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Lab report April 14th 2009: little instruments

Okay, okay, I’m a somewhat born-again luddite so I can sound a little evangelical and pig-headed, but bear with me…

Here’s a little back-story: in my first semi-public attempts as an improvising guitarist, I had my guitar, amp and volume pedal… plus a compressor, a distortion box, a delay pedal and a chorus unit. Eventually, this chain would be joined by a wah. (I did, incidentally, my first recordings (a piece by Pedro Rebelo) with more or less this complex of equipment.)

Why am I going through this guitar-geek fetish confession? I started as an improvising guitarist of the ‘if-only-I-had-a-gizmo-I-would-rock’ school of wishful, self-delusion. Somewhere in my head, I had this naive idea that what separated me from the Frisells and Friths of the world was the hardware. (Oh, I almost got myself, don’t laugh, an SG thinking that this would get me closer to Frisell and Zappa.)

Yet Bailey never got better than with a guitar, terrible sounding fuzz box, a volume pedal and amp. Heck, Braxton, age 24, got two LPs from a single alto.

Who was I kidding here?

I only got through my personal-political-musical-technical hiccups and hang-ups by jettisoning, first the wah, then the compressor and delay, and eventually the distortion and the chorus boxes.

Fast-forward to the present…

I feel I’ve melowed from my fundamentalist, luddite stance from years ago, but, as I sat watching Katie O’Looney setup her behemoth kit, as I helped her carry her atomized percussion setup out of her van, up the stairs, into the performance space, I couln’t quite figure out what I was feeling.

My mentors include those who enroll gargantuan complex of musical resources and those who do not. How do I figure in this equation? There are, of course, pragmatic dimensions to this (I travel from one gig to another, by and large, via public transport), but nonetheless what are the political/ideological implications of subscribing to one position?

Part choice, perhaps: I did, for example, suggest to Owen Sutton that he might want to “decide whether you’re an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink drummer (a la Tony Oxley), or happier with a more spartan approach (like Joey Baron). Neither [is] the wrong choice, of course….” Sure, neither’s wrong, but neither are they neutral; they have very different implications and possibilities.

6 Comments

  1. Posted May 27, 2009 at 12:32 am | Permalink

    I’m a fan of enforced abandoning of equipment occasionally purely because it makes you re-evaluate how you work with equipment. From a mixing perspective it is very constructive occasionally play around with the following tactics (for example):

    – don’t use any EQs or dynamics at all. Mix entirely with the faders.
    – don’t use anything except the pan-pots after you have set up an initial basic level mix.
    – don’t use anything except compression threshold / ratio / attack / release once you have set up an initial basic level mix.
    – don’t use anything except desk EQ once you have set up an initial basic level mix (this one is really good and really makes you think about things and how they fit together)

    While these aren’t approaches that I would necessarily advocate using exclusively on a paid gig, they really do open your eyes to what is and isn’t possible, and suddenly desks with less flexible EQs than you might like suddenly don’t seem that bad at all.

    Of course we would all like to have the perfect most flexible gadgets on every channel possible, but this isn’t really always the best option. I’ve got a TC2240 that while it has only got 4 bands per channel does sound considerably nicer than most 31 band graphics, and more importantly it makes you *think* about what are the 4 most important things that you want to do to the system EQ rather than just repeatedly hacking holes in the mix with band after band after band of graphic equalisation. So I think that I’d probably end up in the “less is more” camp (especially if the less gadgets can be of as high quality as possible!)…

  2. Posted May 27, 2009 at 10:58 pm | Permalink

    Alex,

    Thanks for your comment.

    You comment does remind me of Braxton’s atomization of the alto saxophone (and his entire musical universe). Finding a galaxy of possibilities in the unlikeliest places… (I’d never have thought of using pan-pots for mixing… 😉

    The other thing this bring to mind is that, when I started playing guitar, to get a sound that I had in my head (kind of Hall-Kessel with a little Frisell thrown in), I’d use some combination of the eq on the amp, and rolling-off of the treble on the guitar. Eventually I found that sound with the eq flat, and everything up on the guitar…

    You (your body-mind-instrument-complex) are sometimes capable of much more than you might initially expect. Somehow your body-mind-instrument-complex learns and adapts to get what you want without much ‘extraneous’ tinkering.

