Group-members present: Owen Chapman, Bernadette Houde, Anna Friz, Lynne Trepanier and Richard Williams
Transcript begins here...
OC: The mastering session, in brief.... I think Harris [Newman--a Montreal-based mastering engineer http://greymarketmastering.com] was actually impressed because compilations are apparently the most notoriously difficult thing to master, which I hadn't appreciated at first, but of course it made a lot of sense. I think that it was professional enough--we gave him a quality of mix that was actually half decent, so he was able to work with it. Although he worked with everyone's quite differently, it only took him 3 or 4 hours to do all 7 tracks, so that's pretty rad. With Anna's piece he said, "there's not much I can do with yours" cause there was already a lot of dynamic fluctuation already so he didn't want to screw with that by compressing it. With Richard's he said it was a bit hard to contain, same with Alex's. When he threw them up on the spectrograph they were mostly pretty contained, but Alex's was like rarararararahrarhaa. Clipping in the computer. Same with yours, he said it wasn't clipping but it was hard to really push it too much, you'll understand why. Mine I think he did quite a bit with. Richard's he brought out a lot of bottom.
Listening session begins
Some random quotes from the following 20 mins...OC: So what did you think?
AF: Great
RW: Somehow they all worked out kind of somber--they're all really focused.
OC: Jen Morris' track was...gosh they're so hard to describe in a word.
AF: Jen has her sort of signiture sound, she has that nice modulation that she'll build on for a long time.
OC: She had some guitars slowed way down, and those crazy organ washing thing I thought there was a similarity between your two pieces and some between mine and Jackie's because the rhythm and....
AF: And you guys both used the reverse.
OC: They're all so distinct but nevertheless they have a melancholy sound.
BH: I was surprised that they're all as somber as they are.
RW: The textures, all the samples were pretty gritty.
AF: The samples were really dense, all the samples were like blocks of sound and so when I was first playing around with them and trying to see if I could grab little bits to do something with I found I was often encountering these huge blocks.
RW: It was kind of hard to mix because there was a bunch of stuff in the same frequency range.
AF: I have every frequency in one sample- I'm guilty of that, my sample was hell for that. Just like a wall of radio RW: If you're going to take the whole path of using a sample, that's what's going to happen right. OC: people wanted to put the most content possible? RW: --can't help but think in terms of the first sample I will build something on, right? It's got to be something pretty that will [occupy] a certain space. AF: Neither you nor I used our own samples, really. Your sample was not really prominent in your piece and mine was pretty sublimated in mine. RW: Yeah, everything was pretty indistinguishable. AF: I felt like they were really indistinguishable by the end--in everything, a lot of the samples. There were some samples that I assumed that other people would take more advantage of, like, 'Oh, probably someone who thinks in a certain way will use this drum break or will use this melodic bit. I could see how would use it even though I'm not going to', but then in the end no one did actually do that the way I would have anticipated. BH: Maybe everyone thought the same way, like, I'm not going to use the song's break, cause everyone's going to use the songs break, so forget it. AF: Yeah, stay away from the obvious. OC: Well, how do they compare? Maybe each person could take a turn saying how it compared with what you would have done in the past, like what would have been part of your own practice versus this slightly artificial experiment? How did it change the overall process--being forced to work with samples not of your own selection? RW: I did something really different than what I've done before. Previously I would have taken a chunk and chopped it up and made it into something, and then gone looking for other stuff afterwards. So starting off with a whole set of them was a different thing, because instead of, 'I'll start with this and build on it' it was, 'How do these, or a couple of these work together?' There was a whole lot of going back, you know. OC: How did you make that guitar sound? The strumming, the [cling-cling-cling]? RW: That's the espresso machine, just in Audio Mulch with a ring modulator and filter thing. OC: So what about the [wayayayayaya]? AF: There's that signature Audio Mulch sound OC: What's Audio Mulch? RW: a free mac or free PC software. It has this kind of distinct- everything. Well there's.... AF: Flutter. RW: [It's all granulator] OC: Is that where you started, with Audio Mulch? Or did you start sequencing some kind of beat? RW: It took me forever to get to. I fiddled with stuff for a long time. In the beginning I was messing around in Cubase, and then thought 'Ah, forget this'. Initially I was just in a sequencer kind of mode and got frustrated with it, chucked it out and loaded it into the composting device. BH: Yeah, I tried initially to approach it more like sequence sampling in the keyboard sampler. I