Helios

More music, this time made with a Korg ARP Odyssey, this chap here:

And a new Mac Mini, but I'll write about that in a separate post. In retrospect I'm not sure if the key changes work; they're harmless, but they don't add anything.

The video is a bit of a cheat, because it's a playback, not a live performance. And the Meris Hedra pictured above doesn't appear. It's not even plugged in. The only effects are a bit of overdrive, some EQ, and panning delay, which was good enough for Lee "Scratch" Perry back in the day.

The Odyssey isn't generally associated with acid music. It isn't particularly bassy, and in the 1980s it was big, awkward, and expensive on the used market; at the very beginning of the decade the likes of Ultravox and Gary Numan still used it as part of their touring setup, and despite its longevity it never sold in the same numbers as the DX7 or Roland's cute early-80s music boxes. Nonetheless the ring modulation, shrieking self-oscillating filter, and oscillator sync are all excellent as a means of turning the acid quotient up to 11.

The Asteroids Respond

Even more music, composed while staring intently at Taylor Swift a picture of Taylor Swift while drinking wine, lots of it. If this had been part of an album, it would segue in from the previous track.

Wine isn't sold in pints, or at least you can't go into a pub and order a pint of wine. Also, a good name for a band would be Robert Burns In Hell. I picture them as a Scottish folk-punk band in the style of the Pogues, but Scottish. This track has three basic elements. Firstly, I have always wanted to do a piece of music that just has a pulse beat, along the lines of Aphex Twin's Tha, John Foxx's Kurfurstendamm, or Thomas Middleton's Larynx. Notice how I didn't link Tha, because I trust that you are already familiar with that track.

Secondly, I wanted to play with my Monotron. It's a simple analogue synthesiser that came out several years ago. It's tiny! And very noisy, so you can't use it in a conventional way, not least because you end up amplifying noise. It costs about thirty pounds and there are three of them - the standard unit, the twin-oscillator Monotron Duo, and the Monotron Delay, which has a short digital delay. They can process external audio and although the controls are very limited (and for some reason the LFO is a sawtooth wave instead of a triangle) it's surprisingly versatile. For a simple but punchy kick drum sound, just turn the cutoff down, the peak up so that the filter self-oscillates, the rate to about four pulses a second, and then use the int knob to change the "punch".

The third element is a sample of "Four Loom Weaver", a traditional tune performed by Maddy Prior and June Tabor on their 1976 album Silly Sisters, comma, slowed down and reversed. The British electric/progressive folk music boom of the 1960s and 1970s is fascinating. The likes of Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention are amongst the least fashionable, most-unlikely-to-be-revived-not-even-ironically bands of living memory, and ultimately the only lasting remnant of the period was Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, which is one of those albums that's simultaneously naff and awesome. Wikipedia is not usually a source of great literature, but its description of the movement's demise is worth quoting - "all popular music trends have a generational problem as their audiences grow and might not be replaced, but for folk rock the discontinuity was very acute."

That's quality writing, you know. Discontinuity and acute. It won't be a State-run initiative that murders human expression, it'll be us. And yet for every word that becomes obsolete a new one comes along - nowadays we have bae and cray-cray and TayTay, as in "my bae TayTay is craycray", which is just an example (Taylor Swift is not crazy). You know, when I was a kid "basic" was a programming language, not an insult. And when people talked about hippy crack, they were talking about the bum cracks of hippies. So, yes, everything is in flux. Even folk music is in flux, although folk purists resist change. But in the words of the song, "now your ashes are scattered on the wind".

Navigating the Asteroid Belt

More music, with Logic Express 9 running on a 2008 MacBook Pro. On the left is a ThinkPad X61 running the wonderful M-Tron Mellotron simulation, and towards the middle is a strong cup of tea. Here's the result (the tea was the most important thing):

A while back I bought an old G4 PowerBook, just to see what OS X was like in the early years of this century. I also wanted to check out Logic, which is the standard Macintosh sequencer. Logic was developed in the 1980s for the Atari ST, and was eventually ported to Windows; for a while it was available for Windows and OS X, but eventually Apple latched on to it and brought it inside the company's walled garden. Now it is an OS X exclusive.

Perhaps because of this it tends to be pooh-poohed by the cognoscenti. The latest version is Logic Pro X, and word on the street is that Apple has tried to dumb it down for the app market as part of a general shift away from the professional market. I don't know. I like Logic; on a conceptual level it's similar to Cubase and Pro Tools, and it has a few irritating quirks, but I don't have a problem with it and it runs well on my MacBook.

My old, circa 2002 G4 PowerBook is very limited, so I decided to try an experiment. My ThinkPad X61 is a traditional PC laptop, but it can be turned into a "hackintosh", and with an afternoon's worth of work I had OS X 10.7 running on it. Logic Express 8 worked fine but the whole experience felt a bit wonky, so I bit the bullet and bought a 2008 MacBook Pro instead. Why not simply buy Cubase for my Windows PC, and cut out the Macintosh entirely? Why indeed.

On the used market, 2008 MacBook Pros are an interesting proposition. The 1440x900 screen is still better than most entry-level modern PC laptops, which seem to have setted on 1366x768. The reliability problems that bedevilled the G4 PowerBooks had been mostly solved, although there are still issues with the aluminium case attracting dents and the internals overheating. Performance-wise modern laptops are undeniably more capable, but over the last few years there has been an emphasis on power-saving and miniaturisation as well, and so the six years of progress since 2008 are not as apparent as the six years separating 2002 from 2008. The 2008 MacBooks have two graphics processors (an on-chip card and a separate unit which kicks in for games) but poor games performance is one thing that definitely separates 2008 from the modern era.

The 2008 MacBooks are easy to work on. I've swapped my MacBook's original hard drive for a cheap SSD, taken out the DVD superdrive, and inserted a second drive bay. Reason being that Logic Express is flakey with OS X 10.10 Yosemite. It runs, but becomes unresponsive for seconds at a time, seemingly whenever I plug in my keyboard. So I bought a copy of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and installed that on the second drive.

Snow Leopard is the Macintosh analogue of Windows XP - old and sturdy - if Windows XP had been built on UNIX, and part of me wonders if Apple reached a peak with its Macintosh range circa 2008-2011 and has been regressing since then. Perhaps the company no longer cares much for its computers. I often wonder if the failure of the XServe range finally convinced Apple that it did not have a future as a computer company. Still, a 2008 MacBook with Snow Leopard is fast, reliable, and relatively easy to fix if it breaks; the post-2008 MacBook Pros had a non-replaceable battery, and later models progressively became sealed units with everything glued-and-soldered to the motherboard. I have seen nothing in OS X Yosemite that I prefer over Snow Leopard, or indeed OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Ah, I hear you say, but what about the music? Why are you waffling on about laptops and hard drives, why not tell us what was going through your soul as you poured raw emotion from your musical heart? I like to think that good art has a core of humanity underneath it, but in practice the act of creation involves a tonne of hard, uninteresting work. Whenever films show an artist in the act of creation, they imply that it just happens, but someone has to sharpen the pencils, put ink into the typewriter and load the film etc. You have to be quite far up the chain before you have minions to do that kind of thing, at which point you have to master a new set of skills. Until you are the King, at which point you just have to look good in robes.