Funkhameleon is from Finland and have been in the Top 10 of our last Remix Cohmpetition. He made a cool french-housy track (massively) using Ohm Force’s Quad Frohmage, it worths a listen! His own words: “I did that one with a guy called Shine Fish, but I did pretty much all of the sequencing. So every single filter is done with QuadFrohmage and I have one doing something on almost every mixer insert – not necessarily always filtering stuff but also using the peak “filters” to boost some certain frequencies. I gotta say, I really love QuadFrohmage. It’s easy to use, the sound can be so funky and edgy, and it has so many filter types, settings and possibilities that I’ll never have to use another filter again.
25
Aug
10
Funkhameleon’s Quad Frohmageries
Ceri Charlton is from Barry, an ex-docking town in South Wales, UK. He’s been doing online musical collaborations over the last 10 years and has some interesting experiences/feedback to share. In this interview he explains which tools and methods he used at the very beginning – with him and his partners running on Fruity Loops – and how things evolved to his current method: he and his partner already working on Reason 4 and planning to go for Reason 5 as soon as it’s released. He also talks a bit about the mixing process in a collaborative environment and which features he’d like to see on the Ohm Studio. You can listen to Ceri’s most recent collaborative productions here, they will make a nice soundtrack while you read the lines below…
Who are your musical partners and where are they from?
The main guy I work with at the moment is called Straker and he’s from Worcester, which is just over the border from me, in England. In the past, I’ve collaborated online with people from all over the world, Australia, Holland, Germany, Sweden, France, America, Chile.
So online collaboration has been a important role on your musical path?
Very important indeed. I think that’s one of the benefits of the internet from a social point of view is that you can “meet” people who you’d otherwise never bump into. From a musical point of view, this is particularly important. A lot of people talk nowadays globalisation and cultural homogenisation but, unless you live in a big city, if you have any sort of niche or indie musical tastes, you’ll really struggle to meet significant numbers of people with the same interest. Of these, only a small proportion will be making music that you’re into, so your prospective ‘partners’ are fairly limited. The internet takes away these restrictions that your physical location imposes.
At the beginning, how was using Fruity Loops for your collaborative productions?
I think the first thing I ever collaborated online with was Fruityloops 3.xx.xx, one of those really long version numbers that contained all the details of the patch level! In terms of collaboration, one of the best things was being able to save a file containing all samples used as well as the actual track itself and then ship that one zipped file off to whoever you wanted to share it with. Prior to that, it was limited to exchanging CD-rs, and even floppy disks with a very small group of school friends.
The other nice thing was that it came bundled with some samples, FX and synths, in one particular collaboration, we agreed to stick to just these, to keep files sizes down (so that it was mainly just a glorified midi file and patch data being sent).
Both these things were such big benefits and gave so much freedom to edit/tweak the other person’s material that at the time I only really sough out collaborations with people who would work in Fruity Loops too. I remember experimenting with ’remixing’ style collaborations where the other person gave you a set of .wav files and (if it wasn’t obvious) Continue reading ‘South Wales’ producer Ceri Charlton shares his experiences of almost 10 years of online music collaborations, talks about his methods and tools…’
One month ago we posted dutch artist Remco’s demo track for the Symptohm:Melohman PE and now he shows up again, this time showing his experiments with the Ohmicide:Melohman distortion. His Ohmicide demo track shows that this distortion – despite what many could think – is not only suitable for hard and agressive distortion grain. The owners of this unit know that the Ohmicide palette goes far beyond that, crossing the huge field of subtle distortion and ‘distortion to add warmth’. This demo shows us some percussive elements dictating the rhythm for some atmosphere/texture sounds, while the Ohmicide helps creating a global ‘soul’ for the whole landscape, the final result being anything but cold…
Robert LaDue and Matt Hettich attended together the California Institute Of The Arts some years ago and are good friends ever since. They already used to make music together at that time, as a band called “FTPP”. Then Matt moved to Oakland, while Robert stayed in Los Angeles: online musical collaboration became the obvious solution to keep their music plans up and going. Renoise is their sequencer of choice, and they told us in this quick interview how they manage their project files sharing and what they expect from the Ohm Studio… and their collaborative moves.
How long have you guys been making music together?
Since early 2007ish. We met while attending Calarts. We began the collaboration using the same process that we still use today; passing renoise files back and forth.
Why have you chosen Renoise to collaborate?