couldn't find a way to make it work so then went and kind of ripped everything apart a bit more and went down to like, what are the sounds, and more basic elements rather than the melodic bits? OC: Ok. Yeah, you constructed it more out of Richard's sample in particular right? BH: The main part is actually the rev, but it's also mixed with the taxi sample, Jen's sample. Is that what yours is as well? The AF: Yup, it's the windshield wipers. That was part of that sample as well, they were both mixed in there. I like they way that you used it because in the beginning it almost sounded like a weird tribal drumbeat. BH: Oh really? AF: You know what I mean? Like at first because it came in a bit louder then you brought it in a bit lower in the mix toward the end I felt, or maybe that was my perception but in the beginning it almost sounded like something really different than what it was, even thought I knew what it was. BH: It was a lot of I was trying to learn how to use the [Korg] Electribe drum machine, so I put stuff in there and was just playing around and that's when kind of happy accidents would happen or new sounds would.... OC: You can load sounds up into the Electribe? BH: Yeah, it's just like a sampler. Either play them in a sequence or play them by hand, and then they would get kind of chopped up to, and then I would hear things that maybe I hadn't expected or planned on. AF: I think normally in my own practice I normally make the sounds that I want to do something with, so I play instruments or go out and field record or I make sounds with other things. I have different little techniques from playing live that I know that I like, so I say ok, I'm going to work on that and then I kind of get raw materials and work from there. So this time definitely, it was--I'm not really sort of scrounging around working with samples as much these days, so it was a bit of a challenge for that too, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with them, how they fit together, like 'I don't want to use all of these'. My sneaky trick was all the ones I didn't end up using, because I made the whole piece basically out of three samples and I didn't need any of the others. I thought to myself "Oh damn, now I have these other samples to deal with, so I just threw them in the granulator and just took miniscule little microseconds and buried them in the bass line so they pretty much aren't there. Technically they were in the ProTools session but they were totally sublimated. RW: It's not the same as in yours. BH: Woah! OC: At the end I didn't know what to do with that. I tried and tried and tried to find a break that would work, or a drum hit or anything. It was so dense that...yeah, I just put it at the end. AF: Yeah, I was trying to break it up a little bit [ta-ka-ma!] BH: Yeah, I tried that as well at first. It was like, trying to break up that....Everything was just so dense. OC: Yeah, it was very dense, but there were certain sounds that I was drawn to--my own in particular I used heavily. AF: Yeah, I loved yours. I could have made the whole piece just out of your sample. In fact, at first I had made the whole piece out of your sample. Then I thought, "Oh damn, I should really work in all these others way more" so.... RW: Especially the first part of it, just the guitar. OC: Yeah, it's a nice record. It's a funny record. What did I do? I started with that and then I knew that I had this little box, this little Yamaha SU10. It's a tiny sampler that has a control ribbon on it so you can actually scratch sounds. So I figured I'd make a beat and then I would take the static sample, as I didn't know how to work with it, and I would scratch it, and so the beat was supposed to initially just be a beat and I was going to do a whole lot more scratching, but the beat became more interesting the more I ended up working on it, and I ended up staying there and using the scratch only as a kind of an attention grabber in the middle and at the end, but yeah, that's what that crazy BH: Yeah, I like how you did that. OC: It's on this little ribbon thing, and it doesn't actually sound like a scratch because it turns the sound into these weird granulated bits, and you're just running your finger over top of it. It was cool to use that. I wanted to make a bass line and I tried to make it out of your sound [Richard]. It was really tough, but I think I got something, and I got Harris to really boost the bass end a lot because I found it hard to keep the sound under control and still give it presence, so I kind of relied on the mastering to bring that out. I wonder, did you hear any sub-frequencies come out in the master version? RW: I heard less of the bass actually because the speakers that I'm monitoring at home are just like... OC: But there was a breathing kind of [whooooooooo]. RW: That's from Alex's sample, it's one of the bass drum things slowed down like a thousand percent. OC: And what about in your case, did you hear artifacts that you didn't hear before? There was stuff that I heard in the session that I didn't hear before, especially when the organ goes [wee-oouu-wrrrr] part comes in. You obviously very subtly put in some [ch-ch-ch] little bit of white noise in places that I didn't hear. AF: Those were all from at the beginning when I