tools of the trade, part 3: avocado

yes, it's a delicious way to make guacamole. but it's also the name of a plugin that'll fuck your shit up good. avocado is only available as a js effect, which means you'll need to download reaper to get it. but since reaper is available for a free 30-day trial, has a very relaxed purchasing scheme, and doesn't rape your computer with a bunch of bullshit that takes forever to install and uninstall, there's no reason not to give it a shot. but that's for another thread.

avocado is a glitch plugin, or, as many people fondly say, an fsu plugin. for the uninitiated, "fsu" stands for "fuck shit up," since that's what these plugins are generally built to do. they make normal, pretty sounds sound completely unrecognizable and often produce unpredictable results. there are tons of fsu plugins around, many of them available for free in a place like kvr's database. i've tried out lots of them over the years, but i guess i'm too tame in my fsu tastes, so few of them really caught my fancy. one that does, though, is avocado (you can see a thread about avocado here).

there are lots of plugins that will store your audio in a buffer, mangle it up someway and repeat it back to you later, but to get the most out of them, you have to be modifying the parameters in real-time. with trombone, though, that's not really possible since your hands are busy doing something else. the cool thing about avocado is that it has up to 16 buffers that it records to and plays back from in random order, so if you improvise along with it, the audio that comes back out could come from 100ms in the past or 10 seconds in the past or anything in between. this keeps you on your toes as you're improvising and provides a "partner" who responds somewhat to your playing. it also has pitch, repeat, and other parameters to mangle up the audio in random ways.

here's some free improv i did with it. mangled plunger sounds sound particularly great, so i used mine.

tools of the trade, part 2: audio damage dubstation

i'll probably write some other time about using delays in more "normal" ways, but these days i've been messing around with audio damage's dubstation after not using it for a while and have rediscovered its awesomeness.

there are other plugins that model bucket-brigade or tape delays, some of which will kick your nuts just as hard, but the cool thing about dubstation is the loop function. at 2 seconds of full delay time, it's not really cut out for looping long, slow passages, but for shorter, glitchy sounds, it slams tits. you don't have to worry about finding the sweet spot on the regen knob that will sustain the sound infinitely without building too loud and blowing up your shitty-ass speakers. you just set the delay time short, turn on "loop," and flick the input level up and back down real quick to get instant nasty repeats. fiddling with the delay length knob and reverse and 1x/2x buttons will dirty things up even more, so do that too and make weird-ass noises.

dubstation is, as the name betrays, made to sound like a delay you'd find in dub music (although i thought king tubby and those guys used tape delays back in the day, not bucket-brigade; but what do i know). since i don't have a background in dub or pretend i do, i don't really make much dub music, but sometimes it's the little features (like the loop button on dubstation) that open up a whole new bunch of sounds to make music with even though they probably aren't the main draw of the plugin. if you're into finding new sounds, exploiting these little features is a great way to find them.

here are a couple clips of dubstation with me messing around on trombone. the trombone parts were recorded first and the dubstation parts manipulated in real-time after. play them both at the same time for double the slam!

ex. 1

ex. 2

heavy metal bonin'

trombone isn't usually thought of as a heavy metal instrument. guitar works well in metal 'cause it hangs down near your crotch, which is where metal comes from, but trombone requires you to operate a lubricated slide in a circus-like fashion while pinching your lips like you just ate a sour plum. plus, metalists tend to have names that reference drugs or violence, which are both big parts of metal, whereas trombone players tend to be called "dave" or "pete" or have cute nicknames containing the word "slide." if metal was about proper breath support, good posture, posing for a goofy photo in a tuxedo while holding your instrument, having a clean-cut hairstyle and keeping your cellphone in a cellphone holder on your belt, trombonists would be kings of the metal world.

so how can we as trombonists keep up when it comes to playing metal? one route some people take with electric trombone (including me when i first got into it) is to slap on distortion, a wah pedal, flanger, play through an overdriven amp, etc., essentially mimmicking the setup guitarists use for harder sounds (listen to ex. 1--it's loud!). i have mixed feelings about this. on the one hand, it's fun and sounds pretty cool at first, but on the other hand, even if the novelty of distorted trombone like this might impress your friends who think that "heavy metal is cool," it probably won't get you very far opening for cannibal corpse. i still muck around with it sometimes since it's fun, but it gets old and gimmicky after a bit. i guess if i were a real metalhead it never would, though.