Renoise doesn’t use wav files, which is one of the reasons why we really enjoy it. It sends compact ogg vorbis files (I think). Each Renoise file can contain a large number of lengthy samples (i.e. multiple vocal takes, guitar parts, etc. ) and remain a relatively small size. The reason we chose this software Continue reading ‘West coast electronic act “FTPP” explains how they collaborate today and their expectations for the Ohm Studio…’
UK born and Swiss-based audio technician Jonathan Reamonn made a cool demo track for the Ohmicide:Melohman, which you can download here. This track is a great example that the Ohmicide distortion is far away from being limited to Rock or any other specific music genre. Jonathan’s distorted digital basses and distorted IDM beats are everything but cold, and if you like it and would want to taste more of his music, take a look at his site.
Keith is from Los Angeles and Arthur from Burbank, both towns in California (USA) and virtually not that far from each other. But the LA megalopolis and its speedy life boost distances and these two friends found on online music collaboration their efficient method to evolve their musical duo. Things started in 2002, when they still used to attend high school. At that time Keith and Arthur used to play together in a few rock bands; then the university put the duo apart and both have discovered computer based music, that became a passion ever since. Among their several projects, Cuello Nectar is currently their official one: electronic music with high doses of hispanic vibes.
1 – What is your current method for online music collaboration?
It’s been already a year that we’re using Ableton Live with Dropbox and its fantastic. Before we tried sending sessions over AIM or even sending Mp3 files by e-mail (which gave us some cool resampling ideas) but now with Dropbox we keep all of our sessions for our various projects in a 50Gb account ($10 a month) and we are always in sync and working on the same stuff. Wether I am at work, at home on my desktop, or on my laptop in a cafe. I can add to our music or make up a new track and in minutes its on his computer. I also use it to collaborate with other friends or share samples I’ve made by sharing a folder with them or giving them a public link.
Literally we can work on tracks in a day, and have them be 90% done. I work 2 hours, he works 2 hours, and and back to me or editing and mixing and its done. We just directly share the folder where we save the project, together with all project files and sub-folders, no zipping or unpacking. We’re both on Macs, but I have an old G5 and he’s on a more recent Intel one, so he don’t have some of my old plug-ins that are not UB. Regarding this plug-in issue, I usually deal with by freezing the track if its a synth. If its a processor (compressor, reverb) I usually don’t worry about it because it’s only me who do the final mix and Live has no problem working with sets with missing plug-ins, so it’s Ok for our specific case. So any saves he makes I can open up and my plug-ins are still there with my settings.
Sometimes, when track counts get high, we add tracks to a session with a rough mix to save CPU for and lower latency for recording. Continue reading ‘American electronic music duo talks about their current collaboration methods and Ohm Studio expectations…’
British techie magazine Click made a 5 page feature about the Ohm Studio in their recent June edition! For all the guys in UK it’s just about going to the news agent, but for the rest of the world to purchase this mag could be more complicated, so we scanned the article in a quality good enough for reading it. We scanned page by page, here they are: Page1, Page2, Page3, Page4 and Page5…
Tom Shear from the Waveformless blog made review of our Ohmicide:Melohman distortion. We’ll spoil his conclusion: “Regardless of your experience level, Ohmicide sounds undeniably great. It can sound analog, it can sound totally digital, or you can mash the two together into your own monstrosity. This is the kind of plug-in you will find yourself getting lost in for hours with a big grin on your face the whole time. You neighbors might not be as amused.” But his analysis is much more in-depth than that, click here to read his full blog post.
Dutch artist Remco has made a nice demo track for the Symptohm:Melohman Performer Edition free synth. Except for the drum sounds (for which he used Drumatic) all sounds are from the Symptohm, take a listen! And then if you want to check out his tracks, there are many in his Soundcloud profile…
In the last 2 years we read an ever growing amount of blog posts about people making sounds from the most odd objects or using pens, towels, Nike sneakers or even the dog shit sticked on it as MIDI controllers – and all of that to mostly make completely uninteresting music. Then we watched this video of Diego Stocco playing his hybrid instrument “Bassoforte”, made of parts from an old piano, a bass, a guitar and such. There’s hope! Not only it’s a pleasure see a passionate guy constructing a new instrument but he actually composed good music with it. Then we take a look at his site and realize: making music with his house’s tree and bushes and making music from sand have been his past projects. Already in the good music field, maybe just because in addition of being an music/audio hacker he has some talent.
