Hi. How is everyone doing?
Are we enjoying Loop so far?
That's fantastic. So thanks for coming today,
this is an event that I'm really excited to be hosting today.
This is: I Speak Music - Manipulating, Improvising, and Composing with Vocals.
The voice is something that...
we all have, we use the voice to speak,.
We use it to sing, it's something that is instinctive, it's built into us,
it's an instrument that we carry always with us.
And what's so special about the voice, I think, is if you look through all of human history,
and there have been so many different cultures of using the voice in music
in different kinds of storytelling.
Almost as many different kinds of traditions as there have been people
who have used their voice. So it's just this terribly diverse, unique instrument that is...
has so much to do with our bodies and how we feel and emotion, so...
I think...
the voice is something that's really special in music making.
Just to let you know who I am, my name is Lyra Pramuk.
I am a member of the Ableton Loop programming committee and the core programming team, so I...
have spent a lot of time to put this event together for this year and we choose,
sort of what's on display here at Loop.
I'm also a singer, performance artist, composer and I do my own music, and...
with computers, with technology, so it's a topic that's very close to my heart.
So why are we here today?
What are we gonna do?
We're here because standing behind me we have three phenomenal artists
who are all using their voice with technology in some really interesting ways.
And I think the time that we live in now is this time of...
the personal merging with the technological, so there are so many ways to make this happen,
it's no longer just this notion of the voice being used in traditional ways,
just for singing, just for speaking, but now we have the voice as a sample,
the voice as a signal that you can process.
And so we have all of these different things on display here and...
shall we go in now? I'd like to introduce you to these artists we have on stage.
This is Shlomo, SK Shlomo.
In the middle here, Doseone.
And last but certainly not least, Katie Gately.
So what we would do now is, first of all I'm gonna get out of the front.
And I'm gonna go more in the back.
We'll start, we'll demo through set-ups, we'll talk through their processes,
and then learn how each of them uses their personal relationship with their voice
in performance and manipulation through technology.
So, I have a question for you guys, and I'll just take in one by one.
And I'd like to start with you, Shlo.
When was the first time you used your voice to make music?
So... can you hear me out there?
Is it working? - Can you hear my mike? 1, 2.
I can't hear it in my headphones though.
So I was an eight-year-old boy obsessed with music and rhythm and showing off
and my parents bought me a drum kit for my birthday.
But they said, do you know what? Here's a drum kit, happy birthday,
but please don't play it.
So I had to find ways to express rhythm without annoying anybody,
which I failed at by discovering beatboxing.
But it gave me away to kind of make music vocally and express all the sounds
I was hearing around me, but without needing anything,
no equipment, no drums, no... nothing that would annoy anybody except my big brother.
Sure. And then...
beatboxing became something for you that wasn't simply
a means of not distracting your family but it became something that you started
to channel musical energy through in a much more intense way, right?
Yeah, like, for me, music is just everywhere, like, music...
so I was obsessed with the drums and I was obsessed with the piano
and writing and composing and creating, but what the beatboxing and the vocal stuff gave me
was this portability and this kind of versatility, so like, I don't know, I really love drumming...
but when you're on stage drumming you're at the kit, like, you are shackled to that kit.
But when you are free to run around the stage and just express music anywhere you go
and in any direction you wanna go musically, that's what the voice gives you.
You've got that huge range and that huge kind of versatile tool for creation,
and that for me was key, I needed something that I could just do everywhere, all the time,
music doesn't stop in my head, so I don't see why it should stop coming out of me either.
Sure, yeah. That's the beautiful thing about it.
How about you, Dose?
I was...
Before I was a creative human being I was a violent child.
Due to mechanics of humanity. But...
So I started freestyle rapping with some hoodlum pals of mine at the Jersey Shore,
when I was fifteen, in change,
and I already wrote graffiti so I was stuck with "Doseone."
People get to think of their rap name later in life. I was fucked. My shitty tag name, so...
and I started freestyling and I had close friends around me so they didn't tell me how whack I was,
and I just kept goin' with it and then...
you know, first I was very sort of posturing and sounding like I was 300 pounds more
than I possibly was, and then eventually found my own voice and...
got exposed to people like Freestyle Fellowship who do polysyllabic triple time crazy rap,
and I was like, that's way harder than what I'm doing, I think I love that.
And then through freestyling I found battle rapping.
