90s Rave Scene

2019-08-30 by TTTThis

Notes from comments:

Everyone acting funny bout the dude at 0:33 but this vid shows that even social outcasts are welcomed at raves,everyonejust dances and noones judging one another, like it should be - Maxim van Dijk

It was brilliant, look at all the massive eyes, chewing and gurning. Everybody was pilled up, it was just pills and water, no booze dancing all night together happy. If you bumped into someone you'd end up having a chat. Wasn't about fashion or dressing up, you wore what you wanted to dance all night in. - Melford Blue

No video phones to make fun of people later with. Just some random with a (probably massive) video camera at this one. - WhisperSparkles ASMR Since 2010

you got that right....the fact was rave party back then during the 90;s thru the 2000's was kinda the party for the outcast, weirdos, and definitely not for the cool kids....i had my fair share of rave parties, rolls and K in late 90's to early 2000 fun times - nugraha teguh ginting

Molly...makes you look into the soul and see the beauty in everyone...while it makes you look like someone from a horror movie xD - Haffelpaff

good old days. no stabbings no acid attacks no gangs just happy people having fun - New Adventures

One thing that always strikes me about the difference of then and now.... we danced together, NOT FACING THE DJ booth. - KA FKA

Oh cool, I was at this party. It was an illegal warehouse event by Energy in 89'. Me and mates were driving a Peugeot 205 gti and at about 5.00am I went to the car to get some skins, I had a football in there too so I took it out and kicked it in the air. Next thing there was like 50 to 100 of us out of our faces passing and kicking the ball to each other, it was so hilarious trying to kick the ball as we were so gone we kept missing it and falling over 🤣😂🤣 best time ever. Trust me when I say this, these were beautiful times to be alive, the parties, the music, the people... Epic in every sense... The dj playing is Evil Eddie Richards who I first met at Clink Street in 88'... Best days of my life ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ xxx - Tam James

Amazing thing is, nobody is showing off, they just look like ordinary people enjoying the atmosphere, just being themselves. Nice to see lots of black and white people mixing, no trouble. Everyone happy. I remember the 80s being like this, people were so much nicer to be around. Nowadays everyone is image obsessed and arrogant, all about me me me, the labels on my clothes, the car I drive (you mean lease LOL) and posting everything about themselves on Instagram or Facebook etc. People have such a horrible self important attitude these days with no time for anyone else. Social media has turned everyone into sickening attention seekers. Get me a time machine please. - Ernie Flannel

Every single person is dancing or at least trying to dance.Thats cool. - Dennis Fiorillo

Love how people dance and are not trying to look cool for one another. - jryde421

Theyre trying but you can't see it..its a different kind of trying - Matina TheArtOfRolling

LMAO remembering the time were waiting for the bus home late in the morning after hard partying and suddenly realised we were dancing at the bus stop to the idling of a bus engine. Couldn't stop laughing when we realised what we were doing. Wicked beats were everywhere. Man, them were the days....... - The Herbalizer

Oh hell yeah! No cell phones. Everyone dancing. No stupid trendy clothes. Raves back in the days were the ultimate! Everything was perfect and I mean EVERYTHING! - Anthony Smith

The 90s was f***ing amazing for raves...No post code wars back then you might get the odd one or 2 muppets chewing a wasp but not as much as you do nowadays..it was just happy people on a dance floor enjoying the music....All as one..Peace.. - David D

Looking back at this. I don't ever remember it being a problem finding my mates or loosing part of the gang you went out with when its all over and time to go home. You always found each other and usually ended up back at a mates house or flat to carry on for a continued party and eventually wind down with a few joints while the birds started tweeting. Happy days.... Now i cant even meet up with a friend without about 10 mobile phone calls back and forth just for a pint in the pub. whats happened lol? - Kick Muck

I was there and It was amazing! Talk of how times have changed,no mobile phones glued to peoples ears,no people covered in stupid tattoos,I don't know what the point im making now and im sure some one will reply to bite me on my arse ha ha but things were just better then,or were they? - Russy Russ Ally Decks

this is so awesome to watch, nobody gives a fuck, they are just enjoying the moment and everybody dances, no one is holding his shit mobile phone in his hands!! would love to have such a clubscene back - Marcus Mondel

I love how everyone is enjoying the music and not caring about the camera. Unlike now days were people get hyped they being filmed then it goes away from them and the just stand there again. - Isaac Tom

We need less phones and cameras on the dance floor. People can't be themselves on camera. - Geeeee8

Not a single Instagram post or Tweet was made that day.