granulated that whole thing. I used Thonk, that little freeware granulator, and I granulated some of the record scratches from the beginning of the samples, so those are little bits of the record scratches that are stuck in there. There were lots of little really low volume things. I was a little influenced from hanging out with Howard [Bilerman, from the Montreal's mighty Hotel2tango reocording studio, where the L.O.E. record, along with the Arcade Fire], who used to say 'more dynamic range in recording!' Fine idea. That's a fine idea, cause I do really like the super quiet little bits. I find the end is a bit more whoa, but maybe that's ok because I know it is a little more crispy now and my version was a bit muffled. I feel like the mastering has made it a bit more crispy. OC: Well you can listen to it a few more times and see. He tried to bring it all into line with the other tracks without cutting too much of the dynamic range that was there. And Jen's too, the second half of Jen's was much softer and he really had to bring that up a lot. AF: There's a lot of line noise you can hear in hers. OC: Well, I think it got brought up as he compressed it. Do you think it was distracting? AF: Little bit. OC: Ok, like a hiss? AF: I just felt like I really could hear her pedals and so on. I felt like I could just hear her setup somehow. OC: I'll have to see what she thinks too. The problem is getting it to her and not having it be MP3. I guess I'll have to mail it to her. BH: When I heard it though, I felt like it was not displeasing--the line noise. I felt like there was a lot of that texture and that it was more of it, but I did hear it. AF: It just made it feel like it was far away. BH: Yeah, I could hear that too. OC: So what about her sound? Like, her sample? It was really interesting but it was very soft. It was the taxi cab ride. BH: I did like that sample. I always had that little loop of the windshield wipers because I always liked that. OC: I took it and I chopped it up into tiny sixteenth note parts, and then I rearranged it to try to turn it into some sort of Akufen-like, [ge-ga-ke-ke-ga-ga-po-ta-po] then I played it and it sounded almost the same as the original. When you listen to the two together they sound really different but when you hear it the effect is pretty much exactly the same. The windshield wipers are still there. They're still on rhythm. The voice, you can't understand it, but you couldn't really understand it before anyway. Sort of a failed attempt at experimentation. I just let it be. AF: If anything I'd say there's a mood of her sample translated into the mood of the pieces more than anyone else's. Yeah. Mm-hmm. That's true. OC: a bit rainy, a bit lonely. RW: It had the most mood. BH: It had the most mood? AF: Well, Jackie's sample had a lot of mood too. It had the sort of chipper coffee making, poking around. I'm sort of surprised that more of that crunchiness didn't end up in peoples' [work]. Yeah. BH: It was hard to use that sample for very long though--the coffee one. I felt like it really was best as a little hi-hat. OC: That was my snare [sound] pretty much throughout. Your sound and Jackie's sound was pretty much there throughout because yours became the kick drum, and.... [cassette tape is flipped over] OC: In terms of all the interviews I did with everybody, a couple of fascinating things came out. First of all, what is sampling? That question was probably the most rich in terms of answers because people had really divergent points of view but nevertheless they all resonated really well together. I wonder, what is this process [I proposed initially], because it was really a sample based experiment in a way that I think is, I'm realizing now, it was akin to my own practice a couple years ago, but even now I'm much more into playing live instruments and adding in other elements that are not purely sample based. This was purely a sample-based endeavor. I wonder how it felt in terms of your attitudes towards sampling, if it opened them up or if it changed them, or if it made you think, "This is something like 'Been there, done that'." Where does it fit now? AF: Well, actually, this was my excuse to start using Thonk so I got a bit hung up on it for a while. I'd always be doing some kind of droney granulation thing, but I'd done it with other tools, not with a piece of software. I got into a very particular aspect of the software. Otherwise the software is quite unremarkable but if you put exactly the right things into it, it does [great] things. It was your guitar sample that I loved so much going through Thonk with a Bob Mooger-Fooger filter slapped on afterwards, so it was something like "Yeah ok, Thonk it is". It turned [out to be] a good...bed track creator. OC: You found something in it that you've continued to use? AF: Yes. I had this little piece of freeware lying around and I had never been so excited about what I put through it but throwing in an actual melodic instrument sound into a particular feature of and running it for a particular length of time just yielded awesome results. BH: Personally, just because I've been playing in a band, where in some sense that everything is done live--it really humbled me in terms of hearing well crafted sample based music. Because I haven't done a whole