Let's fire up my modular synthesiser yet again and make some more music. This piece - 2706, which is also falsely called BREAKS - doesn't have a clever technical trick or anything like that. It's just Mutable Instruments Plaits run through a Strymon El Capistan delay pedal, sequenced with an Arturia Beatstep. I decide to use Plaits' FM mode because why not.
The strings in the background are coming from a Behringer Model D playing the same sequence, with a slow attack. Both sound sources are being modulated with copious LFOs. In retrospect I should have made Plaits slightly quieter towards the end because it starts to distort. The song is a kind of endless grove that could continue indefinitely.
One of my favourite musicians when I was younger was Jean-Michel Jarre. His albums were technically fascinating, not least because they were recorded in Beatles-style stereo, e.g. everything was hard-panned to the left or right. As such you could hear how he achieved certain effects by fiddling with the panning control. He used a lot of stereo delay on his early albums, with the original signal in one side of the stereo field and echoes on the other.
His 1981 live album The Concerts in China in particular has a track called "Arpegiator" that uses a classic idea - the dotted eighth delay. The track is essentially a pair of simple, robotic sequences fed into a delay unit that produces a three-quarter-beat echo. By itself the sequences go dah-dah-dah, which is boring, but with a dotted eighth delay they go dahgha-dahgha-dahgha, which is exciting.
Do you understand? Not dah-dah-dah, but dahgha-dahgha-dahgha. The first song I can think of that uses the effect prominently is Pink Floyd's "One of These Days" from 1974, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a bunch of surf rock bands used it in the 1960s. It's all over The Wall, and U2's The Edge made it his own in the 1980s.
Jarre uses the effect on the steady bassline in a style not a million miles removed from Tangerine Dream, and also on the more staccato melody, where the echoes are allowed to die away naturally. He mostly avoided sequencer effects in favour of old-fashioned tunes, and "Arpegiator" it's atypical of his work, not least because it has a bass solo. For me it was one of the highlights of that album.
Concerts in China is an odd beast. It's a mixture of new songs and old favourites re-arranged for a small albeit well-equipped live band that included a drummer, because Jarre wanted the music to sound a little bit like conventional Western rock and roll. His only major concert before then was a live show in Paris in 1979, where the music was entirely played back from tape, but for China the band did actually perform live.
There are apparently lots of studio overdubs, but the playing matches up with the footage shot for a contemporary television documentary so not all of it was worked on in the studio. It's fascinating because there's a ragged, almost garage-band looseness to the playing that never again appeared in Jean-Michel Jarre's work. His later concerts again mostly involved miming the playback, because everything had to be synchronised to huge projections, but just this once his live sound was actually live, just like The Ramones, but with a hugely expensive Fairlight sampling workstation and a laser harp.