TTTThis

"me and my friends miss rock and roll"

2019-08-30 by TTTThis

Nothing on my phone this morning except a couple of replies. there was a new vid by lana. out of the people today, really lana must be the top. chan isnt making music any more it seems, and the last one was unfortunately more towards a pop attempt, which is one of her ambitions i think but didnt go through. both women. are there any other musicians today? lanas been putting out tracks for the past few months to a year. mariners apartment complex, venice bitch, and doin' time (by sublime). with 70s like ( / 90s like) solos and lots of lyrics. theyre mostly not that great songwise, but still good and lana. before them i thought highly of lana but not as highly as now. something in the type of songs. yup, i think higher of her than if she had put out an album full of amazing written songs. the one today was another ballad, about it sounded like an appraisal of things, culture, music, and possible bowing out. it has the lyrics 'guess im burnt out afterall.' and that she and her friends miss rock and roll. this is the same thing ive been feeling recently.

i had a few shitty days a few days ago, uncontrollable, and wrote a metal album. so much more interesting than the electronic shit recently. and the drums. i wont explain. i dont think you can ignore or avoid electronic. its just that its not as fun to play. you dont have an instrument. and the people making it are producers, hands off, and thats not the same either. when you listen to their tracks. a girlfriend of mine sent me a couple shes been listening to. they werent bad. there was a good use of accentuating organ synth notes, and i think a decent guitar or voice hook. but overall so flat and boring. you can hear that they probably took a few loops and premade samples and put them in to compose the majority of the track. also that they probably didnt spend years picking up and playing an instrument or writing songs. the other thing though that i was feeling a bit ago is that the musics not hard enough. ive been wanting harder music again. the headbanging, the arm banging or fist pumping, the forward sound, the attitude and perspective. even hard edm doesnt have it. it has just louder grinding serum synths and bigger builds.

i guess also that lana is a bit like the latin and greek poets now, that commented on things and made us think or realize them, also in song. the poets of old did so in song, right? the recent ones just in verse mostly meant to be read. but like of old, now we wake up in the morning and still in our bed listen to lana sing a song about the times still in our bedsheets sheets wondering what were going to do with the day.

TTTThis

The History of the Spanish Language

2019-08-25 by TTTThis

The Phonecians gave a name to the peninsula which is today Spain and Portugal with the word "I-shpan-ha," which is thought to have meant "land or island of hydraxes," as those people might have confused hydraxes (which they called "shpan") with rabbits, which are common in Iberia. Romans, who began their conquest of the region during the Second Punic War in 210 BC, continued to use the same word, "Hispania," and elsewhere did refer to Spain as "the land of rabbits." There is even a coin from Hadrian's rule that includes a rabbit in the same way the Egyptian coin bears an Ibis. "Iberia" was the Greek word for the same place, so the words can be used interchangeably.

Before the Romans came to Hispania, several languages were spoken in various areas (called "paleohispanic languages"), including the languages of the Iberians, Basques, Celtiiberians and Gallaecians, some of which languages were related distantly to Latin through Indo-European language roots, while others weren't related at all. From these neighbour languages some words remain today in Spanish, such as the Celtic "camino," "carro," "colmena," and "cervesa" and the Celt suffixes "-iego" and "ego," while many place names, surnames and common words such as "izquierda" come from Basque (although many of the place names entered the language during the Reconquista, in which many Basques took part, a millennia after the first "Spanish" was spoken in Iberia).

The speakers of the first "Spanish" were those who in this Roman colony spoke one of the dialects of Roman Latin that came to be used there. Through the course of historic events, the particular dialect that came to spread over all of Spain was the one spoken in central Iberia around Toledo, in the Kingdom of Castille, but that didn't happen until around 800 years after the fifth-century breakup of the Roman Empire.

Early, "Spanish" was just one of the prodigious children of Roman Latin, some of which still live today in more developed forms, including Italian, with is today very similar to Spanish, the two languages sharing most of their vocabulary and grammar and the Latin phonemic system. For example, while today's Spanish is 20% distant from Roman Latin, Italian is only 12% distant (and Sardinian is 8% distant, all according to the linguist Pei), and speakers of Romance languages share a high level of mutual intelligibility: Spanish has around 89% intelligibility with Portuguese, 82% with Italian, and around 73% with French, having a much higher degree of intelligibility when read than when spoken, demonstrating that much of the difference is phonological.