    Thanks again for your comment, and for reading.

  3. Andrea Bonino
    Posted June 11, 2009 at 11:01 pm | Permalink

    Definitely a thought-provoking post from Han (like all of Han’s posts in fact)..
    Reminded me of what William Burroughs said to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, about alchemists in the past that always made use of the latest technologies available to them, as a way to explain his own approach to sorcery using tape recorders etc.. If Robert Johnson was alive today he would be a gansta rapper, some said.

    i think i got rid of my own prejudices about instrument technologies in the early days of drum’n’bass: if you have a story to tell, i don’t care if you are throwing stones on a wall or using the most complex Max patch, as long as you can make the story interesting.. sure i can see the beauty in simplicity, and the motivation in exploring infinite possibilities of a single bare instrument, but if there’s no other way to get a certain sound than using a certain tool then by all means people should go for it..

    it’s funny that i never listened to a lot of guitarists using effects, but then i loved to listen to dub, so delays, reverbs and phasers got (occasionally) into my guitar set-up via the mixing desk..

    i agree that it’s easy to get stuck into loops, that delays can often mask a lack of inventiveness (weird sound-..ound-..ound-..ound-..ound, another strange sound-..ge sound-..ge sound-..ge sound-..ge sound, yet another weird sound-..nd… and so on) but it seem to me that humans have some fascination with pushing buttons, and that music technology and form memes are seriously contagious..

    lately i’ve been listening to some West African early 70s music, and heard a lot of Hendrix-informed guitarists messing with wah, echo, phasers, ect, and the results are exhilarating (to me at least)

    i think people are interested and fascinated by sound, ultimately.. last summer i spent a few minutes inside a huge room in a cave in South France; some 12000 to 15000 years ago people used to walk half a mile into the cave to get to that room, where they left amazing paintings on the walls. And what was possibly the main attraction of that space?
    you guessed, massive reverb and echoes.

  4. Posted June 13, 2009 at 9:24 pm | Permalink

    Andrea,

    i think i got rid of my own prejudices about instrument technologies in the early days of drum’n’bass….

    The drum’n’bass connection is a good one, since that’s a musical practice very much dependent on (defined by) the technological resources. I imagine you would be frowned upon, at least the old school drum’n’bass, for bringing too much hardware to the gig.

    i think people are interested and fascinated by sound, ultimately.. last summer i spent a few minutes inside a huge room in a cave in South France; some 12000 to 15000 years ago people used to walk half a mile into the cave to get to that room, where they left amazing paintings on the walls. And what was possibly the main attraction of that space?
    you guessed, massive reverb and echoes.

    So here’s the question: are the effects (in reception) of a beautifully crafted digital convolution-in-a-box the same as being in a huge cave?

    If it were simply the pursuit of sound, the answers would be yes, but I am, to some extent, arguing that the answer is no, the effects are very, very different.

    The sound issue is important, but not, I think, in and of itself.

    Let me ask another question: What if someone managed to simulate a cavernous reverb with just a bugle? or a harmonica? Would the effect of that be the same as the convolution-in-a-box, or being in a huge cave?

    Perhaps the enrolling additional hardware and paraphernalia is warranted “if there’s no other way to get a certain sound than [by] using a certain tool”… but how are we ever to know for certain that some sounds are not in our reach until we try…

    I think Alex’s comment is instructive here: there’s a tendency to think that, yeah, I desire a certain sound, and thus pursue a the most obvious solution (i.e. enrolling additional hardware and paraphernalia). My last question: for those that desire a cavernous reverb in the club/concert/livingroom space, why not try to coax it out of the resources that are already available to you (whether that a bugle or a harmonica)?

    Thanks for the comment, and thanks for reading.

