plugin freak…

July 23rd, 2008 Rich

I confess, I’m a plugin freak.  I have at last count, about 500 VSTs and VSTis installed, and have just set up an ubuntu studio version of my desktop so I can try out the LADSPA plugs for linux.

I finally broke down and bought Oli Larkin’s great dronebox and polycomb VSTs.  I’ve been using an old demo version of dronebox for a while, but when I figured out how to run midi notes out of my guitar into the polycomb filter, the results were too cool so I straightened up and bought it.  Dronebox is a set of six or seven resonant comb filters with all sorts of tweakable settings.  You tune each one to a note, and when the corresponding note gets fed through, it resonates like a sympathetic string.  I use it as the wash in these two ambient pieces: “ambient 040328” and “ambient 040428“.  The loop is recorded live with the elogoxa Elottronix plugin, which has a great filter section you can hear tweaked in both pieces.  A bit more rocking, this song combines the dronebox with another of my favorite plugs, Krakli’s TrAmp, in a song suitably named “dronebox tramp.”  This time the looper is loopy llama or mobius, can’t remember which.  Both are great…I’ve generally gone with loopy llama lately ‘cuz its simpler and uses less resources.  You can hear it a lot in rreplay, where TrAmp, Dronebox, and DK+ drums, all get worked out regularly in plogue bidule.  Mobius is a spot-on emulation of the Gibson echoplex.  You can use the same manual for most of the controls.  Oh, except mobius is like having 8 echoplexes. Oh, and with unlimited loop length.  Oh, and its free instead of about a thousand bucks.

And now back to Oli’s plugins.  If you want to know what polycomb will do to guitar, check out this freshly recorded piece, polycombatose, where I am just working through all the presets.  The looper is loopy llama this time, recording just the bass (the trusty Hohner slammer run through an electri-Q eq and ruby tube tube emulator).  Missing Eric on the bass… The drums on both dronebox tramp and polycombatose are from nusofting’s most excellent DK+ drum machine, this time imitating an ancient Acetone rhythm box.  In order to get midi notes out of the guitar, I use G-Tune (which besides being a strobe-accurate tuner, converts the signal it reads to a midi note) and then run its midi out to a maple midi port. Of course, everything is played and recorded in one take via the ever-amazing plogue bidule.

Leave a comment if you wish, would love to know if you are listening.

Tags: DK + drums, dronebox, Electri-Q, elottronix, Eric Parker, G-Tune, Krakli, LADSPA, loopy llama, maple midi, mobius, oli larkin, plogue bidule, polycomb, Rich Rath, rreplay, ruby tube, TrAmp, vst plugins

Posted in Rich Rath, computing, electronica, guitar, music, rreplay | No Comments »

last rreplay for a while…

July 17th, 2008 Rich

Ahh well, Eric has gone back to Boston, thus ending for now one of the funnest musical projects I’ve had in a while.  rreplay recorded our last-for-now session on July 1.  It was a bit out there for a number of reasons on my part.  First, I had not regularly practiced in a month while I was away in Kolkata and Japan (more on the sounds from there later…), so the ideas were bubbling up but the fingers were a bit sluggish.  Second, I had just returned from Tokyo, where Monisha and I stayed a few extra days so I could catch the avant gard Japanese experimental guitar festival (also about which more later).  So what’s to listen to?  My favorite for weird factor is “squelch.”  What is not bass is manipulated guitar echo.  “drip grind” has a cool wash thing going that mutates over time.  I think my favorite is “nothing to declare,”  though “spider camp” and “flow control” are kinda cool in an experimentalist sort of way…all three are in the key of z.  That leaves “low town twilight” where I was trying too hard to evoke a particular mood instead of just going with it, and “neither flotsam nor jetsam.”  Not bad all in all.  I’ll certainly miss rreplay-ing.  We’ll put together an album or two more from it…if you find anything in the rrepository particularly compelling, in part or in whole, let us know in the comments here!