In 711 the Muslim conquest of Spain began, succeeding in most of the peninsula for hundreds of years, during which time the majority of the Christian population (which mostly remained Christian, although many of those who wanted a place in the powerful parts of the society controlling the land were more enthusiastic about the Muslim faith and conversions) spoke a mix of the preexisting Latin and Arabic (a mix we call "Mozarabic") until the 11th century, and today 8% of Spanish is Arabic in origin (around 4,000 words), including common words like "aceite," "zanahoria," "azul," "azúcar,"technical words (such as those describing irrigation, "atarjea," "acequia," "arcaduz," and "aljibe,") scientific words such as "algebra," and titles such as "alcalde." In addition to the Latin-Arabic mixed language, a large population spoke a Latin-Judean language ("Ladino"). Both of these languages had vanished by the 16th century, but that the population spoke a mixed/bilingual language like this is considered to have facilitated the transfer of vocabulary from Arabic to Spanish.

The Reconquista spread the language of the kingdom of Castile over the bulk of Iberia, partly through poems and songs about the heroes of these great battles and adventures (including those by El Cid in the 11th Century).

A big push towards the Castilianization of Iberia took place in the 13th Century under King Alfonso X ("Alfonso the Wise") who assembled scribes in his court and tasked them with writing works on history, astronomy, law, and other subjects of interest. Writing continued to enforce Castillian Spanish between the 13th and 16th centuries from Toledo, and after that from Madrid.

It was during this time that Germanic sailors influenced Castille to replace their "septentrion," "oriente," "meridion," and "occidente," with "norte," "este," "sur," and "oeste," (although Germanic words don't feature very large at all in Spanish) as this was a time when ocean voyages were increasing. While the first Castillian grammar book was written in Salamanca and presented to Queen Isabella I, Cristóbal Colón was beginning his 1492 mission to sail west to Asia.

In the New World, Spaniards adopted from American peoples or created new a variety of words, and from the neighbouring Romance languages they were more frequently exposed to, including that of Renaissance Italy, they also received some new vocabulary. From the Americas, new things meant new words, such as "tomate," "aguacate," "mosquito," "cigar," as well as other novel flora, fauna, and cultural concepts.

The solidification of Spanish began in earnest, we might say, in 1713 with the first founding of the Spanish Royal Academy, built for the purpose of standardizing the Castillian language with its publications of dictionaries and grammars that continue to this day. There is one such academy in every Spanish country, held together by the Association of Spanish Language Academies that was created in 1951.

Today Spanish adds new words from its own technical and popular culture, although it has been remarked that for its size, Spanish does not feature prominently in any scientific writing outside of the humanities (social sciences, medical sciences, and arts and humanities making up 75% of scientific production in Spanish), while Spanish literature, on the other hand, continues to feature large in the world.

These days, Spanish also adds to its around 100,000 real-use words from English, which is also adding to its 200,000 real-use words, mostly with new technological, sports, commercial, and pop vocabulary.

Thus the participants in the Spanish language include Basque, Iberian, Celtiberian, Phoenician, Roman Latin, Greek (much through the Roman, but also for scientific terms especially beginning around the 13th Century), Visigothic, Arabic, Hebrew, French and other Romance languages, German, Quechua, Nahuatl, other American languages, and English.

Read later: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/56490/56490-h/56490-h.htm#Page_363

TTTThis

Production Notes

2019-08-24 by TTTThis

On Mutt Lange's Def Leppard:

Vocals:

First, guesses by producers and musicians, that can also be used as methods:

EQing: Scoop out the mids. Compress the stew out of it. Add a bunch of 10k and 16k. Or boosting from 12 to 16k. Or HPF, a mid scoop and Aphex, with a few cents up and down on a Harmonizer with 15 to 30ms delay each side for a bit more width possibly dont hard pan those returns.

Effects: A harmonizer like the Eventide. Eventide H3000 set on the "FAT AS CAN BE" program with some reverb or delay. Or a stereo harmonizer just a little off unison on each side. Manley mic pres and C12s.