And that was an extension of violence that, again, I got into it 'cos it was like,
less fighting fight. And then eventually I found art, I found a community, started Anticon
which is all these collective human beings like myself in the middle of nowhere.
And then I found me after recording a bunch like I was heavy set.
Yeah, great. So it really started with rap for you.
It was always like freestyle...
Yeah, I had no musical training. I learned from self-taught beautiful people around me.
I would just be like...
And the same goes for Ableton, electronics, all that stuff, so...
you know, suck till you don't. That's my advice.
Sure. Totally.
I'm gonna swing over here.
Katie, same question. So when did you...
when did you really start using your voice?
Yeah, well I was really late to the game, I started in grad school for film and...
I was doing a semester of dialogue editing which is very clinical, OCD, perfectionistic...
getting rid of mouth clicks and...
that felt very oppressive to me like Photoshop, like sonic Photoshop, and...
I started singing really badly, as a reaction to that and recording my voice
and then like using the software I was using to remove noise,
I would then try to actually emphasize the noise in my voice.
Because I was just being defiant.
And that made me realize I did not wanna be a dialogue editor
and then it kind of became a very fun...
like, joyful, positive, creative path from there. But it started, like, sort of violently.
With some reactionary stuff.
And what do you mean when you say "noise" when it started with noise or...
you make this distinction between, like...
maybe "normal" singing and sort of noise.
Like the up close in the microphone, the things aren't supposed to be there that...
like, the transparency would be removed.
And also the... And all the kind of nasty sounds, like right now...
like that stuff, in a film you would re-draw the waveforms in Pro Tools or use RX whatever,
Isotope RX.
So I would invert the settings, you know, so if you do the RX search for the noise
you can bypass it but you can also reverse it and the I just re-sample the noise.
And it was really curiosity but then I felt like interesting stuff was there to play with.
Yeah, awesome.
Sometimes when you do something exactly the wrong way... it works, right.
Science.
Absolutely. So now, what I think would be really cool, you all have brought
some very impressive gear set-ups.
Katie, what do you have going on here?
Can you just show us a bit... maybe we can also get the cam up here.
Yeah. - You have quite a rig.
Yes, so I... Will this work if I... Should I just show visually?
Or should I show what they do through the mike?
I think maybe just... What is your sort of signal, like, the signal path or sort of
what do some of these do? How is your voice moving through?
Yeah, so, it comes in here and then then this POG2 you can... so these are all guitar pedals.
It's probably obvious but... So you can add an octave up, two octaves up,
an octave down, another octave down.
This will give me, like... This is octaves so this will give me, like,
minor second, major second, major third... and I can use latch so I can be singing a note
and then change the note or add a harmony.
I just like that, I like the way the pitch shifting sounds.
This is a ten dollar chorus pedal that sounds really gnarley and then...
this is multi-effects, this is sort of like a freeze pedal, so I might sing a note
and it'll catch it, it won't sound like it's looping it'll sustain which I think is pretty beautiful.
You have these little guys here. - These little guys, another pitch shifting pedal.
This is flanger, detuner, chorus, ring, echo, does a bunch of stuff.
This pedal I don't know what it does, I just got it. And...
It's called the Dream Sequence and it's described as a rhythm, an octave...
a programmable rhythm and octave, like, it's a sequencer...
it kinda changes the pitch of whatever's coming in and then gives you different subdivisions
and shapes to an LFO. - I see, so sort of arpeggiating and pitch shifting?
Yeah. - OK.
And then there's some randomization and you can automate...
what's cool about these two pedals is you can actually automate.
So if I hold this down and turn a knob and let go it'll play that back.
This is like a MEL9 which...
has some cheesy choir settings, so it'll kind of add this choir setting to the voice.
This, similar to Dream Sequence is...
it's an Infinite Jets, which I guess is a play on David Foster Wallis,
re-synthesizer, so it's kinda like glitch and synth and swells and blurs and...
this is incredible, like, it never sounds the same twice, it's very unreliable,
and I'm afraid to use it today because...
This is a 20 dollar compressor, this is a little pan knob, I like panning.
This is a doubler, this is a gorgeous reverb unit.
This is a Terror Echo, this is a slicer
which kind of allows for more panning, tremolo-esq sounds,
kinda dance music sounds, and then this little reverb,
this is a multi-effects guitar pedal.
Yeah, and this is... I have a problem.
I really have problem.
So, I mean, I'm just...
How do you even choose where to start? Like, when you're looking at this rig,
you're like, I wanna create something with my voice, where do you even begin with everything?
