The Gestalt Analysis Podcast

Every so often we would create something that soaked up our ideas then draw even more from us. They tend to be anthemic tracks that build, adding more and more layers interspersed with complex breaks until they climax into some kind of wall of sound. The track would get longer and longer as we jostled for our turn at the helm, adding breaks, twirls and flourishes. We would encourage the other when it was their turn, suggesting tweaks and variations. "Ooh yeah", "Do that!", "Do it again", "How about this?", "Mmmmm", "Oh aye" plus any number of other grunts, whoops, and squeaks could all be heard by anyone at the door.

This one isn't the longest but I think it certainly has the complexity of one of these tunes so is likely to be one of the first. We will meet another one of these called "Divide by 3" which really demonstrates what I am talking about. There may also be a few others before we get there.

Oh, and the title is another "Dirty Harry " reference.

Love this one. We were trying to get Gavin's old Amiga back online and playing some samples for us. It was on the Amiga we started writing tunes together using breakbeats, the DX21, and some "2001: A Space Odyssey" samples. Pretty sure there was a crowd cheer in there too.

Anyway, we couldn't get it to playback properly and I think it only played a sample on every second note. So we gave up and just set it to loop the Albert Popwell sample at its own speed and filtered it through the Jen. Probably doesn't add much to the track but we liked to stick stuff on the start and end of tracks just for the hell of it. Some of them had meaning, some were a reference to the inspiration behind the track, and some were just daft.

Watch out for Gavin's awesome ad-libs on this track. One of our favoured techniques was to set the tune on a really long loop and let him tinkle away, recording everything. We could then pick the best stuff, tweak it and add it to the mix.

Can't remember much about this one. The name stems from late nights sitting about with our pals talking crap.

Sounds like we are using everything we had though. I think I can hear the DX21, Bassstation, SH-101 and the Poly 800. I could have sworn we had the Kawai K1 by then but it must have come later.

Seems to be quite a short tune for us so perhaps we ran out of ideas for it or didn't feel we could develop it further. Guess it does what it needs to do so enough for now, some good stuff next.

Boom. We've got a Drumstation and we are going to use it. Okay, maybe a little overzealous on the classic 909 thing but we were bursting to let it out.

This and the next track are good examples of what tended to happen when we got a new bit of kit. We would go all out with it creating a track or some tracks that demonstrated the features that had drawn us to it. After the initial excitement we would then create some more measured tracks where the device was incorporated in a more subtle way. Another example is when we got our first effects unit and put delay on everything. Oh, and the sampler, wait till we get the sampler...

We had both returned to Carnoustie after graduation. Gavin already had a job but I was unemployed for a year before I found something. That means I had a lot more time on my hands. I think I kicked this one off. Some tell tale signs are the almost randomly created melody and the, of course, slightly out of tune synth. It's got a bit of a melancholy feel to it which is quite appropriate as it marks the end of an era. Things were about to change.

I think this one really demonstrates our frustration with the drum sounds we had at the time. This could have been so much punchier. We could have used a synth to create a more banging kick and SH-101 was great at that. Unfortunately when you have very few synths and no means of multitracking you can't afford to lose a whole synth to a single drum sound.

Everything we wrote at the time was created by mixing down live to 2 channels. There were ways to multitrack and sync to midi back then but they were very expensive. I think ADAT was kicking about and I imagine hard disk recording was in its infancy but nothing like that was on our radar. I don't think we even had a multimbral synth which could have lightened the load. One synth, one sound.

So it must have been around this time we decided to get the Drumstation. The whole 909/808 thing was probably getting a bit tired by then but it was an inexpensive way to get some oomph into our tracks. Getting a sampler may have made more sense but they were not within our reach financially. A Drumstation was, and it had the potential to transform what we were making.

Here we have the SR-16 coming into its own. We were just getting to grips with Cubase and had previously used the internal sequencer on the drum machine to write tracks. You can imagine how limited that was on such a small screen. Now we had the Atari ST controlling all the parameters of it through midi we were really able use it much more expressively.

This track also features the Korg Poly 800 mkII. This was our first analogue poly synth. It was a bit of a strange beast in that it was analogue but had no knobs and was programmed using multi function buttons (I hate multi function buttons but that is for another time).

This made it a bit of a bugger to programme. It was also designed as a keytar and required batteries to store the patches. I think it did have an internal battery but this had died some time previously. Anyway, if you took the batteries out it would lose all the stored patches and revert to random patches across all the memory banks. The settings were all over the place and some of the parameters were set to values you couldn't set manually. Some of these new patches were absolutely wicked and the whiny synth sound in this track is one of them.

Lastly this track includes the first appearance of the "drop down" method we use in a few other tracks, particularly 2 Root. More on that later.

Struggling to remember much about this one.

We had a Jen SX1000 which was a very basic mono synth. It was very broken and could only play one note or something, so we butchered it. Basically we jimmied an audio in directly to the filter section just to see what happened. Somehow it worked and we were able to send audio from our other synths into it and filter the sound. What you hear during the breakdown is our DX21 being filtered by the Jen.

We were looking to do something with a jazzy feel, something with a shuffle to it. I think we had also just picked up a phaser pedal from a guitar store on Albert Street. Although, it might have been an auto wah.

Suffice to say I think we achieved what we had set out to do. Also, I think this is an example of us trying to beef up the kick drums from the drum machines by using a synth to provide that "whump" on the first beat.