400+400 and loop-making
2002-02-17 by ferrograph@aol.com
>>BTW, did you ever release any of the 'two 'Trons' stuff - regular discs orCD-Rs?<<
I actually feel a twinge of guilt now that this has been mentioned on the
list..... radio massacre international played at the alfa syntauri festival
near amsterdam in late march 2000, with two 400s on stage.
two weeks earlier, we'd been at jodrell bank and had some difficulties
getting our then-favourite tape frame to behave after carrying 1098 around a
bit more than usual... (our favoured rehearsal space in stockport involves a
big iron staircase; does anybody have any strong feelings about moving 400s
with the tapes in place? a colleague of mine at mtv used to schlepp stuff for
greenslade- he said they used to take the tapes out after a show and
sometimes forgot to put them back.... this may have been a ruse, of course,
to eliminate the machine from the keyboard arsenal on account of some
misbehaviour or unwieldiness....)
so andy T (who was at the JB planetarium because we wanted to show him what
our setup was, because he was going to be driving the van on the dutch trip)
said he had his 400 out in the carpark, it having been streetly'd and now on
it's way home. andy lives about a mile or so from me, so possibly the closest
'tron neighbours in london- anywhere?- are me, andy and woolly....
so we borrowed his frame for the gig at jodrell bank and then decided it'd be
an essential laugh to take his 400 aswell as ours to the gig in holland. so
we did. I even made large labels for the both of them so's the audience could
puzzle over these four-digit numbers stuck on the cabinets. there is video
footage, multitrack and stereo recordings from three different sources, many
photographs... and I forgot all about it. I'm ashamed.
I have an excuse, sort of. andy probably spent a few weeks in therapy after
the ordeal that the dutch trip became. he may well have forgotten the
frustrating three hours driving around amsterdam looking for secure parking
for the (bog-standard) transit van that was an inch too high for the
euro-standard car parks we found. we had to put it in the marriott while we
stayed at anne frank's old house across the road.
this is easily forgotten in the light of our near-death experience with a
low-flying goose at 70mph on the way back through belgium. that would've been
the end of the band, the van, andy and both of the 400s. THEN we were set
upon by a french customs guy, a complete jobsworth fuckwit with a .38 and, as
it turned out, no sense of smell. all those cases in the back went unsearched
while he dismantled the cab of the van instead. his smarter colleagues stood
out in the rain and mocked him, the stash made it back to london. amsterdam's
great.
so well then, what did we do with the recordings? well, the concert of two
weeks earlier at jodrell bank was one of a series of electronic music
performances there, something dave law (of synth music direct) tries to
organise every year, and something we've been doing since '96. this time, the
occasion was to be marked by a cd-boxed-set (which grew from 2 to 8 cd's).
what we gave dave as our contribution was a remix creation from the *two*
concerts, using multitrack and audience-"bootleg" recordings to get the full
effect... so some of it actually has three or four 'trons going at once.
as far as I know, it's still available from smd. I would have to negotiate
something with dave "do what thy wilt shall be the whole of the moon " law to
have our portion available separately but I think it could be done. then I
could augment the artwork with some of these pics. meanwhile, maybe I can get
some shots up on our website.
what I should mention while you're all still awake is that BOTH machines
behaved perfectly throughout the set in huizen, despite the long drive and
the subterranean overnights in the van. we used proel swell pedals on both
machines- I think I let andy keep one for his troubles.
>>So (general inquiry here), if I wanted to create a loop in my 'Tron, howwould I go about it? Take the tape frame out and simply insert a loop of
tape around one head, going right round the 'innards'? Not that it's very
likely that I'll try it...<<
why ever not? that's the idea, basically. there are some caveats...
before it became relatively easy again to get new sounds for the instrument,
I'd done exactly this to 1098. our original tapeset was a bit fucked (list
members may remember discussions about cleaning old tapes- mildew, meths and
cotton balls, that sort of thing) so I made 1/4" tapes of sounds from my sci
sampler.
the machine doesn't seem to mind having the tape just dangling inside it but
what does happen is that there's a lot of lateral movement and you don't
stand a chance of making this work with two tracks on each tape. even
full-track tapes are too unstable. if, however, you mount 1/4" tapes in a
normal tron frame, stability is much better and two-track stuff will just
about work. what is immediately apparent is that the 'tron plays the tapes
properly, honestly, like any 1/4" machine would. the "essence-of-'tron" first
appears when you play the keyboard properly- chords and so forth- and the
variations in tuning and replay quality enter the equation.
("temperament", as a word for the concept of variable tuning, could have been
chosen with the 'tron in mind. and most rock musicians have got used to the
idea that "dropout" is the guy back there with the sticks and the stool...)
round about this time, out of nowhere it seemed, there was streetly. (guys-
you remember the crouch end machine? the pale blue lid? it's owner gave me
DK's number in the states for 'tron assistance but I never called him because
I thought there was still a chance there'd be a 'tron-tape-making-kit in the
uk somewhere, possibly at the BBC). one of the first things I bought from
martin & john was the 1/4" comb kit.
it's probably not worth y'r while spending more-time-than-is-fun on this
unless you've got the comb kit and a very good reason for wanting
longer-than-8-seconds-and-no-distinctive-attack, since the loops will only
last one spell in the machine. (this because you have to undo the splices to
get them out; that's just too much handling for the tape to survive.)
you need to be shit-hot at splicing, degaussed blade, the whole bit. (i.e.
able, almost, to home-in on zero-crossing points like a sample editor would)
or you'll have worse bumps than an old copycat-tape-echo. you can gently pull
y'r edit back and forth over the head to listen for the thump. sometimes an
orthogonal splice works better than an angled one, and it's a compromise
between the two sounds on the same tape anyway.
you'll number the loops carefully only to see the ink gone ten minutes
later.... I got around the "what order do they go in?" problem by making each
tape a bit longer than the next-highest; it looked like a tape-harp in there.
it also helps scatter the effect of the splices- you don't want all the bumps
audible in the same place each time they come round when you're playing big
droney chords.
if you're careful, the loops can stay in there when you remove the 1/4" combs
and put a normal frame in.
you have no idea how anxious I am now to get started playing with this again.
KL- did you ever get that 1/4" comb set made for your machine?
I'm going to go and play for a bit.........
d/r.m.i./400nr 1098