I usually begin, like, kind of in the order it is, the pitch stuff,
and then I'll play around with these because there's some randomization that will happen.
And that's exciting to me, when it's not something I'm intending and I don't...
there's an unreliability that excites me.
And, you know, sometimes just, like, turning feedback up on the echo,
or just maxing out the decay on a reverb will just be beautiful enough,
it doesn't have to be fancy.
So you're... like a punk. It's like this little...
juice up the volume a bit. - Exactly.
Yeah, like the front of house people are probably like...
But, yeah, so...
for me it's very fun and...
but it never feels like enough, so I just keep buying more pedals.
Yeah, totally.
So you sort of arrange them in a physical space also in a way
that you sort of start in this corner and then move.
Yeah, a lot of people will... I think they'll arrange their pedal boards
to be the most economical with space.
But for me... I guess I'm a dumb-dumb, because I just, it's like there to there to there,
I need it to go like that, and then like that, and then like that, I just need that
or else I'll get lost. Maybe I'll evolve at some point but for now it's pretty much...
pitching and then modulation, and I don't have any distortion really,
these have some drive, and then the time-based effects over here.
Cool. Great.
So we could move on to Dose. - Hi. Lyra.
And let's just say...
So you're using not just your voice, not just hardware pedals as Katie
but you're also doing quite a lot of triggering and using the laptop as well, so.
Yeah, so I knew that these guys would be rig heavy.
So I was like, I'm just gonna go with what my throat can do.
This is a new piece of technology called the Kaoss Pad,
you might have never heard of it.
I utilize it because, you know...
this is all, like, this is designed by years of shit breaking on the road.
So I try to make something that if I'm in Istanbul and this explodes I can go get this again.
So it's dialled in in that regard, to be breakable and replaceable.
And then in order to ensure... I have boredom problems, or patience...
I don't know, whatever it is.
In order to ensure that I am satiated with every time I play back static stems
I have created a giant 'good' button that is my Keith McMillen QuNeo.
So everything I touch on here I like.
So you guys know what this is, this little Push.
I only use this because big Push is so big. I can't get it in a backpack,
or under my shirt, or wherever I like to hold midi controllers.
This is a QuNeo.
The QuNeo is, when you first get it, not fun.
It's very hard to get your head around but once you rip and strip it of its functionalities
you can replace and assign what every button is doing,
it takes velocity, it sends notes, receives notes. So...
Every single corner of these squares is a different sound.
So again, I don't suck, I just press it. It goes great.
And then every other button is designed to save my precious CPU and not explode things.
And it's actually turning off and on various beat repeats and plug-ins I hold dear
that do not crash an Ableton session.
So it's all streamlined to not fuck my set-up in the middle.
And then also always keep me entertained when I'm playing back static stems.
So I drop and bring in things.
I keep the computer as shut as it can be without shutting it off.
And that takes... I just have to neurotically rehearse
in order to memorize, but I find that's also how I eventually am actually myself on stage
is by over-preparing what my fuckin' hands do.
So you don't even want to see the laptop at all, you just wanna know that it's there.
Yeah, I don't want it. No, but what I do love about Ableton is I do...
very complex arrangements and crescendos and I don't wanna leave those at home
or have to get on an MPD or, you know, I actually wanna do it all from one place,
so what I do is I bake a lot of transitions in and then I allow myself to use beat repeats
and simplify and pull things out so I can change the composition at will
but know that when I'm trance ramping up into my chorus it's there
and I can rely on what I did in the studio to make me as fun live as I wanna be
without having a band and whatnot.
And then these are more new tech. That's a mixer, this is another mixer.
Another thing that I do, because shit happens with computers,
is I always run my vocals out dedicated through a separate mixer
so if power goes down or something happens I can do comedy.
A baby seal walks into a club...
I'm sayin', I'm sayin'... Anyway.
See? Magic.
And then this one is just to have another volume knob on my...
you know, DAW volume in general.
And I find that's good for playing shitty warehouses, which I grew up in
and still play today, that's my home.
So this allows me to deal with no sound guy or a guy on too much drugs and not enough mix.
And that is pretty much it.
Cool. Is there a reason
you have these things down here and these things up here?
Oh yeah, and then I have this thing, which, whatever.
You now, it does it's job and I use it to slave Turnado which is
"the greatest plug-in in the history of live playback."
And I do this so that I can go under... - Sorry, to interrupt, could you...
just mention what Turnado is for people who might not know what it is?
