Is that a reference to a certain person?
I think its about turning the grid off and feeling the music. Too many DnB producers are on some 'my technological breaks are better than yours' thing. Its so annoying and so gay.
Modern d'n'b is rubbish - tune ID and a moan from an old man
- Thread starter john eden
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I think its about turning the grid off and feeling the music. Too many DnB producers are on some 'my technological breaks are better than yours' thing. Its so annoying and so gay.
UFO over easy
online mahjong
who? name names. otherwise what's the point?
ignore that post. just woke up with massive hangover.
djnaphta
Member
Just saw Burial bigging up Black Secret Technology in a recent interview (think it was the one with Kode 9).. sounds like he feels the same way about avoiding the grid effect
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
i suspect that the linear beat structures took over as much because the people who were actually making the tunes started to get gigs where they were expected to actually mix them - i know from reading interviews with the likes of shy fx that that happened to more than one producer...
even photek, when he played one of his first dj appearances after the fuss areound that house album he did died down, remarked afterwards in an interview that without that huge snare whacking away in the middle ground the tunes he was playing (on that occasion) had a much diminished impact...
basically the "problem" with dnb is that it's a very diverse music - you wouldn't make blanket judgements on house music based on a lisa lashes set or a theo parrish set and if anything dnb is even more divergent than those two examples... any genre that can encompass current value and ltj bukem and can have two releases in the same week that have a tempo difference of 32bpm is always going to be hard to figure out, especially when your contact with it is minimal enough.. (and the people who start these threads always do have a pretty minimal contact with it)
the other thing of course is that even people who are involved in dnb moan about it because they know what they like and see that the output of the scene they can identify with is only a fraction of the whole, and they take it to mean that the music as a whole is "doomed", whereas it's only really the side effect of the diversity and versatility of the genre.
as for the likes of gerald getting all high and mighty about it's demise, well it's a bit sad that one of the original innovators music couldn't have done a bit more than taking a big chunk of a Phantom Audio tune, whacking an amen on top of it and proclaiming drum and bass to have been "saved" (although there's an excellent guy called gerald "live" in berlin set floating around the internet somewhere - if a few of those tunes ever actually make it out i'd be first in line to pick them up and play them)
i've a wee mix up at www.virb.com/tyrannyexecutivesteve - breaky atmospheric and melodic stuff from the likes of trax, d:bridge, seba and hidden agenda, check it out if you want to hear some of the stuff you probably wouldn't hear being played out in the same venue as that "tarantula" tune
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slim jenkins
El Hombre Invisible
Apologies in advance if I just repeat what others may have said here (haven't read all the pages) - but hasn't D&B obviously run it's course like all genres do? Why should we expect it be innovative ten years on - bop had it's days just like Free Jazz, ska, dub etc - days when they were new, interesting and explored fully by pioneers and second phase exponents.
The only new interest comes from sufficiently removed younger generations discovering it for the first time...oh...and non-UK residents who always get there later (with respect to UK dance genres - don't they?).
All beat-based instrumental sounds have limitations, obviously. I think D&B was stretched long ago by the likes of T-Power (whose work still sounds good today to me) along with, say, Cujo, Squarepusher and all the other leftfield producers. I've still got a small collection of tunes and enjoy playing them now and again (early 4 Hero, No U Turn, Source Direct etc) but it's over for me.
I now spend my days wondering whether to wear my trousers rolled, or eat a peach whilst enjoying non club-related music. The clubs I go to play original R&B, soul etc. If anyone's still getting mileage out of House or D&B in clubs, good luck to 'em!
The only new interest comes from sufficiently removed younger generations discovering it for the first time...oh...and non-UK residents who always get there later (with respect to UK dance genres - don't they?).
All beat-based instrumental sounds have limitations, obviously. I think D&B was stretched long ago by the likes of T-Power (whose work still sounds good today to me) along with, say, Cujo, Squarepusher and all the other leftfield producers. I've still got a small collection of tunes and enjoy playing them now and again (early 4 Hero, No U Turn, Source Direct etc) but it's over for me.
I now spend my days wondering whether to wear my trousers rolled, or eat a peach whilst enjoying non club-related music. The clubs I go to play original R&B, soul etc. If anyone's still getting mileage out of House or D&B in clubs, good luck to 'em!
Your missing an 'e' in the link there steve0.
Just listening to 0=0's mix posted on subverrtcentral (its deadly so far) and the first tune is 'taught' by polska which I havent heard in a while and it occurs to me;
Why isnt everyone going crazy over polska? He has to be one of the only new-school producers bringing something really fresh, and who has the potential to appeal to a wider non-dnb audience.
(I've been out of touch with the scene for a while so maybe I missed the polska-hype...)
