[Ramona_A_Stone]

I have a stack of outboard effects units as well as about 8 jillion plug-ins. I use a Yamaha SY77, (sample and FM workstation synth) a combination of spiffy Korg and odd archaic drum machines, an old dinosaur Korg analog synth (a restored MS20, my first), an Akai sampler which broke down during this recording, and sound font sampling design which I'm really just getting into. There's also a touch of actual electronified pre-neolithic stringed instruments in there. I'm using a flexible mixture of Acid, Vegas and Cakewalk at this point, and depending on what I need, pieces may travel from one to the other program. Most of this was done fairly straight forwardly in Vegas, and unlike most of my stuff, there is very little midi implementation. I was in fact midi-rebellious as a sort of concept, because I got mad at everything being midi-midi-midi there for a while. Except for this self imposed quasi-midi restriction though, this is really my first experiment with unlimited home computer tracking, and is pretty much exploratory. I might add, that not only is each track treated seperately, I did quite a bit of experimenting with a primitive sort of "3-d" approach, by having a lot of the tracks in these pieces occur in more than one "place' in the stereo field, and using things like tight alternating pans and detuned discrete seperations. Also, if you listen closely, you'll hear that some of the processing is backwards, that is, the tracks are reversed, processed and reversed again. But I admit, a lot of people (almost always musicians, strangely) tell me I use my effects very "sparingly," so I'm not offended at all, I consider it a feature. I could only say that it is intentional, and toward the purpose of clarity. I was after something very "tight" and "close up" here, not always the case in my music, much of which is Washy Ambient, Post-Old-School-Pre-Digital-Semi-Germanic-World-Quasi-Industrial, or even (gulp) New Age-ish. (I always feel like I'm John Tesh when I have to use that phrase)

If it seems a bit "empty" to you, and I hear that a lot also, all I can say is that I cultivate that too. I'm very subtractive. A final piece may contain only ten percent or so of what I play in the mix. In the final mixes of my previous CD, resulting from a foray into Acid, as Mr. E mentioned, I spent weeks on the solos and then suddenly and apparently intentionally, without warning myself, removed them all and decided it was finished. I don't know why. I've always imagined that the reason I might do this sort of thing is because I want the listener to hear the very same things in the music which inspire me to play, and I feel I don't need to fill all those "holes" with actual playing. [shrug] I'm a minimalist, I guess, in that sense. Or a moron. The only real "training" I ever had was from a master oud player named Dalouna, from Lebanon, who I performed with, under grave stress, for a couple of years; a cruel but very funny taskmaster who taught me hundreds of ancient Egyptian and classic Arabic songs and giggled every time he heard a synthesizer or reverb. He would always squint at me, gesticulating wildly and say "you must always leave room, Ramona, otherwise no one will know where to sit down in the music, you see, like in a crowded restaurant with fat waitresses, they will go somewhere else and eat Greek food," among other inscrutable if not incomprehensible pearls of wisdom. (for some reason Dalouna loathed all things Greek)

At the same time, tiny, weird things interest me, and I may get totally involved in completely exotic if not retarded processes such as replacing a snare drum voice with a whale sample, or go to great lengths dissecting choirs and taking vocal samples apart, all to acheive something more or less normal sounding, such as the "choruses" of Aviophobia. I think I'm usually listening to this "collage element" - this transmuted nearly random garbage, if you will, the way some people might listen to solos evolving and changing. This comes from a long and strange relationship with samplers, I think. Again, the relative lack of reverb allows for tiny, swift shifts in diverse sounds. I sort of like "the sound of editing," I guess you might say.

Anyway, thanks for the blow by blow report Mek. Keep 'em coming. lol. And how about you? Got anything new?