2006-07-26

 

"Taos Hummer" plus ACTUAL CONTENT!!!

A few days ago I was thinking Taos Hum would be awesome for a band name, but some guys already had it for a few years.

Well, necessity, like Frank Zappa, is a mother of invention. So that's how I came up with today's band name of honor: Taos Hummer.

Taos Hummer is such a groove-ridden, jam-heavy band name that I nominate it for my prestigious Band-Name-of-the-Month © award. Excellent name, guys!

The Band Names for today shall be:
and, of course,
* "Rock n' Roll Martian" has it's own legacy, beginning as a ad-libbed line in the--ahem--delightful family fantasy, "Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders". At least we think the kid is saying "Rock n' Roll Martian". He could be saying "#@!%&#!!' Old Martian" for all we can tell.

But don't take my word for it. Obtain your own copy today! It's like "Princess Bride" for masochists who also hate their kids.


Today's Music Feature:
A new genre, tube heaven, and surround sound shockwaves
Brought to you by ScoreForSale and Ice Plant Studios

Play StarDrive for Me
I would like to post a clip from "Taos Hummm", a song I'm currently doing with the Phosphene Machine Project. It's a style of music we call stardrive. Imagine ambient or "cruiser" style crossed with the drive of trance or techno. It's space music at 140bpm, then we kick it to lightspeed!

People who have only heard my film music or classical pieces are surprised to hear this kind of drum n' bass noise coming from the studio. But they haven't heard me rock on the Stratocaster either. Wall o' Roar, baby!

Tube Serendipity
I recently discovered that some of my grandfather's old stock of vacuum tubes were standard 12AX7 tubes that fit into my mic preamps. Two of them happened to be the highly sought after Telefunken smooth plate 12AX7's (from medical equipment). I have swapped the Sovtek 12AX7 tubes in my bi-amp and looped it into my effects chain.

You can really tell the difference between these rare vintage tubes and the $8 Russian ones. Needless to say I have been living in a warm analog haze for a couple days. These things positively glow, both optically and aurally. I cannot describe this level of tube warmth.

You will have to hear it.

Surround Sound Compromise
I will upload "Taos Hummm" in both a matrix-surround encoded MP3 and an MP3 in the new MP3 Surround format (which gets its own review soon) . The actual music of Phosphene Machine is full surround, which we encode as MLP, as well as a DTS and AC3 downmix. The surround MP3 formats are major compromises, but they are a bandwidth-friendly way to get my surround music to you. The matrix version is mastered to Circle Surround II, so it is actually quite good, of its type, but you need a CSII decoder for best results. Dolby Pro Logic and PLII works fine also.

We might do a surround-mixing workshop when ScoreForSale goes online in the fall. Write me and let me know if you are interested.

Comments:
I think KLF beat you all to it with the concept 'Kings (of) Low Frequency' and I am now contemplating the idea of surround sound sub bass as an out come of mis-reading this post :-)
 
Naw, surround sound techno is nothing new. The only innovation I was shooting for was juxtaposing the cruiser with insanely fast EBM beats (in a cohesive way).
I freely admit that others have done surround quite well!
Ironically, many mixes you hear in clubs are intentionally MONO for use in a point-source sound environment like a large hall. A good technique to solve phase problems! Mono is not dead!
 
Hey, how are you going to pull off surround sound sub-bass (seeing as how bass is psychoacoutically non-directional)?

One idea would be have a sine wave "steer" the bass around the room. Pan a sine wave at about 50Hz with the surround panner tool in WAVES! or similar in Sonar (MDA Circle Panner might work with surround bridge).
 
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