Turnado is made by Sugar Bytes. They make a series of fantastic plug-ins
and Turnado is all... It's an effect, a VST, that houses other effects within it.
So you can put any 8 effects in it and assign them to 8 knobs,
and they do, there's beat repeats, there's effects I'll never use in my entire life,
like flange, why are we still making flange?
Anyway, but it's a beautiful effect. Again, like some of the beat repeats I've chosen
it's a marvelous way to enjoy you stems you've memorized on a nightly basis
when you're performing and get back into it and fuck things up and be yourself.
Great. Cool, thanks for the little walk-through here. - Pleasure.
Shlo, what's up. How are you? - I'm good, how are you?
I'm doing good. So what are you have going on here?
You do have a Push, I see. - Yeah.
How is this all working? What's your eco system?
So, mine is everybody is living very much within Live, within Ableton.
So... I try to do as much as I can within Push, so I've created a bunch of Max for Live devices
so I've basically hacked the way Push works...
so I could create a sort of multi-looper which I'm go gonna go into a lot more detail,
I'm doing a whole presentation about that tomorrow, 12:45 in this room, but...
I can show you it in less detail now.
I kind of wanted to emulate the hardware loopers I grew up with, like, I grew up with
loop stations. I was the first ever world loop station champion
which I'm super proud of.
Thank you very much. - We give applause.
But then after that happened, after I won that competition
people started sending me pedals and amazing stuff like what Katie's got,
and I just became like Katie, like, this is amazing, I'm gonna plug them all in and then
my rig just got bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then one day I just had a bit of a nightmare they were all just not playing with each other
like I was trying to synchronize them through midi...
and I was just crying, which happens a lot, but a lot that particular day.
And I just thought I wanna try and emulate everything I'm doing in the software,
but Ableton, I love Ableton so much, but it needed a bit of help,
just with a bit of help with Max for Live so I could undo some of the things
that are very solidly done in Ableton and especially with Push,
'cos Push is so powerful, but once you unlock it with Max
you can access every single button on there,
you can access every single color, RGB, LED light.
Velocity, aftertouch, it's so powerful and if you can get inside the hood of it
then you can start to basically hard-wire your brain into the computer
so the way you're thinking is coming out through the kit.
So, my kind of walk-through is less interesting, I guess, than you guys.
I've got this Leap Motion guy here which is quite exciting, so...
it's an infrared sensor so...
when I'm performing I'm waving my hand around...
that's mapped to about 8 or 9 different effects. - Can you do anything with that now?
Yeah, I could kinda demonstrate it. So if you put a little loop in first.
So I made a super-cool abstract 5/4 rhythm for you there, super deliberately.
So that...
So, like...
Super-fun.
So Leap Motion can recognize 8 or 9 different movements to do with, like,
tilt, bend, where you've moved your hands, if your hands are open or closed,
and then you can map them all through midi-mapping into Ableton
so I'm controlling a bunch of effects with that.
It's not super, I think you used the word "reliable," like, it's not... can you still hear me?
It's not super consistent, so I use it more for broad brush strokes
rather than anything where you want something to actually happen in a specific way.
But for something more specific, I'd use...
touchAble, here on my iPad, so touchAble is an Ableton controller.
And I basically try to emulate the Kaoss Pad, which Doseone has over there.
I used to love my Kaoss Pad so I wanted to have that X-Y kind of control
so you control things: three... three...
Right, right. What sort of effects are you controlling with X-Y pad?
Mostly beat repeats and little glitch effects.
And this is all processing?
It's all... yeah, like... - Vocals?
It's mostly vocals, yeah, but I've got lots of clips and synths and stuff that
I've created at home in the studio and then I can kind of trigger them live
and mix it with the live looping. Oh, yeah, and I've got this thing here, I made like a...
a sampler so I can sample you guys, so everyone after "3" just go - "Yeah," ready:
1, 2, 3. - Yeah.
Ha. That was excitingly not happening.
It happens. Shall we try again?
So it works for me. Let me try you guys again. 1, 2, 3. - Yeah.
It doesn't wanna play today. I'll have a little look at that while someone else's talking.
And then you have these pads up here, your little Ikai LPD 8s.
Yeah, so I got the LPDs, and I use them to just switch effects on and off, just like, reverb.
That's so straight forward what's happening, there's nothing clever there at all, it's just...
turn shit on, turn shit up. - You need some interface...
