlie] And he's a small developer, and he had developed a a standalone app that helps to automate the process of sampling drums from live input.

[Charlie] And it will automatically,

[Charlie] as you hit the drum, it will detect the the start point of each sample and the end point, and it will trim it, and it will then move on to the next cell in a grid for your velocity ranges in your round robins,

[Charlie] which is amazing.

[Charlie] But it also

[Charlie] correctly deals with and allows you to record multi channel

[Charlie] drum

[Charlie] signals in one pass. So you'd have your close mics, overhead room

[Charlie] and so forth. And he's very

[Charlie] cleverly implemented a thing called a you designate one of the channels

[Charlie] as a leader,

[Charlie] and that might be so let's say the close mic. Whatever sit whatever channel has the

[Charlie] is gonna be earliest.

[Charlie] Like, the room mics will be a little bit some milliseconds behind the close mic. So you designate

[Charlie] a leader channel and it uses that channel as the basis for detection of the start point and the so forth.

[Charlie] And you can, in one pass, in a semi automated fashion,

[Charlie] sample a drum kit with up to I think it's 10 stereo pairs at once, and it cuts all of the samples in one pass

[Charlie] and allows you to, using a token based naming system like in Kontakt,

[Charlie] create the file names that will be

[Charlie] adhering

[Charlie] to the exported

[Charlie] files.

[Charlie] It's incredibly

[Nick] multi track, I guess, well, like we said earlier. Exactly.

[Charlie] And he's also just implemented

[Charlie] hosting a virtual instrument. So if you wanted to

[Charlie] sample sounds from a different plugin

[Charlie] and turn them into drum samples

[Charlie] for Logic Sampler or whatever you might be using, it helps to automate that process too. Amazingly,

[Charlie] it's a full featured, but still

[Charlie] simple

[Charlie] and not an a hailstorm of tiny UI elements like you find in resampling apps like auto like a sample robot

[Nick] and a couple others that are getting a bit longer than two. It's it's Sample Robot's got a new version coming out, Sample Robot seven, I think, in the next few weeks.

[Nick] I've had I've

[Nick] and we'll have a native decent sample support, which is what I want because I'd be doing loads more if it wasn't such a Yeah. Such a pain to make them.

[Nick] But I I mean and again, this is something that I you could I because I think Starsky Carr did a thing which is like a Vibe coded

[Nick] browser based

[Nick] decent sample sampling engine. I tried it on my system. I just couldn't get it to work because the permissions were wrong, but I think we're gonna see more of the you know, I've got an idea. Can I make it work? Yes. Yes. You can. And this And I think that's a great

[Charlie] use for vibe coding. And I remember talking to both the the developers of Plug in Eyes and of Remake and saying, you know, how much of this is is AI assist and vibe coding and Claude code and so forth. And in both cases,

[Charlie] the hard part is done

[Charlie] by hand.

[Charlie] And the only part that

[Charlie] sort of Claude code helps with is just

[Charlie] draw me the 87 GIFs I need

[Charlie] to show a UI knob at every position. And the sort of tedious and mundane stuff that slows down plug in development

[Charlie] is the only area where any of these people are really using it for, which frees up their mind and their time to concentrate on

[Charlie] nickel and diming the milliseconds

[Charlie] of their sample crossfade or whatever. Because a lot of those

[Charlie] more niche aspects of DSP or audio programming

[Charlie] are less exposed

[Charlie] to the

[Charlie] Claude codes learning module or whatever that there's not many Yeah. Yeah. As many examples

[Charlie] for it to to try to call from. Whereas designing UI knobs or something, there's a million

[Charlie] applications.

[Charlie] So those elements are more easy to automate through some of those,

[Charlie] like, Claude code type programming tools, I think. I mean, I don't know how it's it's all witchcraft to me. But

[Nick] but Well, yeah. I see. I mean, I because I've I've like I say, I've I've spent the week. I've I've been I have a I've had we have had a system for five or six years now, an automated system where you drop a

[Nick] a video in a folder. It gets uploaded to the YouTube channel, auto titled from some defaults depending on whether it's a SonicLab or a Friday fun, you know, just the first two characters of the file name. And now I've

[Nick] got Claude involved to say, right. Okay.

[Nick] How can we make this even more interesting and even more useful? And and it it's really really kind of opened it up a lot. Yeah. So those kind of tools can help with the mundane stuff,

[Charlie] then Yeah. That frees up the pro the coder's

[Charlie] mind and schedule to concentrate on the difficult stuff. So

[Charlie] I I'm definitely opposed to trying to use AI to generate sounds or music, but Oh, yeah. To generate Definitely not. You know, UI knob My GIFs

[Charlie] or whatever. Sure.

[Paulee] My Luddite pitchforks

[Paulee] that half mast for that.

[Paulee] Okay.

[Nick] You've got a little bit life. Feels like a that feels like a positive note to end things on. So thank you very much, everybody, for joining us. Thanks, Charlie. I hope I hope you make good year. See, it's not even breakfast time, and you've and you've still got the whole day, you've done a you've done a big thing already.

[Nick] So now you can just, you know,

[Nick] gaze lovingly at your

[Nick] yeah.

[Nick] Oh, you're you're disintegrating

[Nick] d x seven in the garden perhaps. Yeah. Something like that. Right. Thank you very much, everybody. Great show, and we will see you all next time.

[Nick] Thanks for everybody in the chat room as well. Nice to see you there. That's it. We'll see you next time. Take care. That was Sonic Talk episode nine ten. Bye.