Beatchopping used to be a lot less precise I think... cut into chunks rather than single hits that are then quantized to death.Just saw Burial bigging up Black Secret Technology in a recent interview (think it was the one with Kode 9).. sounds like he feels the same way about avoiding the grid effect
In some old jungle tracks you can hear it where they play a sample repeatedly like a fill... say a loop that goes tikka-tikka-tikka, where the tikka is a single sample (or part of the beat being played with loop points)... rather than the modern approach which would be to have quantized tik and ka samples. Its a subtle thing because obviously samples that are way out of time will sound shite, but when its done right its just the right amount of "ruff". And it hardly ever feels the same pushing the beats off the grid by hand.
Debated this almost a decade ago with an up and comer who described old jungle as messy beats.
Anyhow, the days of breakbeat science are well over; after jungle, dnb, garage, idm, glitch etc who care about edits for the sake of edits? Where it doesn't work the groove or vibe its pretty damn boring... even then...
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
I'm never quite sure about this sort of argument - have people who talk about everything being 'locked to the grid' actually used a modern sequencer? You can turn off the snap to grid feature and you're straight back in the good old days. If you want to push the beats around by hand, you can (and a lot of people do). If you want to slice things by the chunk rather than the hit, you can (and a lot of people do). If you want to slice it into hits, but then take the exact timing of the hits (ie the 'groove') into the sequencer and use that as a template when you push the beats around, you can do that too. If people are producing overly quantized beats it's because they're choosing to do so.
I get the same thing about Martsman - he mainly does skippy synthy stuff that has maybe a bit of IDM/glitch influence but still rolls out like proper DnB and (importantly) is both Clever and Fun.
djnaphta
Member
I disagree. IMO, most people (music makers included) tend to conform to the technology - and to the commonly applied usages of it that are current at the time.
For better or worse.
In my experience, I'd attest that writing breakbeat rhythms in that old 4Hero stye (where you can hear the full break chopped into chunks and layered with others - rather than surgically dissecting all breaks into single hits) definitely affects the way one goes about writing rhythms. It certainly encourages the possibility of greater grooviness in the end result, as you're stealing not just the sound of an isolated kick or a snare, but also some of the energy and flow with which the original was laid down.
Essentially, I'm a great believer in the power of inspiration that a sample can provide when you let it breathe (so to speak). Hence I try to use em in such a way as to propel my music into other places (rhythmic, melodic) that I might not have thought to go myself. Thus hammering in chunks of a break on my keyboard also throws up rhythmical 'accidents' to (my musically untrained ear) that I can then take advantage of. Essentially I choose that approach as it helps me produce something much more interesting or arresting than if I'd sat down cold to write my drums with a kick and a snare and a hi hat...
However, the fact that old skool producers worked this way was not by choice - it was just the quickest, easiest at the time way to bring a rhythmic twist out of the original sampled loop. The brain-bending Jungle rhythms that began to emerge from this approach were a happy by-product of this.
As with the application of any particular technique, the method I choose doesn't guarantee anything about the quality of the end result. I do agree that Martsman in particular brings a lot of energy out of his minimal/glitchy take on dnb (which I guess is why I think of him as making 'drum n bass' rather than 'Jungle' - my notion of dnb being more, er 'compositional' than Jungle, if you understand me).
Yeah... the stuff I think that stands up the best now is often the most technically simple tracks that were done really well. Something like Ware Mouse, theres not a lot too it, but they work the groove and its just really great, effective, economical use of samples. Hardly anyone in dnb would take a track that raw seriously today.
Also the slower tempo and space in the track makes it a bit more crossover to other styles of music -- the tempo-isolation being one of the things I don't like about dnb now... hasn't felt relevant for years. Used to play stuff to people and they'd get all agitated and say "argh, its like someone beating pots and pans". Now I hear what they meant...
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
... don't get me started on dnb tempos! hehe
The faster the better, I say - you get more music for your minute that way.
The faster the better, I say - you get more music for your minute that way.
i see where you're coming from! at least it's true in a speedcore and ridiculously fast noisey shouty skinhead techno context, but with jungle there's only so fast you can take it before it gets into the mess it's been (or bits of it have been in!) in for much of the last 5 years....
on the other hand, re-reading "Energy Flash" recently, i thought it was hilarious that Reynolds makes a point in the gabber chapter to say that as soon as "right thinking" music experts condemn something as being of no musical or artistic merit that it's the surest sign something truly interesting is going on....
dreadfully ironic then that he is in complete consensus with the general party line on the state of the mainstream "fat rave" end of drum and bass!
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
That's a good point. Perhaps we should all start paying close attention to commercial D&B, it's clearly where the next big innovation will come from.
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
I think there's definitely interesting stuff going on - the just-about-feasible compositional excesses of Pendulum's multi-riffed tunes being a case in point.
well unfortunately going strictly by commercial D&B the next big innovation will be Pendulum's new material which sounds rather unfortunately like Blink 182 setting fire to Kraftwerk's studio while McFly and Busted film it on their mobiles.
except they've taken all the just-about-feasible compositional excesses out of thier tunes...
have you heard "granite" yet?
djnaphta
Member
yeah, his theory doesn't really stand up on that point... or at least, time has proven that such a theory certainly needs a qualifier... maybe something like *does not always apply in cases where careerist conservatism meets cocaine + tinnitus