lot of it, just on my own, kind of thing, cause we record most things live, so it made me appreciate what goes into it. OC: Because the live band brings a certain playability or something to the composition of music? BH: I think so. Just being able to play off of each other.... [To] get that feeling out of...just emptying stuff into the computer, straight up samples, I think is a challenge. OC: My thinking would be that you can find a groove with other people and it's a very human sort of interaction, especially with friends. And then, when you're dealing with samples you have to find the groove in relationship to the sample itself, which is not always as obvious. Yeah RW: If you're playing music and you want separate parts in a song, play them on the same instrument, whereas with pure sampling you either need to find the other part, which obviously you can't do if you're given the initial set. Or, program stuff, you know, map it onto the keys and play it, but the samples that were part of this [i.e., OC: It reminded me of certain sample-based experiments that I've, well, not even experiments, but it reminded me a lot of Massive Attack and I hope you appreciate that as a compliment. Because certain tracks that they've produced manage to give a really heavy feel too [the music]. Anyway it reminded me of a lot of that. I think it was funny, because when I asked people to get on board, first of all, I was under a bit of a misassumption as to what sample based music was and what it required of artists who would consider themselves sample-based musicians. I think I assumed, somewhat naively, that the people who I asked were working pretty much exclusively with samples already. I kind of thought the Lesbians on Ecstasy, for instance, I mean, I know that you were a live band, but I thought a lot of what you did was about bringing in samples, remixing stuff, mashing stuff together, and I know that.... BH: We don't use any samples. OC: You don't use samples? You use a sampler, but more for effects than for actual.... BH: Well, we don't use any samples in the way that you're thinking. We use noises that play as melodic elements, but there's nothing that's sample based. Everything is live. OC: Well a couple things happened to me anyway. I think my interpretation of what sampling was became broader from exposure to different ways of working. BH: We like to say we sample peoples' written material, not their recorded material. We sample people's words, and sample a lot of the melodic ideas, but we don't actually sample their recorded song. Lynne will sing backup vocals with herself through the sampler, but we don't actually, like, in the way that we are remixing Melissa Ethridge, we don't have any Melissa Ethridge recording anywhere in anything we play. OC: Like Anna, for instance, pointed out to me that a lot of the sounds she used would start with instruments, and then they would go into effects or plugins or whatever and be sampled and tweaked. Anyway, I went through a variety of transitions, and where I'm at now, is a feeling that "sampling" is almost akin to the term "recording". I mean, there's not a heck of a lot of distinction to be made anymore, although there is, well, I wonder what you guys think about this, especially after having gone through the project. How would you distinguish...not just what sampling is, but how would you distinguish sampling from recording? RW: Within recording, that word is pretty broad as well, and if you ask Howard [Bilerman] what he does, he's recording a performance, and adding tonal things but he's not processing it in the studio. He's not doing the dub thing, like hitting the tape really hard to get a certain effect. So there's variation in there as well. OC: What of your own experience and practice? RW: It seems like one of those things that if you try to nail it down, then you end up talking about one specific... If you say sampling is..., ok like Madlib [a contemporary hip hop producer], or like, taking chunks of samples from other records and... The technology is not only here for doing that, right, so.... AF: Yeah, I think I rarely sample just from someone else's record. I do once in a while. For a recent piece, I needed a little particular drone and actually from working with Thonk, I'd figured out how to get the right drone out of melodic instruments. I heard this guy talking on CBC about playing violins in Spanish churches and I really liked the tone that he had, so I tracked down his website and downloaded a couple MP3s and grabbed one note and granulated it because it was the perfect thing that I needed in this other piece. So I sampled from him, but other than that it's all recordings of instruments, recordings of live things, or recordings of, you know I have those little cheap shitty microphones, those little piezo microphones that you use to record off the telephone--it has a little suction cup on it. But if you put that near a computer hard drive or an older CD player you just pick up the oscillation of the actual mechanism, so I'll record that and then run it though a bunch of pedals and then be dumping that into ProTools. OC: So is that sampling or recording or is it neither? AF: I don't know. I call it sampling, but... yeah. OC: I don't mean to belabor the distinction too