One of the methods used is with a Dolby A machine, and its called the vocal mod or even "the John Lennon mod." The method involves encoding the background vocals with Dolby but not encoding the playback, thus giving the vocals extra high end and sizzle.

"The Dolby A" was a 70's noise reduction machine. The amount of compression on each band is inversely proportional to the volume of the band, which means that quieter sounds get brighter while louder sounds remain almost unchanged. This adds brightness and air without generating any new harmonic content or distortion.

The bands are as follows:

Band 1 has a low pass filter around 80Hz.

Band 2 is the results of the input signal minus band 1 and 3, essentially a band pass filter from 80Hz to 3kHz.

Band 3 has a high pass filter around 3kHz.

Band 4 has a high pass filter around 9kHz.

The machine was also abused as an enhancer:

The most common Dolby A mod was disabling the two lower bands so that only the high-frequency portion of the signal was compressed, giving even more air to vocals. This is the vocal mod we mentioned.

There are other Dolby-licenced technologies besides the Dolby A, such as the Dolby S noise reduction type (derived from the Dolby SR), which involves combining both fixed and sliding bands, anti-saturation, spectral skewing and modulation control. S type provides 24dB noise reduction at high frequencies and 10dB at low frequencies. Modern high-end cassette decks generally contain Dolby S-type that can make cassette tapes sound "nearly as good as CDs."

Multi-tracking vocals: 10 or 12 takes of backing vocals. On some songs on Def Leppard, there could be 100 vocals tracked together. When you layer 24+ tracks of vocals sung in the way he has them you may get an effective mid scoop in the eq without adding any eq, but the singer has to be pretty accurate hitting pitch and timing because if you tune and do trimming correction all you will get is a flanging effect. Addition of whisper tracks. Because the tracks sound like theres just one singer, though, it might have been just one, along with one background singer, Mutt. You don't hear multiple timbers. Using other voices besides the singers. Then building one huge voice out of them. For a high voice (like Avrils, who Mutt also worked with, there was a man singing the "Complicated" chorus, then they heavily EQed his take to just add one specific frequency range to Avril's take, and same with other singers, so the end result is it sounds like just her singing. Mutt may also have backing vocalists drop consonants and sing only vowels sometimes so the BVs don't rub with the primary tracks.

According to one forum, for Def Leppard the whole group and Mutt would stand around a mic and do the parts. Mutt and bassist Rick Savage sing high. Mutt has a pure tenor voice, and very precise singing ability.

Now according to Mike Shipley, engineer with Mutt on the albums: the "Pour some sugar" BVs were done like this: layer 3 people singing in unison on 20 tracks, bounce them to one track. Do another 20 tracks and bounce them to one track. EQing heavily on the bounces. Then repeat the process. Rebounce the vocals a few times, taking out the offensive frequencies very heavily on a narrow bandwidth first the honky frequency build up, then the shrill middle frequency, the same way so the sounds ends up kind of "concave" sounding with a lot of smooth high end.

"Mutt would make everyone everyone overemphasize the diction of the words," according to Shipley, which gets the sound of those BVs, along with how tight the tracking up is. A lot of the distinct sound is because of Mutt's voice. "We would no use reverb on any of the BVs," but Shipley used multi tap delays to thicken and widen the sound as much as he could, and even more EQ in the mix. "That kind of vocal sound kinda sounds best done on analog because of what the multiple bounces do to the sound. ... Doing it digitally needs boxes like the 'Hedd' to get the right kind of saturation."

Also, Shipley said they would use a lot of tumbling flanged delays. No mic pre's other than what were in the SSL 4K were used on either album. Compression with a Teletronix LA-2.

Guitars:

Sometimes, they layered up different guitars for different tonal qualities. Les Pauls for low end, teles/strats for high end. String by string technique for certain parts (such as the Hysteria pre chorus) to avoid any arpeggiation. Sometimes, they tuned open strings to a chord for similar reason.

Pyromania: According to Shipley, after trying dozens of amps, "I’m pretty sure we ended up with just a little Marshall combo amp after we’d tried everything," through condenser mics, to get the "commercial distortion" sound. A custom 100 watt head with an old cabinet.