i guess the big problem with mimmicking a guitar setup with trombone has more to do with the people playing it than the setup itself. like i said before, metal comes from your crotch, and most trombonists don't have much crotch (though some of them do sport nice camel toe). i would love to see a trombonist whose life is all about metal devote himself to playing it on trombone, 'cause he'd probably have so much crotch it'd be pouring out his eye holes.

one way to get around this without resorting to being a wannabe metal guitarist trombonist is to get into free improv. well, certain kinds of free improv. for instance, peter brotzmann's classic free improv album "machine gun" will give you a pretty good kick in the face if you play it loud enough. granted, not a single trombonist in that group and not heavy metal, but it's a starting point and it sounds a lot more inspired and raw than a douchebag playing metallica through a distortion pedal.

by the way, the plugins i used in ex. 1 are this and this.

you're welcome. bye.

ex.1

tools of the trade, part 1: dtblkfx fft plugin

i've decided to start recording some short samples of cool sounds you can make with free (or cheap) vst plugins. i used to be somewhat of a plugin whore, i.e., i used to download every free plugin i could find but waste time fiddling with them rather than making music with them. i still do this to an extent, but the difference is that now i know right away if i'll be able to do anything cool with a plugin or if i should just dump it and forget about it. i guess you could call me an older, mature plugin madame, instead. some of the plugins i'll cover are probably old-hat to anyone who frequents a place like kvraudio, but trombone players wanting to do wacked out shit with trombone probably won't know about any of these.

that being said, the first plugin i'll cover really isn't one of the most well-known even on kvraudio. it's called "dtblkfx" and it's an fft plugin. if you don't know what fft is, google it yourself... then come back and tell me 'cause i don't completely understand what it is myself. i just know it makes things sound awesome... in a bad way... which is good.

now that i think of it, dtblkfx is probably the worst plugin to start this "tools of the trade" series with. it's hard as fuck to understand unless you struggle through the manual, it makes things sound harsh and nasty most of the time, and you can't use it in real time. but i was thinking today how i haven't used it in a while and felt like messing around with it, so bite me. anyway, here's a clip i recorded with it playing "nefertiti." i used no other effects besides dtblkfx, so it's completely dry besides that. i made up a few different presets, the first of which sounds kinda cool and the rest of which sound nasty.

make your music dirty

i think i was in 11th grade or so when i started taking trombone lessons from this dumbass trombone player whom we'll call "burt." he was the bass trombone player for what we'll call "a symphony orchestra somewhere in colorado." he had facial hair in the style which we'll call a "goatee." he also had an approach to playing trombone and music which we'll call "fucked in the head."

at the very beginning of my first lesson, "burt" said something along these lines: "we want every sound that we make with our trombone to be beautiful, so when we play trombone, we should only play when we're ready to make beautiful music. even if we're just warming up, we should concentrate on making beautiful sounds." i didn't know any better so i was like, "oh yeah, totally. i totally agree. beautiful music. yeah, that's what i think, too."

i didn't realize until many years later how fucking stupid that is.

when i was in college, i saw a post on the online trombone forum in which someone had written how he wants to make "music so beautiful with my trombone that people will weep when they hear me play." i remember thinking at the time, "well that's retarded. who wants to make shit like that. i'd rather make music so awesome that it makes people puke their fucking guts out, followed by their heads exploding in a cumbath of awesome. fuck 'beautiful.' i want my music to sound like a pair of fat, sweaty ass-cheeks squishing around in shit-stained drawers."

as i started getting into free improvisation and found all sorts of weird, nasty, awesome sounds to make on trombone, i realized how stupid it is to talk about how music should always be beautiful. sometimes music should be dirty. even if you're playing a slow jazz ballad, you can just blow your fucking balls off like roswell rudd and slam the shit out of that ballad in the ass rather than take it out for a date to get ice cream with sprinkles like bill watrous would. when you have a long cadenza in jazz band where you're free to play whatever, you can take it to the park for a bike ride in matching blue helmets followed by over-the-shirt light boobie-fondling like tommy dorsey would or you can kick that cadenza in the tits and molest its asshole and play like paul rutherford. personally, i'd probably be a douchebag and play 2 short farting noises followed by a sustained out-of-tune multiphonic if i had a cadenza like that, but i'd rather do something like that and have big hairy balls than have a bunch of dumbasses who have no idea about anything go "oh, listen to that lovely trombone solo. mm... so beautiful. yes, what a talented performer he is. mm-hmm... just lovely."

you're welcome. the end.