greatly, but I think that after all of this, this is what kind of percolated to the top for me--that I began with an assumption that sampling was fairly easily definable. This was blown out of the water, and now I'm at a point where I'm thinking that the major theoretical contribution of the thesis and of this work will be, first of all, demonstrating that a project understood as sampling can have very diverse results. Secondly, just problematizing the notion that sampling is somehow very distinct from the history of recording per se, throughout the last century. If you look at the literature, there's a real tendency to see it as something distinct, something digital, something that, you know, especially hip-hoppers and techno DJs or whatever use. They [academic authors] kind of get limited to fixing it in a certain genre and then not talking about it anymore. I think that what will be interesting about the thesis is first of all to say well, it's not just A,B and C genres, it can be part of many genres, and second of all, it no longer makes any sense to distinguish sampling from other types of practices that studio engineers are using all the time. And maybe Howard would say, 'No, I'm not sampling at all' but somebody else with more of a hybrid studio with ProTools and some tape and some other stuff might claim, 'Sure, we do sampling here all the time'. A lot more depends on attitude and how you want to present yourself than it does the actual technology you're using or how you're using it. BH: It seems to me within that though, that a sample is something like, you make a segment of sound that you are then going to compose with, whereas with Howard, if he's recording a band, even if he's recording it in multitracks and taking chunks of it, he's not composing per se. OC: No, but then when the bass player screws up a bunch of notes and doesn't want to pay for time to come in and do the punches, and then they copy and paste a bunch of stuff....I don't know if they can do that at Hotel2tango. BH: What I think is interesting about it is that you approach sampling as a compositional tool, that this is an element in a composition and a way that you approach musical notes or drum patterns that you're creating yourself. What I think becomes really blurry is the difference between things that are derivative and things that are sampled, and the way that you find inspiration for creation. To me, the difference between bands that are so directly derivative that they sounds exactly like other bands in that style, to the point that you can practically not even differentiate between them--that wouldn't be considered sampling if they're recording an original selection of notes that are put in a pattern, even though it's obviously completely derivative in a lot of other ways. And then you can have a style of composition where you're using either a prerecorded or a previously existing work, and then reinterpreting that through other filters, and then I think the compositional work...the creative work is about the choice of the pre-existing material. It's not even necessarily about the way, I mean it obviously is about the way that you decide to interpret that material, but also the choice of that material and how do you select what you're going to work with out of the mass of produced sound. How do you decide what's interesting and relevant, what's the criteria, and is it about sound quality, is it about context? Obviously with our band [Lesbians on Ecstacy - a.k.a. L.O.E.] we wrestle a lot with the difference between, for instance, "Are we more interested in the context in which this music was produced or are we more interested in the way that it sounds as a musical piece?" And how do those two things communicate with each other, and which has more relevance? You talked about things like the Beastie Boys, and the way they use samples and the way that people have put so much value on the context in which those samples were produced, and a lot of the ways in which the artists that have been sampled haven't received any kind of acclaim, acknowledgement, cash. I feel like derivative bands are way less interesting. AF: It's more of a rip-off. BH: It's more of a rip-off. It really is less of a creative process, even if those four people played all of those sounds together in a room and Howard recorded them onto a magnetic tape or whatever. There's just no qualitative creative difference between those two processes, and in fact, I feel like working with other material in a reinterpretive way can be more challenging creatively, but there definitely is a priority between those two ways of working. RW: In my mind I'm thinking that almost exactly half of the pieces were probably made using technology that says sampler on it. I didn't use a sampler. OC: I used a sampler, but I mostly used ProTools, which is like, an audio recording environment, but I did do the scratching.... RW: I know Alex used the Electribe. OC: I think what happened, and maybe you can tell me what you think about this...there is a history of recording technology and it started with the turntable and quickly moved to tape in the 40s, and then multitrack tape, well ok, is this recording? Are we recording or are we mixing? Well ok, it's all still recording. We'll just call it recording, even