You need some physical knobs and buttons which will always be there,
'cos like, you don't wanna be scrolling through pages when you reach for those really key effects
they wanna be there the whole time. - Totally.
So I think you prepared a little something to demo this, what I will still call an eco system.
Yeah, yeah.
I could maybe step off and you could just give it a go for a sec.
I'll have a go for sure. - Yeah.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you SK Shlomo.
That's amazing. Thank you so much.
We'll come back. We'll come back and see you again,
so I'll let you play with your mike- - Alright, cool, I love doing that.
And we'll be back in one sec. - Thank you. - Yeah.
So. Dose, we're back. And...
Is it my turn to make a mess? - Yes. But can you tell me,
'cos you're so good with words, like, tell me, what's your musical style? Give me something.
My musical style is... self-taught, boss.
No parents ever home, never.
I'm highly critical of what I do, what the world does, and I try to be very free.
At the same time I try to be a lover and a hater.
And I form that into my own discern, which, is for me all I have, you know? So...
I basically, you know, when I a new keyboard, I'm like, hate this sound, hate this sound,
hate that sound, hate that sound. And from there I memorize stuff.
And then I guess what I'm doin' here is, like, I've been in a million bands:
Clouddead, 13 & God, Themselves, Subtle...
other stuff. And what I gonna do is like a medley of crazy rapping,
some singing, and some other crazy rapping. - Yeah.
I love rapping in triplets, 'cos it makes me roll my eyes back in my head and not breathe
and then of course, mind you, I am completely lyric-driven, so I started as a battle rapper,
was all about offending someone more than they were offending me.
But then I found poetry, people like Galway Kinnell,
Marilyn Hacker, and I love the word, man, it's the way I get chills,
I got chills from watching you, but primarily I get chills from what is said and how it's said.
So, I give a fuck, I write prose, you know. - Yeah, that sounds all amazing.
Can we hear it? - Yeah.
That was amazing.
Wow.
Thank you for that. - My pleasure.
You have so much, like, energy, it's almost like, I was like, I don't know if that's part of your body,
or that's, or this is your, like, it's all like... all running together.
This is my exercise, you know, this is what I sweat it out for.
So, yeah. - Brilliant, thank you for that.
My pleasure, Lyra.
Katie. What's up? - Debbie Downer over here because...
No.
I'm gonna, like, screeching halt all that energy, OK.
But yeah. - No you're not.
No you're not. - So, Katie. - Yeah.
We have talked a bit. - Yeah.
And you've talked a lot recently about...
your sort of migrating from a computer out into experimenting with...
other things... - Yeah.
... than software. And it seems like now you're having a moment.
I'm just all in, I think, for a while I was trying to kind of like use the computer and hardware,
and I found myself just leaning, leaning, leaning on the computer.
and I'm terrified of this, 'cos this is brand new, but I think it's a good fear
because, like, nothing... what's gonna happen? - Right.
Nothing will... maybe I could get electrocuted but the worst that could happen is
is I'll look silly but that's not really...
So yeah, the computer is on the floor and I'm not gonna use it, so we'll see.
That's exciting.
How else do you learn, right, it's like, I feel like sometimes...
Don't you feel like sometimes just picking up a new tool and just putting it to use,
you can really feel like you're 5 years old again and you're like... - Yeah,
well that's, you hit it on the nose. It's that exciting, falling in love, terror-joy feeling,
it's like happy anxiety, so, I definitely see it here and I can't afford to keep
rediscovering it in new places but for now I think this is a good zone to be in.
Great. Cool, well let's hear a little something. Just give us a demo, and I'll let you take it away.
Thanks, that was great.
You get so many different colors from one signal.
It's like you're putting Katie here and then you get so many different colors.
Yeah, like, it's very scary...
For me it's very scary to sing, I grew up with a mom who was like, an insanely brilliant...
vocalist, not professionally, but. So I just kept my mouth shut as a kid
'cos I was living with this genius.
And I realized it makes me feel kind of supported and safe if I have sort of friends with me
or harmonizing with me or just turning my voice into something more rhythmic and...
It makes singing really fun instead of this, like, look at me, it's kind of like, look at us.
Exactly, yeah.
Do you feel like software and hardware music technology has empowered you
as a singer to explore yourself creatively as a vocalist?
Yeah, I mean, I basically think I became a vocalist as a result of getting into Melodyne and
that is not a realtime software, you have to kind of like sample it in and then
it allowed me to pull my voice higher than I can actually sing and have pitch modulation
that was really sort of insane and aggressive that I can't physically do.
