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Winter None '09

from XX 97 17 by A23P

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from the 2009 Acid Allstars "The Party" EP release.
AA05

Thursday, March 12, 2009
THE MAKING OF WINTER NONE
*originally written on March 2nd 2009*

So I wrapped up "Winter None".
(It will be on the new Acid All Stars release being rolled out exclusively on Beat Port on March 26th; coinciding with the Acid All Stars WMC event)

I didn't have time to execute my preferred writing process for A23P in full, so I decided to take some of the concepts I'd looked at exploring in a previous track called "Banish" and continue exploring them more indepth.

There were also some concepts I had had recently concerning "What if a 303 had osc catered more towards granular synthesis work", and this concept also was implemented and explored in light.

Finally, there was another idea I'd end up injecting which was to get some thoughts from persons outside myself well before the track had began entering post production with the specific intent of writing the piece (potentially) based on some of those thoughts (as opposed to simply using the thoughts as general critiques first and foremost).

Having "Banish" as a starting reference point sped up the writing process dramatically as it allowed me a few liberties:
A. To immediately have a general song structure in mind
B. To know how the "different" elements of that structure could fit together.

In essence, there was no need for me to develop a formula, as the formula was already in place.

I'd been working on a remix of a song by Decibel Flekx; and a significant part of the implemented concepts for that piece were as follows:
A. Taking a significant part of the concepts and production techniques used for Ragga jungle and looking to apply them within a non-ragga/jungle way. (I've always been partial to the "apparent" complexity that the ragga dnb style displayed, and it was in fact the first and foremost thing that attracted me to dnb in the first place back during the mid-nineties)

B. Exploring the 4/4 entrapment that electronic dance music as a whole tends to ONLY accept and figuring out a means of working within that construct but making it feel like a different time signature. (oddly enough, a lot of rock acts were examined for this. It wasn't only various rock bands that I looked at dissecting for techniques here though, and ultimately what all I took in comprises a long and boring list)

The remix wasn't yet completed before I had to break off to concentrate on this new release due to time constraints.
The only reason I bring the remix up is that it played a large roll in the development of "Winter None".

Again, due to time constraints, I had to expedite the process when and wherever possible.
Obviously, the two concepts that had been formulated for the remix had strong ties to rhythm theory.
Further, perhaps obviously, one of the ways to begin creating an illusion that 4/4 time is not 4/4 time is through syncopation; which in turn, forms arguably THE foundation for breakbeats. (and we can then trace this back to jungle/dnb's breakbeat usage, rocks break beat usage, and which in turn brings us back to things that I had noted studying for ideas on how to implement concepts for the remix.)

Where ragga jungle/dnb is concerned, a lot of the feel of complexity came from not just using drum phrase samples, nor even just re-arranging the order those original samples played back in, but also having completely different drum phrases interact with each other and/or taking the same original samples and simply applying quick/brief changes to them...pitching it up/down a few semi-tones, filtering them, etc. But doing all of this frequently, quickly, and briefly before the brain had a chance to register to totally register everything.

I didn't stick to the ideas I gleamed from these styles strictly, in fact, I more so just kept in mind various elements, why those elements worked, which in turn allowed me a bit of play space for tweaking.

Whatever the case, some rhythmic structures for this remix had been laid out already, and the initial rhythms put to outline for "Winter None" were in a way direct imports.
I had various rhythm samples I had already chopped up, key mapped, applied various individual/independent filterings to, and other what nots via a process much akin to Properllerhead's "Recycling". Similarly there were rhythms for the remix I had written using some of these bits. I left the actually notational writing for the remix in place, swapped out the sample pieces used while leaving all other settings in place (which in effect was like swapping out one drum kit for another), and the initial foundation for a beat structure was now in place (ultimately this was how the bulk of the percussion in the second half of the song was made).
(*I'll note here that unlike with the old dnb techniques, these were hardly full on phrase samples in use, they were significantly smaller bits. But the organization of those small bits and how they worked was very much built upon the concepts of old dnb techniques....that said, as I noted, the best way I know to describe what swapping out the samples did while leaving the notational writing in place was it was something more akin to swapping out drum kits. Something somewhat like bringing up different drum maps in a workstation or what have you, but a bit more complex then that*)

I'll give a quick note on the conceptual structure of "Banish" before I move on.
There were two parts to "Banish"; the first of which I'll confess I really wasn't all that interested in.
The second of which I was highly interested in.
People tend to be pretty conservative in their tastes (even though most will deny it). They like what they know and shy away from what is foreign.
Given this fact, there's a lot of danger in looking to jump into new territories with an expectation that people will be willing to allow you to take them there.
So, the first half of the track was very much written with a partial intention of:
A. Gaining the trust of the listener
Which in turn pretty much meant dealing with much more typical dance formulas and hopefully showing "I understand what you like and I have an understanding of the formulas involved....you can trust me."
B. Outright lying to the listener
Oddly enough, this is very much in tune with the first statement. As people tend to assume that because you understand something or are (artistically) doing something that it must naturally mean that you like that thing you're doing. And this bounces back to the gaining of trust thing....it's basically a lie to the listener (to gain their trust) that is tantamount to "I really really dig this stuff just as much as you do." (even though that may be anything but the case)

The second half was where the gold was at (IMO). It's the chunk where, hopefully trust had been earned, and I could basically go "O.K......things are about to get a little crazy....but please just continue to trust me."
There's still a number of limitations at this point, as the fact of the matter is that you can only get so crazy before you've effectively ruined that trust and taken the listener somewhere too foreign. So that becomes the balancing act......
Exactly how much of your insanity is safe for you to reveal?
There's really no way to know the answer to that question until the listeners start actually weighing in on what they thought of the end result.