though what people are doing in the studio was no longer representative of what people could do live. And then samplers came along, and they were called samplers because that was the name that the technology had associated with it, especially on a very fundamental level--the conversion of analog signals to digital, it's called sampling, right? So that phrase got associated with the technology. At a certain point in the 80s or 90s though, hardware samplers were made obsolete by software recording environments like ProTools, and Cubase and all these other things, which not only offered "sampling-like" interfaces--they also offered multitrack recording interfaces. So these were sampling technologies, but they were presented in a way that was more familiar to people used to multitrack tape. They called these recording systems [or Digital Audio Workstations (D.A.W.s)], even though they were still sampling technologies. Then you had this distinction between samplers as what hip-hop, techno DJs and, experimental electronic artists use, and then recording environments, which were what serious studios were using. BH: Right, where you'd have a little separate window you could load in your samples and then do stuff. OC: A student told me a story. The lead guitarist from Our Lady Peace recently opened up a studio in Toronto and the student is now interning there, and he went down, he was working on a recording for a band named Push from New Brunswick, and Push had a demo that got them on the radio which apparently sucked, but anyway...New Brunswick...they were like pretty good. They got $20,000 together to put this recording together, and they went into the studio, and they'd never really been in a studio before, and they couldn't figure out how to make their songs work in the studio, and what my student said was that they pretty much sucked, they couldn't really play. They didn't have a drummer and they couldn't really play their guitars. They couldn't do the multitracking and have it all work, and so first of all, they got a session musician in for the drumming, and then for the two guitarists, they tried for a while and it wasn't working and they were wasting a lot of money, so they got session musicians for the two guitarists, and then the bass player managed to play enough riffs that they could cobble something together, cut and paste together all the bass lines that they needed for the song, but this record is going to come out, and the only thing that is Push is the vocalist and the bass line that has been cobbled together. Everything else is studio musicians that were brought in and the whole thing was constructed--in a very sample-based kind of way, but this was still a recording endeavor. Anyway, I found that kind of amusing. AF: Isn't there something about a sample as being a piece of a sound that you could potentially repeat, but you may or may not choose to repeat as part of your composition? OC: I don't know that it really matters ultimately to try to, I mean I think I'm going to try to be nuanced about it when I write about, to say, we need to have better definitions, but at the same time we don't want to be to extreme. AF: I think that when I think of a sample, it just means like, I recorded a bunch of other stuff, but now I took a smaller bit of it. To me, the sample part is in a selected piece of something else, something that was potentially larger. Because when I load samples into the pedal, or if I load up samples to perform, then they generally come from much larger recording sessions, or recording things or pieces, or whatever, but then I've taken a small select bit that I like that either loops really well, or... BH: So you know we're talking about maybe a sampling? AF: Literally a selected thing. In my mind it's because it came from something bigger, and it might be, "I listened to the short wave for four and a half hours, and now I've taken this 15 minutes that I like from it" or something like that. OC: So the selection process is pretty important. AF: I think that's the main thing for me. RW: With the technology, it's definitely complicated... There's this weird boundary between finding it as a music practice, and then the technological part. Software wise, Native Instruments, Kontact, whatever their software sampler is, basically does the same stuff as like, the old Akai rackmount samplers, but times a thousand, because there's so much processing power, and there's a big screen. There's no arranging on. It's all "take the sound, chop it up into discreet pieces and map it into zones and overlap it and things". The thing is, most people I can think of don't do stuff I would consider sample heavy music, that's more soundtracking, composition type of stuff, you can make the orchestra and compose your own pieces, but that almost seems like less about the sample part. OC: Yeah, I agree, it's more like using the technology to allow you to bring an orchestra of instruments into your studio without having to pay your musicians. RW: Yeah, but you'll be using it in different ways. OC: It's too bad Jackie isn't here, because I'd like to hear about her opinion on this, but a student in my class...I played all of these [pieces] for some of my sound students, and I was talking about the different ways that people put