I've recently been getting really into these three guys' music... and I'm starting to notice the true funkiness of this stuff.... especially editor, it's some of the craziest shit I've ever heard and that's saying a lot

I'm just curious if anybody has ANY ideas on how they make their music, they all get a similar sound... Whether it be technical or compositional I really don't understand how in the fuck they make music like that... is anybody more familiar with this aussie glitch hop stuff and how the sound of it is so unique??

Tippers Wobble Factor is also a must. Also Opiuo
Heavy use of the stereo field, nice tight reverb, nothing too airy. They really separate their frequencies out and put lots of subtle phasing over those snappy transients. I think?

I think if you can make bass noises that you can replicate with your mouth, you're onto a winner.
Check out this monster:

editor is awesome. anyone know where that dudes from? Australia?

i think it's needless to say that Tipper is the shit... but ya i have that cd, good stuff

Editor, spoonbill, mollusk are all from Australia... tipper is from london (thought he was from australia for the longest time)



i really just want to figure out what their angle of composition is... like how they approach a song... I feel like the way i approach music is ideal for dubstep or hip hop... but not right for that genre, nothing ever repeats itself... how do you manage that??? my computer crashes if I pull out 20+ synths... technically i could make some crazy song where nothing repeats itself but I'd make it about 50 seconds into the track and i'd crash my computer

i know there is a way around this with samplers and bouncing synth lines to it to save cpu, but it just all seems so tedious compared to just making one loop after the other and mixing them together (to me this just comes naturally because i've played in bands... make a drum beat, play a lead or bassline, then play something over that... then try and compose it into a song by rearranging it, adding intros/outros and build ups, and changing instruments/effects)

to me it just seems like that this type of music has a much more complex method of making it... is there more "playing," as in on the keyboard or drum pad, and less cutting and pasting on your DAW??

the obvious solution is the one you mentioned: bouncing/manipulating audio.

other things you might want to look at are aleatoric/generative type approaches, or other algorithmic approaches. a trick that i used a fair bit back in the day and still occasionally now, will be to take a synth (or drum or whatever) and throw it through something like the dblue glitch or effectrix or any other step-sequencer sort of fx unit (especially one with random settings) and set the sequence length to a different length/meter than that of the song. for example, letting the fx sequence repeat after 3 beats instead of 4, or 6 instead of 8 to create a sort of irrational rhythm in the way it's triggered.

if you're an ableton user try using the slice-to-midi to dump parts of your line into a sampler and then apply the above technique. it's always a changin.

have your tools do work for you. i use ill.gates method of making 128 with tons of awesome field recordings, blips, audio screwery so i can easily access tons of awesome sound. make a midi loop with these sounds. pick some sounds you like, delete the rest, then you can modulate the sample selector with an unsynced LFO to randomly choose samples. another method i use a ton s 1-macro-effects in ableton. basically, i create a rack and have one macro control some parameters that sound good with modulated. i.e. it may control the freq of a flanger, downsampling, etc. make a bunch of these fun custom effects then combine them all in a rack. you can get com amazing results from just fucking around twisting knobs. record the resampled version of you knob twiddlings then slice out the bits that you like and replace the original audio with it.

sorry for the in-cohesive brain dump! hope that helps

I think the key is to stop thinking of music in the form of loops, and let the track evolve more organically.
Think in terms of traditional music theory and song organization. i.e. jazz or classical methods.

Bounce down lots of layers and delete everything that doesn't work.
In terms of CPU load, either bounce software synths to audio more often, or add more external gear to take the load off your computer. I use about 50/50 software and hardware, and my old and dated powermac handles its fairly well.

Playing parts life will add life and humanity to tracks.
Lots of automation also is key.

THe most important thing in my opinion is to take your time, and work on all the details of of your track over the course of days or weeks. Complicated composition takes time.

wooo
i already knew spoonbill, but the others are amazing too.
one another is this guy called okapi (->http://www.myspace.com/aukapi), he's not hiphop at all, but totally glitchy and crazy in his compositions. I've one of his vynil and each time i am fully excited to listen to it. i hope you'll see how great his sound is

@CircusofMind: good read, i'm more and more in this process (the details thing not the hardwre thing)

aukapi has some goofy shit! love it. feel like im in a kid in a carnival that accidentally ate his brothers LSD dosed sweettarts.

Spoonbill seems to use a dedicated sampler live, so he might be pinging and wining his way around the sample select options similar to the ill.gates method within live.

I use Vortex quite a lot for some real sample mangle fun. Same rules apply, 128 samples, but with its own internal seq and the lovely detailed random buttons you can make squelchy funtimes noises really quickly.

http://twistedtools.com/shop/reaktor/vortex/

There was an article in an Australian audio magazine, Audio Technology about Spoonbill.

He uses Logic and builds his percussion as 16 loops, but with slight differences every 16 and if I recall properly, he uses that built in logic synth, ES2 or whatever it is for his sounds.

I dig this sound a lot and I'm glad that Australia seems to be developing it's own voice.

ricorb and zarkov, thanks for your posts... they are the first truly helpful ones... thanks for throwing out some actual knowledge versus just more ideas

@ricorb, ya I was attempting to use this whole ill gates method with the sampler, but I'm still getting around to doing it... but now that you mention it i think i need to spend more time with my sampler setup

@zarkov.... i had a feeling he used logic... what do you mean by 16 loops though? does he create 16 different loops and layer/arrange them? or do mean 16 beat loops that change every 16 beats??

but ya, australia is definitely coming out with it's own unique sound, that kind of reminds me of tipper but is still different... that and california : )

Sorry, again, this is if I recall correctly, I'm pretty sure it was spoonbill, but he builds a 16 bar loop, then copies and pastes it, but goes through and changes up some bits in each 16 so that each one is different. So each 4 bars is different from all the others within the 16, then within, say a 80 bar track, no two groups of 16 are the same, because he'll edit little bits of each one.

I'm finding this hard to explain despite it being pretty simple, I hope you understand.

no you explained it fine... i understand... Ill have to try that... i do it a little bit sometimes already, but maybe ill have to try it extensively like that... lol, need to make more samples! start filling some samplers to the brim and saving the patches is the first step i guess

thanks