It expanded the way I saw my voice, instead of being plain and not very exciting,
it was like, oh it's limitless. And then that helped me actually gain the confidence to sing more
'cos I always knew I can shape my voice with these software tools.
And this is a different kind of challenge, but it adds a lot of color like you were saying.
It adds a lot of company and... - I like what you said about having little friends.
Yeah, it's kinda sad. - Like also I guess when you're...
when you're always on the road and sort of like around, you know, you need little friends around.
Yeah, and they're quirky, you know, they don't crash like sometimes software will crash.
I don't know, there is something about physical objects, I didn't understand it as much
when people would say, like, hardware and... but then...
it changes things, for me at least. I attend to them more than a flat on a screen plug-in
that maybe is really nicely, perfectly designed but I have to midi map
and just having to midi map is just like...
They're different tools, right? - Yeah.
OK, so that was phenomenal. What I'd like to do now...
is give ya'll a chance to ask a few questions, can we have the mikes out there?
Rip the mike.
Hello.
Are the...
Does anyone have a question? Any thoughts stirring around in the room?
None.
There must be, right? - There's a few people now.
So, I'm a producer, I've been working with a beatboxer who approached me.
and he was like, can you make me sound like this guy?
Not you, but some other beatboxer who was great.
And when I was recording him, I was like, wow, the dry signal's like really nothing like
what comes out at the end. How do you process your beatboxing stuff live,
what do you put it through?
This is a great question, how do you process beatboxing?
Really, if he's... It's a difficult question, are you talking about in the studio
or are you talking about on stage?
I think you're talking about on stage.
In the studio? - Well I'm gonna answer the on stage question
'cos I wish that's what you just said.
Basically you gotta crank up the bass, so...
You gotta crank up the highs.
You basically got like a smiley face EQ.
Maybe a tiny bit of compression, but not very much.
But I'd say the processing is done in your face. - Yeah.
It's here, it's about...
Do you wanna throw down?
Throw down.
Are you guys gonna battle?
I can't, I can't battle. - I thought you were challenging me.
That's what I thought that was too. - No, no, no.
No, I can't do that, but I wanna hear more.
Wow, amazing.
Thank you.
But to...
to now very respectfully answer the question you were asking which is...
beatboxing in the studio is an age-old problem for us beatboxers, right?
There's so many people like me who love music and create music with our voice,
it's that live dynamic excitement, wow, he's doing it all with his voice.
As soon as you take away that visual element and take it in the studio it's like,
wow he's making fart noises into a mike.
So to kind of get that musicality to translate into studio-based music
you have to forget that performative excitement and just focus on the actual signal you're creating
and the rhythms and the music and stop tryin' to be impressive. So...
I would say if you wanna get a good sound out of your beatboxer
just get him to forget he's beatboxing, don't make him think about a show,
don't make him think about making realistic sounds or anything like that
just get him to make the music that's here
and in terms of processing, the same kind of thing, I've played around with using
a dynamic mike in the studio, and using a condenser mike,
I'd say dynamic every time, 'cos you can get that... proximity.
Yeah, but just have a play, have a little experiment, it's fun.
I guess it's similar in a way to your performance, which is that...
something you mentioned earlier which is just sort of having to shut off
in order to have it flowing. Is that right? - Yeah, you gotta let go.
Especially with fast rap, or stuff where you're...
you might in the next one minute have a breath you can take.
You just gotta let go. Control...
When people watch at really enjoy it, they're not like, look at all that control.
They're just like, look at that whirlwind. So I think it's about getting out of your own way.
Great. Does anyone else have a question?
Do we have a microphone? - Where that mike at?
So I'm a vocalist and I've always been really afraid of technology.
But I think it's really interesting, but if you guys would all recommend
like, one thing that would be the first thing to start playing with...
to not be afraid any more? - Can I say it?
Ableton.
I hate to say it.
I grew up on 4-tracks, this is God's 4-track.
So...
But it's also so huge, you know? - It's true. But, you know...
again, it lets you use itself like a novice, you know, so find your glass ceiling,
and what your voice is doing,
and then with Ableton you won't have a technical glass ceiling
you can always get into more of what it can do for you.
Other than that though, like, the mirror, I don't know, you wanna, you know...
get into that mirror, bring it out of yourself, aside from tech.
Practice performance, suck until you don't.