stuff together and Jackie said that she took all the sounds and chopped them up and loaded them up into her sampler and then plugged her Octapads in, and then played on them. She's told me that one of the hardest things about playing those drums is that they're not drums, they're pieces of plastic so when you hit them it just goes bump. There's no bounce to it, there's no elasticity to it to give it that drum like feel, and... BH: They're very small. You have to be really precise with you hands. OC: Then one of these students of mine who's mother was a producer for the Cirque de Soleil ended up saying [that for one of their shows they had acquired] these drums and they called them GIDI, or GigaMIDI or whatever. They had some other kind of name, but basically it was a full drum kit that looked just like drums, but all the drum hits were individual sounds, and the drum skins were these MIDI sensitive surfaces, and depending on where you hit the skins, it would send different kinds of velocity touch messages out to the sampler, and you could just load in different drum kits, and they could be playing any drumkit or samples too, you could do whatever you wanted. BH: Well that's what our set up is, we scroll through different drum kits for every song and then two of her pads blew on the Octapad, and so we have those MIDI triggers that you just put all in, and they can go on a drum kit, and so when you hit it just sends the MIDI. OC: Oh, ok, onto a drum kit? BH: Yeah, they're just a little thing you know, you hit them, and they make noise. They're just little tiny triggers, and they're really cheap, and so when the pads blew, she always blows the pads because she hits them way too hard, because she's a drummer and they're not a drum kit. We've totally gone through so many pads on that thing, we could have fixed like two. Garfield at the Hotel, he fixes it. He uses a garage door opener things on them that he replaces Jackie's...he's fixed it I don't know how many times now. We blow through that thing. She nails the shit out of it. It is tricky with the velocity, like, when we've played with her, we've played with her playing a real drum kit sometimes and obviously the dynamic range that she can get out of the drum kit is so much more exciting, like, "bring it down, bring it back up, quiet bit, hit it really hard".... The Octapad, it either goes or it doesn't go. It's either on or off. Those are the two things that MIDI understands: go, don't go. There's some velocity range, but it's very limited. RW: They had the brains for [something like that] at a pawnshop in St. Henri for a long time. It's an old analog drum triggers, so instead of sending MIDI messages, it sends an electric pulse, and you could feasibly plug anything into it and trigger it. You could use contact mics, or anything that sends a signal. It's Duran duran basically, but it's supposed to go with the pentagon things, but it's an analog synth, it's not a sample based. BH: The thing that's so interesting about this sampling question...,I really feel like we're sample based, I feel like that's really clear, but it's totally about working with other people's pre-existing materials in a really broad way. And that material exists in a lot of ways, it doesn't necessarily exist as a recorded piece of sound that we then manipulate, it's like everyone knows how to whistle Rough Trade or something or it's like... AF:Yeah, sampling is a lot like that. BH: Yeah, sampling... I feel like, if you had the written material of what they've done, cause we're not replaying it true to the original by any stretch, we're not sampling their recorded material, but we're referencing what they've done. We are sampling bits of their words, sometimes bits of the melodies. We're rewriting them in the same way that someone uses a prerecorded sample, it's just we're not using the sample, we're using... AF: It's more like citations. RW: Are you sampling other stuff to make the sounds? Like bass drum sounds or anything like that? BH: That's the thing, we play it all live. In Jackie's drum kits there have been a couple of LT: There was an Iggy pop sample I think [on the L.O.E.'s first record]. BH: There's like an Iggy Pop sample, and... LT: I think there's one of the earlier tunes, I just remember there being a little BH: Yeah, there may have been some... LT: Some little bits that made it onto the drum kit BH: One of those 1001 guitar riffs. LT: But for the most part, all the music is played live. BH: I'm sure it's inspired by lots. OC: For this piece, you put the stuff into a keyboard sampler and were like BH: Yeah, like a drum machine OC: Ok, like an MPC kind of interface? BH: I feel like technically, just to add on, I think what we're doing is technically called "interpolation", which is the word for what it is, but that's a word people use to say you're referencing people's intellectual ideas rather than their physical material. If we were to get a license, it would have to be an interpolation license, not a sampling... OC: But interpolation, that's a tricky, like what does that mean, you know, really? Where do you draw the line between sampling and interpolation, and cover versioning, and... AF: Like you say, derivative bands, Hawksley Workman sings just like Bono, is that a rip off or not. I can't