"Tape Music"

[sramsay]

https://soundcloud.com/stephen-ramsay-6/tone-1

I work entirely with samples, found sounds, and other acoustic detritus. No samplers, and no sounds longer than a bar or so. Just editing and munging. It's really "tape music" in the classic sense.

Plugs: Pro-Q 2, but SlickEQ is in there as well. Pro-R. DC8C (man, I love that compressor). The new Pro-L 2 is on there. Kush Omega 458a. Timeless 2 (I guess I use a lot of FF stuff, but I think I'm switching to Boz Imperial). I never do anything without tape emulators; this one uses the UAD Studer/Ampex combo. Some mojo with the UAD Vitalizer. REAPER's built in Reapitch, without which my life would be meaningless.

I don't know about other styles of music, but REAPER is the best tool in the entire world for making this kind of stuff, where you're constantly stretching and twisting and reversing and repitching and playing your EQs and compressors like they're musical instruments. Nothing else comes remotely close.

[eliot]

Wonderful stuff. At the same time, it feels like something I heard a long time ago, and yet also fresh and distinctive. Please make more.

[sammydix]

Number 9...number 9...number 9.... 21st century style.

[sramsay]

Wow! Thanks. I'm slow. It really took me like two months to make that track.

I can finish stuff, it's just that the way I work is so achingly tedious. I really am placing beats on the timeline by hand, nudging them this way and that so they're not too quantized, and I can easily spend days compressing one transient or messing with the Q-value on some cut. But I can't get what I'm after without really detailed editing and mixing.

It's actually one of the reasons I vastly prefer REAPER to Live, even though Live would appear to make sense for what I'm doing. Live is a great piece of software, but it's so eager to help (by locking tempos and auto-warping), that it ends up being really hard to make things sound "organic." Obviously, people make great stuff with it, but I could never get what I wanted out of it.

I've got to find a way to work faster, though.

[msundh]

Liked this!!

[DarrenH]

Man, this is right up my alley. I'll echo others and say "keep it coming"