I would also suggest one of TC Helicon's Voicelive series,
they've got a bunch of different effects, loopers, and they're designed...
they're the only hardware that's designed exactly for the voice.
If you like touchscreens they've got a voicelive touch, it's called...
personally I like to hit my stuff quite violently so they've got stomp boxes as well.
So if you just wanna get started with vocal processing and looping and...
doing kind of a lot of what Katie's doing there in one unit,
then I'd suggest that.
Thank you.
Screw what they said. No...
No, I would say... So what I have done, which works for me,
is that initially I took people's recommendations but it didn't feel right,
so I devised this scheme where I order things on Amazon and use them for a few days
and then return them and get refunded.
But, you can't break them. But it helped me because I found that
the really inefficient trial and error is how I found what really feels right to me
and it's definitely not a quick fix if you're looking to go on a tour.
But... you could go into a guitar center and...
fiddle around, play around. I mean, it may not be your thing, but it was worth it for me
to just really try some stuff out to figure out what felt right.
Do we have one... Oh, here. Yes?
I would like to thank, because the Spectrum show today was really inspiring for me
the whole range, really amazing.
I have just two quick questions, the first one to Katie is:
how do you manage the noise?
Like, normally with the guitar players in my studio
a lot of noise comes from the pedals. But your voice came crystal clear...
what did you do, or not do? It was really impressive.
I think I got lucky because I have a noise gate that I always have on hand,
and I don't use it unless I have a problem. Today I didn't have a problem.
But it's tricky 'cos if it's a hard gate, it'll kinda cut into my voice.
I have this 20 dollar Donner compressor pedal that's really quiet.
This Electro Harmonix pitch... Electro Harmonix is kinda noisy,
but today it's not. So yeah, I think it's just luck for now.
It was perfect. - Thank you.
And to Dose, a quick one, like, you said before that you use Turnado or whatever
and that you control it to mangle your backing tracks, and it was amazing,
so I just want a little bit of your input, how you do that? It's so impressive.
Well, again to... It's a good button because it was bad buttons.
So I go through everything, I have an expansive user library in Ableton.
where everything that makes me go "ooh" goes in,
and everything that doesn't make me go "ooh" I never touch again.
So it's really the few beat repeats that I love and trust.
And I experiment with them in the privacy of my own sucking,
and then when it feels good I go out live, and then the wonderful thing about Ableton
is that you can iterate, erm, that's not the right word for this,
but you can change it after a set and be like, that's terrible.
And then again, we talked about this at length, a lot of the plug-ins I use
in the home studio environment crash computers and hit your CPU really hard
so it's about finding the ones that play nice with not crashing.
So that seems to be something that's commonly coming up too, is like...
you're on the road, you're also working with a lot of different systems,
you're working with different sound tech and you want something that's going to,
like, have longevity, that you can rely on, and computers are wonderful but also...
it's about interfacing and your body as well.
Yeah. And again, like, no one can ruin my show. Just me, not my computer.
So it's about finding this way to have this guy be your best friend
but when he tries to kill the middle of your set...
So, again, that's just about experimenting, for me, you know, fun stuff that works.
Sure. - Fail till ya succeed. I'm just re-using that whole...
That's a good one though. That's like, you could re-use that for your whole life, I think.
I think so. - Just fail till you succeed.
Live till you die. - Yeah.
Exactly. - Sorry.
Shlo.
I wanted to come visit you again, and also this is a great segway.
You have been coding more, right? And you're coding in Max for Live?
Yeah, that's right. - Can you tell me a bit more about, like...
you mentioned this earlier, but you're...
needs.
What your desires for your set and for your music and how you solved that through coding and also
the interface with the Push.
So for me I... The starting point was wanting to lose the hardware
and have it all happen in one place.
And so I just initially wanted to emulate my equipment, so I had my...
a loop station called a Boss RC505 which gives you five channels of looping
so you can have your bassline on one channel, maybe your hi-hats and vocals.
Each one of those you can have as many layers as you like,
but you can bring them in and out independently from each other.
Which you can't do in Ableton, it does have a plug-in called Looper
but it's a single channel emulation of a very simple loop pedal.
So I wanted to create a away I could have basically five instances of Looper
on separate channels that I could observe and operate without every touching or looking
at the laptop, so Push has to show me what all those five loopers are doing at any one time
using colors and flashing and other sexy stuff like that.