tell the difference sometimes if I turn on the radio. And all the Sum41, Greenday, pop, all those bands I find are particularly... BH: Nickleback and their ilk. RW: They mix them afterward so they're all sort of the same song. It's like somewhere in Southern California, washing it all the same way. AF: But the song structure, that's an interesting thing to me. People adhere to an incredibly strict song structure as well, like a lot of those bands, a lot of bands in general, but in particular I think of that, what is it called again, pop punk? Post punk? Post pop post punk? What's that Sum41, greenday... RW: Pop punk. Shit. AF: No, there's a name for that genre. BH: Power pop? AF: Power pop? Maybe. Anyway, the songs that I hear on the radio, I can barely distinguish between them, because the intonation of the voice, the place where it gets more intense, the place where... RW: None of those pieces [on the Selected Sounds CD] have a traditional structure. I mean, beyond the not traditional, but it happens a lot in kind of experimental stuff that you've got a quiet part with build up in, something happens, and then it becomes clear, and then it ends. OC: We all definitely followed that a little--transitions into different movements and stuff like that. But I think each piece really stands on its own as a nice little gem, I just need to ask some practical questions I guess. First of all, the CD is mastered now. Do you think there needs to be any changes made, or can I just go to Harris [Newman] and say "It's pretty good", or "That's great, lets go"? Do you like the order? Really, the order we just put together. I was thinking --"ok we'll start with...there are less rhythmic tracks than non-rhythmic tracks. We don't want to have all the like tracks together, so I tried to mix it up by putting non-rhythmic, rhythmic, non-rhythmic, rhythmic, and then a couple that were still left over. Do you feel the flow works well? Do you think that there's places it isn't as good? Do you like Alex's at the end? Do you like Jen's at the beginning? AF: I think Alex's was appropriate at the end in some ways as well because of its length. In the middle it might be like whoa. RW: I think the track order is good. OC: Well you can think about it more too and get back to me. RW: The mastering, I don't know if it's because I was sitting sort of the opposite side, but I couldn't hear a lot of lows. I did hear way lows a bit, but a lot of the low range I was having trouble making out. OC: Maybe it's because your eardrums have been blown to bits. RW: Nah, my eardrums are blown at the high end. I can hear bass. OC: What did you guys think in terms of the sound quality? BH: I would like to say that I know the system, but we just pulled these speakers out of a box right before you got here. In the system we had previously which was the same system but used, it always pushed the bass a lot and I was surprised to not hear more bass. The EQs on this are completely flat. I was surprised to not hear more bass. OC: What do you think Anna? AF: I don't know I'd have to take it home and listen. OC: Maybe if we can all just do that and get back to me. AF: I've only heard it on headphones or flat field monitors, although I feel that maybe the end of my piece feels a little louder than I recall it. OC: Maybe he compressed it a bit to try to make it...I don't know. I know he brought down a certain point of your piece. Like when the AF: The last note just seems a bit blah. OC: Well I'll remember that and mention it to him. I guess I'll go see him in a week or two and if you guys can think about it a bit and get back to me with anything that you want to change and we'll change it. The bass, I'll tell him that maybe there could have been a bit more presence on the bottom end. RW: Maybe have him compress it, like really compress it overall. Except for like, all of a sudden these little tinkley breaks. A lot of that was from samples too. A lot of it was mini disk recorded. It has that recording... AF: They're very dense too. RW: Midrange sound. BH: Recordings off records, sometimes they're already so compressed, and then you bring them...[they can be] hard to recompress. You don't get the original range back. And then you compress it again, it doesn't always help it. LT: Sometimes it does OC: It gives it a bit of bright shine that just kind of stays there. RW: It does sound really even though. OC: Yeah, and the volume of the tracks, and the spaces in between the tracks and stuff? I guess the biggest question is what do we do with it? I guess a lot of that falls upon my shoulders. My plan, my ambition, doesn't extend much beyond taking this master copy, getting some graphic design done, getting something put together that represents it well. We need a better title than selected sounds. That's sort of my thesis title. We need to brainstorm some kind of title, and then make you know, a thousand copies or whatever, whatever we think is... AF: I know a guy in Toronto who will undercut everybody in Montreal. OC: Wicked. Ok. Well that would be good. AF: He did our Harvey Christ CD and it was almost $200 cheaper than anybody in Montreal. OC: Ok. Sweet. Of course I'll pay for all of this, and then give everybody some CDs to have or sell or do whatever you want with. (end of transcript)