Hysteria: According to Shipley, all the guitars are though a Rockman guitar headphone amplifier (made famous by another band, Boston). Not amps. "There might have been a couple passes of clean guitar through a small amp, but most all of it was recorded through a Rockman. That meant an awful lot of EQ’ing and processing. All the clean sounds, all the jangly parts, and all the distorted guitars were Rockman. It would get a bit irritating, because we’d try everything and just keep going until we found something that worked. Because we did it for so long, it never was that satisfying; we’d just look at each other after weeks of working on it and just go, 'I guess this is the best we could do,' and that was it."

But he elsewhere said, "We had a specific sound in mind for Hysteria and at that time because we were living in a world of electronics, we had to utilize those tools because we couldn't get the tones right. On Pyromania for example, the previous record the group did, we had like 200 amps in the studio but because they weren't a straight power chord band, you had to get the distortion and tones right first. So it was a lot of work and lot of layering was involved. But going back to your question, when it comes to mic'ing techniques, it is different for every player. Back in those days it was more condensers than dynamics being used but we'd experiment endlessly with microphones and went to such amazing lengths to get the tones we were after."

Drums:

Shipley: "All the other songs on the record, the song's drums were all samples from the Fairlight CMI (computer musical instrument) sampler. There are no real drums. The cymbals are played, but the bass drum, snare, and toms are all machine. We had all kinds of drums in there, and I sampled them into the Fairlight and detuned them. We'd sample them in at half-speed, thinking that we'd get a better sound, because that's when Fairlight was at 8 bits – you had to get around that part of it. We sampled [Ludwig] Black Beauty snares, other snares, and all kinds of bass drums. We ended up with something that Mutt liked that we could detune a little bit. When we were sampling in the sounds, we used [Neumann] KM 84s and we used [Shure SM]58s. There were so many mics. The toms were primarily Simmons toms back then, which were electronic. We experimented, EQ'd, and mangled the sound up a little bit to come up with the drum sound. It was pretty unnatural, but that was kind of the point."

TTTThis

Lets Make a Phone-Sized Recording Studio

2019-08-21 by TTTThis

For those of you who have ever travelled and wanted to downsize, you might understand this.

Can it be done? Can a mobile phone be turned into a (privacy conscious, as always) recording studio?

Questions:

What phones can be rooted and AndroidOS removed, and Linux installed instead?
Will the battery life still be good?
Will a keyboard be easy to plug and play?
Will the phone accept midi controller instruments through USB (just like a computer)?
Will the phone accept a guitar signal well?
Will the phone be capable of stereo sound recording through a mic or two-line audio interface?
Will the phone be able to be plugged into a large monitor (along with the keyboard) when you want to?
Will Audacity work on Linux Touch OS? Will other music programs, such as H2 drum machine and basic synthesizers?

It looks like the best option for a non-superuser to put Linux on a cellphone is Ubuntu Touch, a project built by the free and open source community, particularly the group UBPorts. This OS works on LG Google Nexus 4 and 5 phones. It also works on something called the Fairphone which I didnt spend time learning about, but would appreciate a rundown on the privacy conscious specifics as well as functionality limitations. I heard the Ubuntu Touch project isnt being maintained anymore, but from their site it looks like they're still making improvements. The phone, messaging, and stills camera now seem to be working, they say, and a bunch of Ubuntu apps, but a few things are still not fixed. The important one right now: Videos cant be played directly (not a problem really for our current subject directly, but if you want to use this studio as your phone and portable device as well it is). You can record them now I guess, but cant watch them on the phone (you could watch them on the phone through a browser though)

Battery life: People report that the battery is OK, but can drain faster. Not sure, but it doesnt sound terrible anyway.

Keyboard: Ive seen people plug in keyboards through the USB and it working.

Midi controllers: No videos of people doing this.

Recording: No videos. I have a concern that Ubuntu Touch might not be set up to run audio out of the box, because audio on Linux is tricky, and requires Jack or ALSA to work. Some Linux OSs have this set up already, particularly OSs made for audio production, and the user doesn't have to set anything up (which can be tricky or even basically impossible on other OSs). This is a question for Ubuntu Touch OS.

Stereo sound recording: Another unanswered question. Most phones dont do stereo sound. Nexus 5 doesnt either out of the box, but there have been some workarounds to get it working. I think these are all for playing sound, though, not for recording stereo sound through a dual channel audio signal connected through USB).

Audacity and other music apps on Ubuntu Touch: I havent seen this either, yet. Im going to see if I can get some information from the people at UBPorts.