And that was the bulk of the job really, was to just emulate
but then once I'd got the hang of Max, I was like, this is so sick, I could basically
do anything I want. Like, for example, I might not have mentioned it earlier
but I can hopefully sample all you guys in one go, let's see if it works this time.
Can you go like, "Ow." One, two, three...
Can you go, "Whoo." One, two, three...
Can I get, "Ahhhh." Two, three, go...
It's just really good fun.
So that's just functions that I always wished I could get the hardware to do,
and then just that understanding, that realization that using software programming,
which I'd always had this terrible fear of, like, when I was a teen
my brother handed me a book this thick called "Teach Yourself Visual C++."
I was just like, na mate, I'm gonna go and play the drums at a gig
where there might be some girls.
And, like...
just getting over that fear of code. And creation meant that understanding:
You can just make anything. If you can imagine something you can make a computer do it,
that's just like...
Yeah, like, the glitter bomb that went off that day is still flickering around the room now.
So you're gonna keep coding now for your life?
Is it something that's built into your practice now?
So it's an interesting question 'cos I got really obsessed with it
and I spent a whole year emulating my old kit and building all these functions.
But now I'm working on this new solo album and hardly using any of them
and it feels really weird, like I spent ages building it but I'm not even gonna use it.
But actually, I feel like that's part of the process, because now everything I learn,
and everything I created is kind of part of who I am and that story I have to tell
so I'm trying not to beat myself up for procrastinating for a whole year
by making this amazing machine...
as a way to hide from the fact that I didn't want to get started on my solo album.
One more quick question about... I have more questions for...
all of ya'll about just like vocal technique.
'Cos this is something...
Sampling your voice is one thing obviously but also it's like this...
like, for both of ya'll who come from this sort of tradition of, like, I don't know...
performance background from a young age.
I mean, I heard about you when I was 15,
'cos Medúlla by Björk was one of my favorite albums when I was a kid,
I was like... and then you did, like, so...
and then you said you were...
I don't know, what did you say? "Ultra contemporary technique,"
can you say something about that?
Yeah, so... I say "ultra contemporary," Björk's Medúlla album was 2004,
so it's like 13 years ago, but... So ultra 13 years go contemporary
there was a whole kind of scene created by that album, so if you don't know that album,
Björk made this album of all vocals, and she assembled this kind of crazy line-up
of vocalists from around the world, from people like Mike Patton and Rahzel,
there was this guy from Japan called Dokaka and there was this amazing Inuit throat singer
called Tagaq, and me and various other people, and after this album was created
there was this international scene of vocal weirdos.
Right? And people would book us all to come and be this like circus of the voice
and at that time I was so excited because I was fascinated by the voice
and trying to push it to its limits, so... Yeah, and then that kind of helped me
feel, like, legitimized, 'cos before that I was just like just doing, like,
beatboxing hip-hop covers
and just trying to impress people with my, "check out my Snoop Dogg."
And then it was like, OK, I can use this to make music that I can express myself.
Sure. - Yeah, you gotta escape your first influences.
Yeah. - Because they print so hard on you.
Actually when I'm making music, I shut all input off these days
'cos I don't... If I listen to...
So you mean "input", like, what you're listening to?
Yeah, if like, Boards of Canada drops a record I'm like, no, I'm not allowed.
You know, it's like, because I'm making what I'm making
and I'm gonna get their sugar in my tank if I use that.
So, and I like... As far as technique too...
which Shlomo was saying, is like, I had to escape my preconceptions
of how a rapper aught to sound, and all my favorites,
and I was like this mélange of other people until I was myself,
and then I went a little hard on the nasal and that was me,
and then I just let go and
I had like, WHY? , he's another guy I work with, and I remember my first time singing with him
on some Clouddead thing, and he's like, "Can you do that again, that's not in key."
And I was like, what's "key?"
And I broke into a full body sweat. And I kept trying to sing in key
and he would be like...
And I was just like, are you sure, 'cos I just did what you did?
And I actually had to learn all of that and then I found a falsetto in the shower
and I was like "aaah."
So now it's about unlearning...
your entire life. - Did you ever have a vocal coach?
Na. I lost my voice a couple times, I went to the lady who told me about lemons.
And hot water.
That's about that, yeah.
Nice, and...
OK, I think actually, I think we're out of time. Is that it? We finished.
OK, so I really wanted to offer some more time for questions but we have to wrap up.
Thank you so much to Katie Gately.
Doseone.
Shlomo.
Thank you, Lyra.
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