Living with schizophrenia - DJ Lace 2013

"A downtempo track made with A Roland Tr-808, Roland JX3P, Roland JP8080, Roland JP8000, Sequential Circuits Drumtraks, Sequential Circuits Multitrak, Kawai SX210, Nord lead 2."


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

"Gear setup for the track 'living with schizophrenia'

The song was inspired by a video depicting what it is like to be schizophrenic. The telephone sample and female voice in the middle are all from the video.

The track represents a person waking up, disoriented but functioning, unable to really grasp what’s going on and hearing all sorts of voice like noises. The phone rings but when answered, there is an incomprehensible voice making instrument like noises coming from the handset. Things get progressively darker and fuller sounding as the middle arrives and everything seems to grind to a halt, While the Xoxbox keeps playing, like reality still going on in the background of someone’s life. A voice then explains this is all a simulation, and to get ready because now it’s about to really get going, then the effect comes back, this time rising to an explosive peak followed by an intense release giving way to lighter yet still tenseful self realisation that everything is going to be ok, this time....

The track started out as a jam with the 808 and the analog solutions reverb. I had the doepfer LFO modulation the reverb and recorded a few passes noodling with it. The big wind down and wind up effect in the middle of the track (including the high pitch whine) is achieved solely with the reverb setting being cranked to the max by the slow sweep of the LFO. In the last part of the song, it the effect of the 808 that is heard overtop the Drumtraks.

That doepfer LFO a-145 is a good deal, this one was $80 used. It can go super slow and you can retrigger it. Very handy as a modulation source for any synth or effect gear in you may own that has some type of analog control input.

I then started playing around with some chords on the JP8000 and laid down the beginning of the song. The crunchy distortion bleeps are the tails of the notes undergoing distortion due to the resonance being all the way up. The sound is compressed with the DM4800 channel compressors to bring out these artifacts.

The trumpet like synth lead in the wind down part is my voice recorded singing “looking at me, looking at you”. The vocal is processed using Ableton’s vocoder plugin and massaged into a telephone like music instrument. The vocal also has a gate on it which is triggered by the XOXbox audio track. Using the SSL Duende G series EQ.

The acid bass line at the beginning is the XOXbox playing back in chain mode, then manually taken out of chain mode in the middle to play just the first pattern as an acid line over the second bass line which I played on the multitrak in unison mode. The multitrak is also used for all the big vibrato sounds at the end.

The second set of drum sounds is the Drumtraks pretty much stock. A bit of notch on the snare and kick at around 300-400hz and pushed up 8k on the hats and the cymbal to bring out it’s explosive lofi sound. The 5 drumtrak sounds used were recorded live on separate tracks, then grouped at mixdown and run through a separate ssl stereo buss compressor.

The string swells were played on the Kawai SX210 with a slow attack and sharp release. The JX3p was used for the low volume bell like sounds at the end. The nord is used for the bell thin sounding background notes in the first half the song."

Update: video to go with it:

Living with schizophrenia - DJ Lace

Published on Feb 15, 2013