  5. Andrea Bonino
    Posted June 20, 2009 at 3:38 pm | Permalink

    Han,

    [i]I imagine you would be frowned upon, at least the old school drum’n’bass, for bringing too much hardware to the gig.[/i]

    I’d probably hand to the frowners the number for the helpline of Purists Anonymous. They’re a helpful bunch.

    [i]So here’s the question: are the effects (in reception) of a beautifully crafted digital convolution-in-a-box the same as being in a huge cave?[/i]

    what i meant was that in times where large spaces like cathedrals had not been built yet, the caves were possibly the only way to experience that type of reverb/echo effect on voices and sounds. it seems that humans have always been intrigued by sounds and the ways to affect them. of course the electronic boxes of today offer a completely different experience; but, without going into another ‘analog vs.digital’ discussion, i would say that people use boxes because they represent a reasonable compromise between sonic results, cost and portability.

    [i]Let me ask another question: What if someone managed to simulate a cavernous reverb with just a bugle? or a harmonica? Would the effect of that be the same as the convolution-in-a-box, or being in a huge cave?[/i]

    Most of us beginners are motivated by imitating certain artists/sounds and we usually set on the most obvious route to do that. As you mentioned in your first post, you had to go through the experience of having a full set of effects before you realized they weren’t working for you; i doubt you would have listened then to anyone telling you that you shouldn’t have bothered, but nothing could substitute your own experience of how these things work.

    i think in the end it boils down to how fussy you are about the results you want to obtain. i don’t think that those using minimal resources deserve necessarily more praise that those using plenty; and both strategies could be rewarding in some way, and are by no means mutually exclusive. Bobby McFerrin and Mark Stewart improvising together are a good example of how these strategies can interact.
    Cooder and Lindley used to share the stage with 15 stringed instruments between the two of them, and this allowed them to take the audience across continents of musical diversity. For each job they were using the tool developed over decades of trial/error and were building upon the experiences of thousands of musicians from all over the world.

    So you can dress your salad with toothpaste if you like, just don’t expect your dinner guests to come back.

  6. Posted June 21, 2009 at 1:28 pm | Permalink

    Andrea,

    For each job they were using the tool developed over decades of trial/error and were building upon the experiences of thousands of musicians from all over the world.

    Precisely. These technologies (whether the kazoo, bugle, guitar, csound or Max MSP) have a specific techno-social history, and are embedded in a complex of ancestors (they deny one set of identities, embrace others). In other words, it isn’t simply a case of ‘pursuit of sounds’, it supports one set of socio-political positions while denying others.

    So, to go back to my article, what are the implication of, for example, my enrollment of a relatively narrow range of technologies?

    i doubt you would have listened then to anyone telling you that you shouldn’t have bothered, but nothing could substitute your own experience of how these things work.

    Oh, I agree with that! 😉

    My question, however, is what was the ideological or political implications of (my) taking one path rather than another. I’m trying to avoid a simplistic good/bad (or, as you say, an ‘analog vs. digital’) formulation, or a question of ‘purity’. However, I’m arguing that neither stance is neutral.

    I still think old school drum’n’bass is an illustrative case here: it is, as you pointed out, an ostensibly a technologically driven music, but it is also a practice defined by specific human-technological interactions (two DJs, say, with specific duties and musical responsibilities). Beyond the notion of ‘purity’, there are questions about deployment of (technological) resources in specific ways. There’s little difference between a turntableist and a radio DJ in terms of hardware, but there are significant differences in terms of modes of human-technology engagement. (Again, not (just) in terms of good/bad, ‘purity’ or ‘authenticity’, but in terms of what the political-cultural implications.)

    Or, how about this, what happened when Bob Dylan picked up an electric?

    both strategies could be rewarding in some way, and are by no means mutually exclusive. Bobby McFerrin and Mark Stewart improvising together are a good example of how these strategies can interact.

    I agree, but I’d argue that the strategies interact in interesting ways precisely because they have differing political / cultural / ideological dimensions, not because they are somehow neutral; their differences (collisions, (re)negotiations and creative (mis)understandings) create interest.

    Thanks for the comment!

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