new song, "turtles on fire"

this song started originally with a loop being put through reaper's fft plugin in a way that let only the fundamentals of the bass and rhodes piano and a little bit of the snare drum through. i also used a really high fft window size, which smears everything together. for the trombone sound, i did something i've never done before, which was to reduce the stereo width of the sound post-reverb to make it dead center. usually i like the trombone to be full and stereo and engulfing, but there's something cool about having a sound with lots of reverb completely mono in the center. it feels lo-fi, distant, and pulls your ears directly to that sound. i think i'll reduce the trombone's stereo width to some degree in more songs from now on. i used ariesverb for the reverb as i do often these days. while it lacks fancy pre-delay and high-pass frequency settings and all that shit, it gets me exactly the sound i want everytime, whether it's adding what to me is a good-sounding room reverb or something long and spacious for ambient stuff. plus, it has a buffer-freeze function which i use extensively on improvised ambient stuff sometimes.

i also played some simple quarter, half, triplet quarter and triplet 8th notes on different pitches with my ukulele then sliced them up with dblue's glitch and mucked them up further still with audio damage's dubstation, putting the buffer-loop function to good effect there. i also used dubstation's buffer-loop effect on the trombone part. audio damage's stuff is pretty great. check it out.

lastly, i recorded some ambient noise off my 8th floor balcony outside with my zoom h4 and put that in the background of the song. this is something i started doing a few months ago to add air to these kinds of songs. just adding some low-level background noise of traffic, birds chirping, kids playing at a playground or something really helps to make sort of a framework for all the fake reverbs and delays to sit in. also, i often have trouble getting enough high frequency content in my songs, so a little noise from outside takes up that space and rounds out the frequency spectrum nicely. i also high-pass the outside noise around a few hundred hertz so the bass doesn't muddle things up. oh, i almost forgot. i also made a bass drone with synth1 widened up with ariesverb and just let it play the whole song.

that's it.

almost got my shit back

i finally got around to making my first new song in a couple weeks. it's not that i hadn't been trying; it's more like i'd fallen out of the groove i was in when i was putting out a couple new songs every week earlier this year. at that time, i was listening to jon hassell non-stop and was totally into that type of music and playing, but then i got a small dent in my trombone slide which demanded repairs, forcing me into a weeklong break from playing, and when i got my horn back, the spirit of jon hassell had fled. plus, i'd shaved my beard in that time, so it was strange to adjust to playing on bare naked lips. but i've since regrown my beard and finally am getting back to where i was before my slide was dented. i really hate my tone playing with no lip bush. it makes everything feel and sound too clean, too pretty and refined, like i'm trying to be a legit jazz or classical player or something dumb. i really prefer a much dirtier, raspier, breathier, less clear tone. having hair limits my high range a little bit and makes it sound more pinched up high, but it's a sound i've really come to like. sometimes you need a little dirt in your playing... or in my case, a LOT of dirt. that reminds me of something i should write another, more aggressive blog about.

anyway, i'll put up my song and some notes about the plugins i used and stuff in the blog after this.

welcome to my blog

my name is "jeff." i play the trombone. i'm interested in playing a whole bunch of different kinds of music (which i won't bore you with a list of), but i've spent a fair amount of time over the last 10 years or so finding interesting ways to use electronics with the trombone. when i was younger, i wanted to play trombone like a jazz-rock fusion guitarist, so i used distortion, auto-wah, chorus, etc., but that got old and lame after a while, so i eventually got into using pitch shifters, long reverbs and delays (preferably with freezable buffers), loopers, fft effects, fsu plugins, etc., all in vst plugin forum. the music i make with these effects is sometimes ambient, sometimes dubby, sometimes fourth-worldish, usually slow, usually improvised, and probably boring to most people (especially other trombone players) because it puts them to sleep. but little do those dumbasses know that that's my goal. idiots.

when i first started thinking about using electronics with trombone a long time ago, the internet wasn't what it is now, so i couldn't find other people doing what i wanted to do. even today, there really isn't much information online about trombonists using electronics other than robin eubanks using an auto-wah and delays to make his trombone more "funky" or people here and there using distortion to make wanna-be heavy metal or something. well... if that's what they wanna do, then more power to them, but i'd rather try to make new kinds of music with electric trombone than just try to copy what guitarists have been doing for the last 40 years by slapping on some chorus and distortion and wah and jerking off all over myself. plus, listening to how cuong vu and jon hassell use electronics with trumpet has really opened up some ideas.

anyway, this blog will be mostly about the music i make with trombone, what plugins and effects i use for electric trombone, thoughts about my approach to trombone playing and music, etc., and sometimes about completely non-trombone things (i'll try to keep those from turning into rambling rants about stupid shit no one cares about). and also, i use bad words sometimes, some you've been warned, assface.