I first heard FILTER- "Can't you trip like I do" on the SPAWN Soundtrack Album.
All the tracks on the album were remixes, but this Filter thing didn't strike me that way. It wasn't something a DJ made....... so I never thought of it as a remix. At the time, I thought it was one of the heaviest things I had heard. Way more aggressive than the Deep Purple I was used too.
I still love the track. I read in some magazine a long time ago they used a 12bit Akai Sampler for the drums and had a bunch of guitars and Amps. Something about being an ex- Marilyn Manson Guitarist too, but I may not remember that correctly. I just love that guitar sound and playing.
It wasn't till only very recently I heard the crystal method original:
It was then it made sense that the track I loved actually was a remix. But not the more typical DJ taking a metal bands riff, and adding in beats and making it sound like hip hop or a dance track. Jay Z's "99 Problems" and the other tracks on that SPAWN Soundtrack Album are more like that.
This Filter thing is very much the opposite. Taking the sequenced, dirty synth line, and adding rock drums, guitars and new lyrics to it.
This is something I want to try with my next creation. To try and break out of the musical rut I've been in. Been thinking of my versions of "Can't you trip like I do?", and "Cars". Sampling others records was a huge legal minefield for a really long time, and probably the biggest step in the increased popularity of Sampling as a Production Technique. Means what I make will not be shared, but it may lead to something else I can.
This wasn't unexpected, but a shame. A real shame.
I was talking with him on Facebook over the New Year break and he apologized for talking a while to reply sometimes. The treatment really knocked him about.
His prints are still left in various place, such as on YouTube and a Blog as if he was still around.. So in Memory Of Greg, here is one of his creations, made in his backyard shed:
I met him through a Zine he was publishing. I just happened to come across it in a specialist bookstore on a quick trip back to Australia. The Galaxy Bookstore. I hadn't seen a Zine before, and just bought it on a whim. Serendipity.
I can think of what a chance occurrence that was, and that it shouldn't have happened, but got to know this guy and his world.
I did this track called Have a Really Good Year Dec 26th 2009 .
It is something I shared again with my Facebook "friends" yesterday. Looks like it got 6 partial plays, which is way better than the response I usually get on Facebook, a platform I mostly think is a waste of time and a scam, but haven't given it up.
The vocal is pretty much me doing a Rorschach (a character in Watchmen) speaking thing, on the
media loves Shock and Horror, the trouble in the Middle East, the Financial Crisis and a few other things that were "news" in 2009, and are still the cliches Neoliberal media and politicians roll out ..
I just a link to the original track, but I also did another version. I have moved to a new computer since then and only installed the most useful VSTs, so it needed a new reverb and organ configured.
I use ValhallaVintageVerb now and that was all fine, but ezDrummer said it wasn't Authorized. It worked 2 weeks ago. But since then a Lightning storm has taken out the Ethernet on my PC and I had put in a new Ethernet card instead. That has changed my PC as far as Toontracks was concerned, but hadn't effected products by Izotope or anyone else. Ok just re-register, done it twice before, easy.
Short story version is your forced to use a new Toontracks thing called PM which is broken and will waste your time to get it working again.... and that really kills the vibe in working on something!
Don't you just hate it when a product you bought stuffs you around when you need it. Not complaining about the need for registration. But having to do it 3 times for the life of the product, and it not working the 3rd time is the issue.
Being forced to install a new authorization application, then it doesn't actually work is very poor Software Management. How would I know? I've had to do it, and I got it right.
A Sargent Peppers reference, but actually probably closer to 25 years ago, when CD-ROM was introduced and some time after Multimedia became a thing for awhile.
I had been assigned researching Multimedia, and attended many conferences, like the first CD-ROM Conference. Also had access to evaluate the main tools of the time. Macromind Director (on the Mac), Swivel 3D, GRASP (on the PC) and later Adobe Premier and others. All cool stuff. I had come from developing the Fairlight Instruments Computer Musical Instrument Series II and Series III music production systems that allowed a single musician to produce symphonic or band works, so extending that to Interactive/AV type media seemed like a good idea. I had the sound production side, and had always drawn so the visual side wasn't foreign to me either. The stuff you needed in addition to the technical side, that I had too.
The commercial things that came out around then where MYST in 1993 and various interactive games, edutainment from Broderbund, most of which I don't remember their names well enough to find them in Google. The SoundBlaster was a huge selling Audio Card of this period , and many tried to get into that game.
I started my own experiments with a 286 PC I had at home using GRASP, which was a scripted 2D animation system. You could move sprites around, interactively put up text and all that and produce a run time thing that fitted on a 1.2MB Floppy disk of the times. Just drawing it all was slow though, so I came up with the idea to use models and do limited stop frame animation and roto-scoping. To that end I bought my own Computer Eyes gray scale video grabber, and built some things to photograph and animate:
In GRASP I was reducing everything to dithered 1 bit graphics to fit in the space I had, so final image quality wasn't great. Like this in fact when you look at it normal size:
Made a few things and eventually bought a Mac Performer 640, that had a built in color video grabber and sound. I could also use Logic, Premier and Director then.
Before it all got squashed in the multimedia compression those things liked more like this:
But this was way before Gigabyte memories and discs become everyday items and we had huge problems making anything but very small postage stamp sized moving image and sound files. The computers and media of the time just didn't allow it. I had a website, but the allocated space was less than the small videos I was making, so distributing anything was difficult. We had 33K dial up modems back then too. So tiny 8 bit GIF images were normal, and I couldn't store the large images on the computer for long either. That is shown in the only other behind the scenes images I could read off old disks in 2016:
Well what I made with this stuff is now mostly on discs I cannot even read, like a 100 MB MO disc and 5" floppies, (was even pre the 100MB zip drives!) but the miniatures and models have stood up fine. Look pretty good in fact, and way out lasted "Multimedia", a business Steve Jobs once described as a "Zero Billion Dollar Industry".
We have moved on since that time.
I actually found one of the larger and longer files and converted it to an MP4 and put it on our YouTube channel. It was 320x240 pixels, 16bit color, 15 fps. It is all way to fast, as the files just got too big. I remember having to set the CINEPAK reference frames every m frames to a very large number to make the files small enough. Most of the other files I've found are 160x120 pixels... pretty much just postage stamps, and even shorter. It is like 3 panels of a much longer comic. The background is Alien Archaeologists in Space.
Something I have made more recently (not including our SoundCloud Music Album or our YouTube Channel ), 5 years ago!, in a similar vein is this very limited animation edutainment thing on Aerodynamics.
Now YouTube makes distribution trivial, but the making of something worthwhile is still hard! Making something that more than a few people will bother to watch is much harder again.