Whatever the case, so back to "Winter None"...

I've long been a fan of things running in reverse, and when it came to "Winter None" I thought it'd be interesting to have a bass that almost sounded like it was running in reverse (but truly wasn't). It was a pretty basic/simple idea, and I ended up cooking up a bass line to fit this on my SynthII (granted any number of synths at my disposal would have been able to amply accomplish this job, it just so happened that I picked the SynthII).

Before continuing on, I'd like to reference Bob Moog, whom had once noted something to the effect of synths changing the way music could be written because now rather than an instrument simply having to play different notes to bring about movement, the entire timbral character of the instrument could undergo dramatic change (and this could replace notational changes at times).
I've always found that little note of his interesting as he might as well have been explaining why people would find the Acid sound interesting (and else).....yet he made the statement years prior to the invention of Acid House.

The first half of "Winter None" (the safe/trust building half) was really somewhat minimal in instrumentation and notational structure.
In fact, notationally, it's monotonous as all hell.
I took from Moog's old ideas, from the ideas of what made the "acid" sound work in large part, and basically just looked to having the timbral character of the instruments involved evolve in various ways over time. My desired end result being for the mind to feel it's hearing something dynamic despite the fact that there's very little notational variation going on.

Again, as with "Banish", the concepts I was more truly interested in we're things to be explored in the second half of the tune.
I wanted to be able to get even crazier; to be able to expose a much wider portion of what I really find interesting then I was with "Banish". So in this light, I felt that a possible solution was to subtly work in not so much direct elements, but more so techniques I planned on implementing in the second half early on.
So this was a major addition to the conceptual idea behind "Banish", to early on begin injecting the more uncommon production techniques in a subtle way so that the listener, without knowing it, had already become accustomed to them by the second half (and thus more prepared and open to things being pushed).

I suppose once "Banish" is out, if one took the time to put "Banish" and "Winter None" side by side, I think they'd be able to easily see exactly how much earlier on "Winter None" begins injecting subtle techniques of the second half.

Finally, the second half comes into effect, and I took things in a much more liberated direction then I had felt I could allow myself with "Banish".
Much to my surprise, of the persons that got to hear the track in it's pre-post production state, all but two of them (there were about 10 in total) noted finding the second half much more interesting....which surprised me, as by far in both it's structural style and production techniques used, it was a lot more foreign; I have to confess, I was happy to hear that the end result I wanted seemed to largely be achieved, which was to at the least, have the listener be willing to put up with the second half, and at most, actually agree with me on that it was much more interesting territory).

I'm going to break off here and simply give some brief and extremely short statements in regard to what the difference is between the initial production process and the "post production" process.
Basically, the pre-"post production" processes are all those things that take place before and during the assembling of some kind of initial recording.
So, for example, a band writes a piece of music, they learn to play, they head into the studio, all the musicians are recorded. All thing that would have occurred before post production.

There's also a number of things that often take place after all that recording is done. For example, those recordings may be edited, mastered, etc. And these are all a part of the "post production" processes.

In the modern day world, most notably with electronic musicians, the difference between when the initial production process and the "post production" process take place has often become negligible. Both processes are very often taking place at the same time. Part of the advent of DAWs, plugins, etc. and something I'd say was arguably largely triggered by when Steinberg first began rolling out their VST effects technology (and similarly systems like Pro Tools, Logic, and even Cakewalk taking on Dxi plugins).

I'm sort of a dinosaur in how I go about doing things nowadays, so that difference between the two processes is still very much in effect. For me, post production is still post production and it can only begin taking place at the conclusion of the initial production process.

That all said, there are considerable amounts of more modern production techniques that are traditionally part of post production processes that I've been able to incorporate as part of my general non-post production process. I won't go into what they are here, but if someone is bored, they can feel free to ask me about them and I'd be willing to go into more detail, how it all works, etc.

Whatever the case, so the formal production process on the track took about 2 or 3 days I think (post production took a couple weeks; granted only two days of concentrated studio time took place in those few weeks).

