Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: June 05 2008, 15:25 |
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I was still writing that when you posted, Scatterplot, so I'll add a little more...
He certainly liked the double speed trick! It does make things sound quite different though, which is partly why he did it (though he did admit in the Blue Peter feature - http://youtube.com/watch?v=f4K6_8_Q0PQ - that it was "basically because I can't play it that fast...but it also sounds better"). A double speed piano would sound quite strange and pingy...which might be quite fun, of course! They're gradually developing ways of processing that let you alter the speed of a recording without doing any damage to the sound, but they still tend to leave telltale artefacts behind, depending on how they're used.
I think Top of the Morning was played on an acoustic piano. The way the notes seem to interact with each other when the sustain pedal is held down is something I don't think could have been done with any sampled piano available at the time. There's a kind of richness there that the sampled pianos of the time really struggled to come anywhere close to. They're getting much closer ten years on, though.
He could have recorded both hands separately, of course. I don't find that works terribly well, personally - the only time I've managed to get it to work for me is when I needed to record a two handed part but only had a two octave keyboard to hand, and I 'played' the other hand's part on the table while I was recording. Having to play one note with one hand often affects the way you play a note with the other, so parts recorded separately don't gel together nearly as well, in my experience (which was why 'playing' on the table worked for me).
One other weird thing relating to sequencing and Music of the Spheres is in the Spheres track, culled from his sequenced demo. Take a listen to the guitar right at the end, specifically to the attacks and the way the notes flow into each other. Does that strike anyone as being quite obviously sampled?
That he used a sampled guitar there would be provide an argument against the theory that his using a sequenced piano and creating parts that were impossible to play means he never intended to play them himself (since I assume his use of a sequenced guitar didn't mean he never intended to play it) - he could have just been exploring ideas, though what was actually going through my head was more the fact that the parts were impossible (the guitar part isn't) than that he didn't play it by hand to start with.
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