Tags: Eric Parker, rich rath experimental improvisation, rreplay

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May 19 2008 session

May 23rd, 2008 eric

In honor of taking some time out on the sessions, we took it out a bit. Light on the drums and heavy on the experimentation. For the brave, you should probably just hit these in the same order we did. If you’re short on time, consider pulling down multigrain serialtiller and skip to about 13:58 to start.

No tag for this post.

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May rreplay play in May

May 16th, 2008 eric

One of our better sessions this week. If you’ve ever heard of a videogame pretending to play guitar, then you might appreciate a guitar pretending to be a videogame. Check out gameboy wobble (blues for the binary crowd). If groovy psych is more your thing, then meloelottronix might work. Couple of covers also that are kind of fun and should be recognizable (quiz time): pierre des armes a feu and pil low. That’s all for now, maybe we’ll get our act together and release another album or two later. Stay tuned as it were.

Tags: Eric Parker, Rich Rath, rreplay, trip hop

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This week’s batch from rreplay

May 11th, 2008 Rich

Just a couple more weeks to go and I leave for India and Eric goes back to Boston. For last week’s session, go to the rrepository and look for files dated 080505 at the bottom of the list. My favorite for the moment is Hoffman’s bicycle ride [fixed link, 5/14/08]. Besides some timing issues here and there the whole session came out well so check out the other eight cuts too.

As always, check out rreplay’s album rrepertoire and the rest of the music at way.net.

Tags: Eric Parker, Rich Rath, rreplay

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rrecent rreplay rrecordings

May 3rd, 2008 Rich

The last three rreplay sessions are online in the rrepository, for April 14, April 25, and April 28.  Let’s see, from the April 14 session, I kinda like cello panetta for its faux strings (all mangled guitar, btw), steel driver for its beat, and round the perimeter for the synth line following the guitar around.  From the 25th, aoomph takes a while to get started but then closes out with some sicko guitar-following synth stuff.  This one will probably turn up again in edited fashion.  There is also convolution blues, which tries to go straight, but ends up, ummm, convoluted.  A couple more blues, this time with slide, start off the April 28 session. Here’s one, and here is the other.  The rest I need to listen to a little more before making a recommendation, but you can check ‘em out in the rrepository, along with most everything else we’ve recorded.  WHy so much blues?  Maybe just got back from Chicago….

Tags: blues, Eric Parker, Rich Rath, rreplay, way music

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rreplay take it on the road

April 8th, 2008 Rich

rreplay ventured into the public ear for the first time this past Sunday evening, hauling our gear down to Ong King’s open mike. In case you don’t know about it, Ong King is as combo gallery/multimedia/music/event space, probably the coolest place in town. We played a short set after a smoking jam from Quadraphonix, Drummer/percussionist/vocalist Shazam, and awesome ukulele player Taimane Gardener. Jonathan Heraux, Quadraphonix’ (awesome) drummer, owner of Ong King, and mc for the open mic commented “that’s a lot of wires” once we were set up. He also said that when he got the cd he popped it on in his car, and by the time he reached his destination, he was on the phone to us to see if we would come down for open mike as a sort of proof of concept…I guess a few other times laptop oriented bands would come for gigs and not be able to get the software running, so he wanted to see if we could do what we do live. We could, cuz basically everything we’ve recorded is live, just minus the audience…no overdubs or post-processing other some “mastering polish.” We did our thing, it seemed well received. It sounded like us but louder than usual, going through their PA, people clapped, it was fun. Taimane Gardener then followed with an awesome set showing a voice to match the uke chops. Good company we got to keep!

Hopefully it will lead to some gigs before I leave for India and Eric has to go back to Boston. Gotta book this incarnation before mid-May, if anyone is interested. The leader of a dance troupe heard one of the pieces and is planning on choreographing a performance to it…either “amazonia dub” or “pilaf,” not sure which….hmmm maybe they’d do something with us live? Have to find out who it is first though. We were so busy setting up I didn’t get a chance to exchange numbers. I forgot to press the record button on my computer, so don’t have a digital recording of the event, but Eric got it on his mini recorder, so if that came out, we’ll post it later this week.