There were a lot of tricks pulled in how the track was written.
There's a philosophy I adhere to that is based on the principal that "The Control Method Determines The Result"....that philosophy was in major play (actually, I always have it in mind for that matter).
What it means is that, for example, where a lot of folks might look to some sort of effects unit or post production process to achieve some sort of dramatic interesting result, a lot of the time what I did was simply make a dramatic shift in the way I played an instrument. This in turn often results in a dramatic shift in the overall perception in the sound of that instrument.
I don't think people grasp just how much the sound of the guitar is rooted in the lay out of how the instrument itself works/is played. The same goes with piano and any number of other instruments. When you begin turning control methods on their head, dramatic shifts in sound often occur.
It's like people trying to use a workstation synth to play the sound of a harp and then wondering why they have such a hard time being able to write stuff that sounds like a harp player despite having access to a harp sound in their workstation.
To really exemplify this, I think an interesting experiment for some would be to get a MIDI wind controller and then begin playing their favorite synth/sampler/drum machine from the wind controller rather then triggering it via a keyboard controller, programming it from their DAW, or whatever their favored method is.
In any regard, so that was another additional build from the original "Banish" writing concept...
There were a good number of sections of "Winter None" where I would dramatically shift how I was/could play various instruments and then I'd bounce back to yet some other method.

The pre-post production recording of the track was taken during the near end of this period. And really, to put it simply, that recording is little more then the result of instruments hitting mixer and the master outs of the mixer dumping out to a recording device. It departed from being a live recording in that the majority of the writing had been transcribed to a MIDI sequencer and so for the most part, outside of one synth (777), I really didn't have to personally tend to the instruments at all. (oddly enough, there are people that go out to gigs and pretty much "play" this way and try to then tell people they are "playing live".....I'm telling you now, that is a complete lie, and the amount of artists out there selling people on this lie is beyond astounding....the reality is, is the vast majority of what is being heard and happening when "playing" this way is done simply by them hitting the "play" button on the sequencer)

This recording was then dished out to a few people for thoughts of what they thought of the direction of the track, what they'd like to see done, etc. Believe it or not, I have a note pad chock full of notes of what they had to say.
I'll note, it's not like all of the view points were full of musical theory ideas and such, a large chunk of them were really quite modest.
"So and so said they felt this section was boring."
stuff like that.

So with all those notes in place, I reviewed the writing of the track as it stood, figured out what areas of perceived noted weaknesses I thought were relevant and which ones I did not, and then took to figuring out what could be done with the piece to address the areas of weakness I did consider note worthy.

After that, all the instruments began undergoing formal recording and such....preparation for the post production process.

The post production processes for this piece were an absolute nightmare of tediousness (I already noted how long it took).
It's funny, because my general out look is that post production can't save you. The piece has to be a solid piece prior to all of that.
And that said, what goes on during post production I think should generally be rather small. Keeping to that thought, despite how long the post production process took and/or the sound of the track, I have a feeling many would be surprised at how little of what they may think occurred during post production truly did take place during that time.

Whatever the case, as I just found it fitting to the writing process, after numerous things had been prepped for post production, I then continued on with the non-post processes in order to address some of those areas of weakness.
I'm not going to go over all the weaknesses or ideas on how things could be made better that were offered, but here are a few:
I. Theres a breakdown in the track and someone noted they felt that area lost their attention.
II. There was another area were someone felt a concept of dueling bass lines would work quite well.
III. Numerous felt the fist section wasn't nearly as exciting as the second.
IV. Someone felt that the two different sections of the track seemed like two totally different songs that had simply been mixed/djd together rather then being an obvious single song.

So just using those four areas for some brief example, here were some things that were done as I headed back into pre-post production affairs.

I made up a new bass timbre (the Supernova II was my tool of choice for this one, and not for some SUPER unique ability it had as much as it was just a convienient tool to program this particular bass sound on). That new bass was then written into the song, to not go as far as creating a "dueling bass" type scenario, but to compliment the first one that had been written and to slightly edge a bit closer to the dueling bass type scenario. Another aspect of it being written was geared towards brightening up the first half.
Yet again, where before things had been rather ambiental, this bass line was reintroduced earlier on during the break down section to help combat the boredom a person might feel during that section.
Finally, it's used in the second half of the song (all be it more in the background) to help make the tie to the first half more obvious. (of note, it's not like all the elements of the first half disappeared in the second half, as actually, the original bass line of the first half is once again still in use, and there's some other elements that were introduced lightly in the first half and then used more promientely in the second half, amongst other things)

After the writing of the additional bass line, this was recorded, and the formal post production process in large part began to take place.

Perhaps not so oddly, being into sound design, and despite owning a good number of hardware synths and what not, there are still times that I run into sound design concepts that the synths and samplers I have on hand either don't have architectures capable of addressing, or don't have architectures capable of addressing in an expedient manner. (this same thing could be said for soft synths, or any other tool for that matter

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from XX 97 17, released November 26, 2017
Written and Produced by Alien Nesby

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A23P Denver, Colorado

Alien Nesby (aka A23P) a multi-instrumentalist & enthusiast of synthesis sound design, issues out of the acid techno, house, and experimental scenes of 90s rave & industrial.

Alien currently leads Acid All Stars Recordings pulling together artist ranging from DJ Pierre, Cari Lekebusch, Dan Doormouse, & Komor Kommando while also working with various parties developing new musical technologies.
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