Mike from LA writes to tell me about his multimedia thesis (kids these days...) "I chose to look at the history of music technology through Radiohead's "Everything in its Right Place", attempting to show how Radiohead showcases some of music's most important technologies, then back tracking to show just how these things came to be and how they affected music along the way." The site is K-i-d-a.com* and full of stuff about Kaoss Pads, Prophet 5s, Fender Rhodes' and the like. Nostalgically, the interface reminds me of one of those mid-90s interactive CDs developed by Coldcut or Peter Gabriel and released on CD-i.
Paul Lansky was one of the first electronic/computer music composers, and he's still a professor at Princeton. Here is his charming account of being sampled by Radiohead. A short loop of his track Mild und Leise [mp3] became the chord sequence for Idioteque. "Mild und Leise was composed in 1973 on an IBM 360/91 mainframe computer. I used the Music360 computer language written by Barry Vercoe. This IBM mainframe was, as far as I know, the only computer on the Princeton University campus at the time. It had about one megabyte of memory, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (in addition to requiring a staff to run it around the clock). At that point we were actually using punch cards to communicate with the machine, and writing the output to a 1600 BPI digital tape which we then had to carry over to a lab in the basement of the engineering quadrangle in order to listen to it. It uses FM synthesis, which had just been worked out at Stanford, and also a special purpose filter design program written (in Fortran IV) by Ken Steiglitz. What's especially cute, and also occured to Jonny Greenwood, is that I was about his current age, when I wrote the piece - sort of a musical time warp." Somewhat cooler than hanging about with Radiohead is this short clip of Paul being taught to play the Theremin by... Leon Theremin! (Thanks Martin)
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Radiohead have a blog about recording their new album, which contains a limited amount of soft-to-medium strength gearporn, if you're into small, blurry B&W photos of large modulars, TR909 drum machines and men with floppy hair sitting on the floor surrounded by effects pedals. And, let's face it, who isn't? (Thanks, Jon)
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The perfect gift for any Radiohead fan: This MTA Series 980 mixing desk is apparently the actual desk that OK Computer was recorded on. I have no idea if that's true, but the owners say it was bought in England about five years ago and shipped to Canada, where it's now for sale. You also get a big rack of high-end outboard gear and monitors.
The official-best-album-ever-(except-for-Nevermind) was recorded at St. Catherine's Court, near Bath. This page explains more about the process:
"We set up in the ballroom," remembers bassist Colin Greenwood, "and the control room was set up in the library, which had these amazing views over the gardens. There were some magical evenings as we sat down with pieces of music with the windows open."
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Here is a great clip of Radiohead playing 'Everything in it's right place' with plenty of live Kaoss Pad action. Alternatively, here is the dude from Muse playing his guitar with a built-in Kaoss Pad. For slightly less rock'n'roll viewing, here is some guy demonstrating the Manson Kaoss pad guitar. It's not pretty.
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Lukatoyboy writes from
Back last summer, we had a spate of synth-shaped cakes - here, here, here and, wonderfully, here. Now Tim write with news that a Japanese Radiohead fan has been presented with this tasty treat, based on an Ondes Martenot - the (roughly) keyboard Theremin, used by Johnny Greenwood, who last year told the Guardian: "I first heard the ondes martenot when a teacher at school played us Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony, and I heard it swooping along with the strings. But I had no idea what it looked like, and then finally, about four or five years ago, when we were doing Kid A, I found one in Paris." Greenwood is now a one-man PR campaign for the ondes martenot. He taught himself how to play it, mastering its keyboard and electronic ribbon, which produces the dizzying whoops and whistles. And he met the instrument's most famous virtuoso, Jeanne Loriod, who was Messiaen's sister-in-law. "Just before she died, I interviewed her, and I was telling her how rubbish I thought synthesizers and keyboards were compared to the ondes martenot, but she was saying, no, synthesizers are great as well: she was in her 70s and she was more broad-minded than me. But I think the ondes martenot is wonderful. It puts you in total control of the pitch and expression, and it's as close to singing as I can get. It's a living thing."
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Here are a small handful of synth-related videos. If you have more links, post them in the comments and I'll do a round-up in a few days.
I just read this piece from the New York Sun about John Schumann, who builds boutique effects pedals in the back room of Main Drag Music in Williamsburg, NYC, selling them to Radiohead and Portishead. His most interesting sounding invention is the Schumann PLL, an analog harmonizer, which costs $500 but does look fantastically cool. I liked this description of John at work: "Empty coffee cups sit neatly stacked next to an oscilloscope that Mr. Schumann uses to test the signals of his pedals. Thin ribbons of hot steam float from the white-hot tip of a soldering iron. In his cable knit cranberry sweater, faded black jeans, work boots, and signature brown hat, Mr. Schumann looks like a veteran musician." Update: You can use login: nysun@nobsys.net pass: password to read the piece.
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Rhetorical rVoice is a professional speech synthesis system - they build voices for artificial call centres and the like. Their demo page is perfect for generating, say, an earnest Spanish gentleman rapping 'Bring The Noise' [100k mp3], or a stoned valley girl doing 'Night of the Living Bassheads' [160k mp3]. If you're hunting for Radiohead/ Kraftwerk/ Hawking robot voices, then you'll have to look elsewhere.
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Tommy Walker III has been learning how to make mobile phone ringtones, and he stumbled on this. It's the Nokia developers kit, which includes two VST plugins to simulate different models of mobile phone. One contains all the sounds available, the other models the speakers. As Tommy says: "Is this interesting? Probably not, but I just like the idea of being able to make my recordings sound exactly like they are coming out of a mobile phone." To test the thing out, I used a MIDI file of Radiohead's 'Paranoid Android'. Click to hear a N-Gage take on the intro, a Nokia 3200 doing the first choral bit, a Nokia 6650 doing the exciting bit in the middle and a Nokia 6100 rather mangling the spazz-out bit at the end. The plugins are free. Registration involves two separate email confirmations, but they don't seem to care who you are.
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