Tags: Eric Parker, live music, Quadraphonix, Rich Rath, rrepertoire, rreplay, Taimane Gardener

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A mess of tv and sixties stuff

April 4th, 2008 Rich

One more tune from the mess . . . actually let’s see, more like eight…see if you can name them all. This has one of my favorite “wall of squall” moments in it, where for about fifteen seconds we ran everything on eleven and a half before returning to your regularly scheduled programming.

As always, If you were around when the mess was playing, drop me a line either from the way.net contact page, or to rath [at] way [dot] net or leave a comment. If you do the latter, I have no other way of responding than commenting back, so you might want to subscribe to the rss feed (over in the right column).

Tags: Corey Levin, Daytona Beach, Greg Drais, Palmer Wood, Punk music, Rich Rath, The Mess

Posted in 1980s, Corey Levin, Daytona Beach, Greg Drais, Palmer Wood, Punk music, Rich Rath, The Mess, music | No Comments »

More rreplay in the rrepository

April 4th, 2008 Rich

The 3/24 and 3/31 rreplay sessions are now in the rrepository. From 2/24, I really like “sizzle” and “summer shirt” — see if you can figure out the pun in the title of the latter one from the music. From 3/31, I like “basspace” — that’s all Eric’s bass other than the drums. No guitar until the bat sonar near the end. This came out of a mis-connection in the program that was sending Eric’s bass through all the guitar effects by accident. Once we figured out what was happening and fixed it, we went back and did it on purpose, with Eric playing and me knob twiddling the drums and bass. “Sand garden” is an introspective piece that gets chopped up and reconstituted at the end. “Pali night ride” is another moody piece that I like. We’ll probably eventually fade it out after the first few minutes of guitar cuz while the keyboard textures that follow are interesting, I think the guitar section captures a better feel.

• rreplay home page, including our first album, rrepertoire, which you can listen to and download free.

Tags: Eric Parker, Rich Rath, rreplay

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More mess from 1983…

March 26th, 2008 Rich

Wow, posting a mess song turned up Melody and Greg, neither of whom I’ve heard from in 25 yrs (more my fault than theirs!), so let’s see what happens if I post a few more. Here are the other three songs from our only studio session. The first one is a fast and loud guess at what 1999 would look like from 1984 if folks like Reagan stayed in power…hmmm, not too far off….Its called suburban dogs after the last verse, which I wrote along with some other stuff after a long night of partying …when I woke up, someone, I think Bobby, had read it and told me, all hungover, “this sucks, this sucks, but this one is ok” with the ok one turning into the song and the other stuff going out with the trash. The next one we came up with during a sound check in Jacksonville Beach about a week before the recording session. Corey came up with the beat and I started playing the guitar line, and Palmer heard it and came up with the lyrics: the result was new beat. The last one, she’s mine, was Palmer’s ode to Melody, who was not exactly ownable! It is a Psychedelic Furs-ish sounding thing with a weird intro and break.

Again, if this post turns up more people from back then, join waymusic and then you can write what what you remember from the Daytona scene in the wiki as soon as you log in. I’ll keep putting up more music in the meanwhile. If you leave a comment here, don’t forget to also leave me an email addie by sending a note to me from the contact page so I can write back if you want. And if you are just coming here for the first time, don’t forget to check out the rest of way.music, including rreplay, my current project with bassist Eric Parker - as always, the music is listenable and downloadable for free.

Tags: 1980s, Corey Levin, Daytona Beach, Greg Drais, Palmer Wood, punk, Rich Rath, The Mess

Posted in 1980s, Corey Levin, Daytona Beach, Greg Drais, Palmer Wood, Punk music, Rich Rath, The Mess, guitar, music | No Comments »