Self Destruction - DJ Lace vs RC Dahle & The Passenger

via Lace Dj on The MATRIXSYNTH Lounge. More pics here.

"An electronic rock track using a custom built electric cigar box bass guitar, a Sequential Circuits Pro 1, Roland TR-606, Korg MS-20, a custom eurorack modular synth & intersound spring reverb. Vocals were recorded using a 1995 groove tubes MD1 tube mic, into a focusrite ISA one preamp with digital out. Recorded into ableton live 8, mixed on a Tascam DM4800 with yamaha HS80 monitors.

The track started out as a quick jam to a 77 bpm beat using the box bass & the song developed from there.

The box bass has an oak neck and poplar box. It’s nailed together so it resonates, the string is a spare low string from L&M. The pickups are a pair of dimarzio Twang kings. Their are placed to the side of the string, facing each other and offset. The top pickup is on a hinge.

The bass was plugged into the Focusrite ISA one with the gain all the way up. The ISA can take a lot of drive and sounds great squared off.

Ryan Dahle played the bass string with power, forcing it to hit the non moving coil at times, to great effect. While playing he would also vary the distance of the second coil. During the breakdown he rubs and strikes the moving coil against the string and jumps back into the guitar riff by plucking normally and moving the coil back again.

At mix down the guitar is run through a tube screamer plugin and an ssl vst channel pulling back 350 and pushing 5k up. It is panned hard right and left dry. An effect send from the guitar channel feeds an intersound spring reverb with 1k pulled back about 6db. The dry guitar signal and reverb return are matched back to stereo in a late 60s fashion.

The mechanical noises in the background of the track were created as a modular sequence that had to be restarted until it started on a part of the pattern that sounded right.

For this sequence, The TR 606, MS 20 module, and Modular are all wired together as one system. The 606 receives dinsync from the DAW via a roland SBX10 sync box. From the 606 the high tom output triggers the clock input of the MFB trigger sequencer in the modular which is making a 32 step pattern triggering a clock divider that controls the envelopes used in the system. One of the clock divider trigger outs controls the a105 filter which filters the output of an A117 noise source. The resonance of the A105 is wide open and modulate by the animated pulse out of the Livewire AFG (VCO). The frequency of the AFG is itself modulated by one of the LFOs on the A143-3 (quad lfo).

This is what creates the low volume noise in the track treated to sound like sample distortion artifacts.
Another of the the clock divider outputs feeds the MS 20 trigger input. The pink noise generator on the MS 20 is patched back into it's own external input. This noise runs through the ms 20 filter sections under control by envelope generator 2, and the on board LFO.

This is what creates the tom like sounds and the helicopter warble synth noises when the song picks up at the end.

Yet another output of the clock divider feeds an A140 envelope generator which is triggering the spare VCA on the ms20. The white noise of ms 20 goes into the audio input of this VCA and into the analog input mod of the TR 606. Inside the 606, this rhythmic noise pattern is cross modulated by the high hat pattern and you can hear the result in the track. The swung out effect of the high hats is a direct result of this, as the 606 has no swing function.

The drums are distorted 909 samples, run as a stereo drum mix into a Duende SSL bus compressor. The background vocals are a 5 part harmony, sung in 6 duplicates each mixed down to mono comps, then spread out into a 70s rock opera stereo field. There is a 375ms ping pong delay on the two high vocals and a long reverb on the two low ones. The middle ones are dry. The chorus lead is sung twice and double tracked, shifted by hand in various parts of the song to pull the effect forward and backwards. The front verse and the chorus share the same tempo delay. The delay is slightly bit crushed.

In order to give the idea of the background vocals slowly destroyed under the pressure of the drums, they shift to vocoded versions of themselves losing a bit of pitch tracking in the process and get bit crushed into nothing by the time the last chorus ends. This is done with 5 individual vocoder plugins and 5 bit crushers and automated ramps.

The desperation vocal in the break down and rebuild is mostly dry albeit for a small amount of TC reverb that sits behind the whole mix. The vocal has one effect on it, a boss ds1 plugin with mild gain. An SSL channel is used to shelf the bottom out completely and bring the top end up a bit, giving the vocal a “small” feel.

The pro 1 brings a bit of bass to complement the guitar, but it’s mixed pretty low in the mix, leaving the kick drums to do more work and get to a hard-techno / hard-style sound. The sample at the end is from a loop of the second chorus that just sounded so cool I decided to tag it at the end of the track, taking yet into one more direction before an old school FM radio fade ending.

The track was mixed down on a Tascam DM4800, using the onboard TC reverb and and external intersound reverb unit. Enjoy"