The realization of "Mobeo"
relied heavily on the
recording, track marking/editing/deletion, and shuffle-play capabilities of
my li'l Sony MZ-R50 portable MiniDisc recorder/player.
Here's how it was done (simplified somewhat for clarity):
-
I set up microphones over and around various instruments (piano, vibes,
bass clarinet) and recorded little isolated musical "gestures," each
separated by a few breaths' worth of silence. (I did the same with a Rhodes
piano, but I went direct into the MD line-in jack from the stereo outputs).
Each instrument went onto its own disc, except the piano and vibes, which
were on a single disc together.
- I went through the discs and marked each gesture off into its own track.
I had recorded a few minutes of room tone at the end of each disc, and I
sliced that up into a few tracks too, with varying durations between 8 or 9
seconds and a minute or so.
- I deleted the tracks that didn't fit for one reason or another (bad
notes, extraneous noise, reed errors).
- I let the MD player run in shuffle-repeat mode for about an hour,
spooling it onto my Mac's hard drive. I did this once for the Rhodes disc
and three times each for the piano/vibes and bass clarinet discs. Listening
during this process, I found a couple more tracks that I didn't like, so I
erased them from the MD, wiped the hard drive file, and started spooling
again.
- I combined all these tracks in Pro Tools, and added some soft strokes on
a gong here and there (I would have recorded the gong strokes on MD too,
but originally I was planning to hit the thing harder and was worried that
ATRAC would drop too many components of that complex sound. In the end, I
decided a light stroke with a very very soft beater worked better).
If I owned a bunch of MD players, I suppose I could have let them run all
at once and mixed the output straight to DAT or something. Ultimately, the
idea is to set up shuffle-repeat machines (could be CD players) and a bunch
of amplifiers and speakers all over the place and let the piece go on and
on and on. Yes, Eno did this already, I know.
- A couple sample mixdowns were done out of Pro Tools straight to MD so I
could take them to work, let them run at bedtime, etc. before I settled on
a satisfactory volume balance between the various parts.
MD was essential for this project, because although I could have used DAT
for step 1, and then burned CDs for shuffle playing, deciding "oh, track 22
sticks out too much, so I'll just delete it from the stack" would have
meant re-burning the disc, rather time-consuming (and not free!).
(Actually, my CD player permits programming a list of tracks and then
shuffling around between them.)
The immediacy of recording, slicing, editing, and playing-back all on MD
(not to mention the portability of the RZ50 going from the piano/vibes room
to the room where the Mac is to the office with me) was very crucial in
getting this piece completed while the initial inspiration was still fresh.
I'd be interested to hear
from anyone else out there who's trying this kind of thing.
I've been experimenting too with setting track marks every two or four bars in a
pop song and letting it shuffle play, creating something like a
auto-Carl-Stone-John-Oswald remix machine. But it's very hard to place the
track marks on the RZ50 with any consistant accuracy. A larger deck-style
unit with better control features might make this more feasable.
Dave
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