(Symphonic Prog) [CD] The Andy Tillison Multiplex - Electric Sinfonia No.2 - 2014, WavPack (iso.wv), lossless

ER....

I got a Spirograph for Christmas when I was 5. I’d never been able to draw, but with this thing I could make things happen on a piece of paper. Things that had form, looked pretty yet were generated by by me and the purity of maths and geometry. It’s been a 50 year partnership that has done well for me. In 1985 myself and a friend bought a computer to make music on. We could already play, but we wanted to add something to what we could achieve. Like the Spirograph it opened doors and allowed us to build higher. For most of my career I have used it as a way of producing demos and prototypes. This time, it’s the done deal. This is how:

The Guitars.

I’ll make no bones about it. Most guitarists refer to my guitars as “fake guitars”. They’re 100 percent accurate. They are. But in a sense it’s having worked with Luke Machin that makes me actually want to play the damn thing so much, and he’s been a real guiding light with a completely open mind. There are huge numbers of guitar simulators out there, but (as usual) I’ve chosen a fairly basic one which only does a few things and I’ve tried to make it do the things it doesn’t by playing it - as me. It’s called RealLPC and it’s made by Musiclab - it’s a fairly old VST plugin instrument that has been updated loads of times and I’ve just stuck with the old one because I’ve learned how to use it. It’s MY guitar if you like. I’ve tried the newer versions and other models. They’re great. I like mine. I use an ancient virtual amplifier for it too. In fact I think Amplitube version 1 is getting on for 15 years old, and of course now you can buy versions with Fender Twin Reverbs, Marshall stacks, Mesa Boogies all emulated in them. This one does just one amp. Itself. And it’s MY amp. You get the pattern emerging? And of course, it all just ends up as what I do with my choice of stuff. Like Luke chooses a Strat or an Ibanez with a Marshall head and a 4x12 cab to be his guitar rig, I choose RealLPC and Amplitube to be mine. And I often play it on a Vortex keytar made by Alesis.

I do the actual keying using a series of notes on my left hand which choose whether I mute the strings, open them, hammer on, pinch, bend, slide or “violin”. I use my pitch wheel as a whammy bar and my mod wheel as a vibrato. I can use wah effects, play harmonics, make it feedback in a variety of different ways. And any guitarist can tell it’s not real. My point is, even if you CAN tell, is it any good? Your choice. Not mine. My influences? On guitar? Luke Machin, Roine Stolt and Jan Hammer & Dave Stewart (the keyboards player). I aim high.

I have a drum kit that’s “mine” too. It’s a 1970s drumkit sampled at Abbey Road studios by Native Instruments. It's one of those perspex ones in three colours. I LOVE it. I first learned to do this keyboard drumming back in the 1980s when my friend Guy Hatton and I decided to see what would happen if you plugged the midi out of a DX7 into the midi input of a Roland TR707 drum machine. I liked what it could do, and made a point of learning to play real drums so that I could put this into practise more effectively on a keyboard. I’ve used the same mapping (very similar to the standard General Midi Drum Map) ever since.

A few weeks into the process, I remember Guy telling me that I “couldn’t do something” because if I was a drummer I would need three arms to do what I’d done. I remember asking him which drummer would refuse the offer of an extra arm if made such an offer. And so I have 10 fingers. A Drummer has four limbs. It means I can do things a drummer can’t. I’ve decided to do them rather than not do them. What I do do though, is stick to the idea of “playing” drums rather than programming them. It makes ME feel better, and I think the pieces benefit from it. I will state, for the record, that I still feel that (as with guitars) the BEST drums will always come from great drummers. That’s why The Tangent has always used real drums and real guitars on the final productions. On this record, I’ve gone overboard to do the best job I can. It’s an experiment. I like experiments.

The Brass.

Inevitably, I have heard and fallen in love with Snarky Puppy. This band have been a great breath of air for me, and I won’t deny that they have had an influence on me during the making of this album. I WILL say that I’d already written the song “America On TV” on the Tangent album “Spark In The Aether” before I ever heard the band, and that heavily features brass sections too, so I WAS already going here before I knew of SP. Their arrival was confirmation of what I wanted to do, so I’m no longer afraid to seize this particular Bull.

I’ve used a variety of different sources for Brass, a lot are from my (once again) 15 year old plugin Edirol orchestral which although nowhere near as sophisticated as the film scoring stuff of today, allows for considerable expression while playing on a keyboard. There’s a couple of patches from Steinberg’s Halionsonic, and a few synthesised bits in the background.

This year I bought myself a new piano. It is a GEM promega 2. It is my favourite inanimate object in the world. I got it semi broken, dead cheap on Ebay, I fixed it and it has given me endless hours of pleasure. It has a wonderful sound, and a magnificent touch, the kind of which I have previously only dreamed of. All the Acoustic Pianos on this album use this instrument (the Promega), and most of the Fender Rhodes, Clavinets, Vibraphones and CP80 Electric Grands. Other electric piano sounds come from my Roland FA06 music workstation, but as this has an utterly terrible piano keyboard, the performances were done using the Promega as an input device.

The Organ

The Hammond T100 that I have downstairs provides the Lion’s Share of the organ sounds on this album. However, while a T100 with leslie is great for some things, it isn’t а СЗ! I use VB3 by GSI Soundworks, and occasionally make use of Native Instruments Vintage Organs in Kontakt, a great sounding virtual set that is, bizarrely, out of tune which means I have a lot of pitch shifting to do at the end of a take. I’d use it a lot more if it was IN tune! VB3 is so good, that honestly, it’s as good as a real one. To those of you who say they can tell the difference I say, make me a list of the exact times the real one is used on this album. If you get it completely right, I’ll refund the money you spent on this CD. Include exact timings from the CD readout please. EG - “Song 1, 3.45 - 4.15 is real organ”. I will be honest! You have to do every bit of organ on the whole CD.

The Saxes and Flutes

NOTHING can replace Theo. In fact that’s true of Luke, of Jonas, of Morgan and everyone else I’ve worked with. But trying to “not see keyboards as just a way of faking things” is crucial to this project, the flutes were done using the old Edirol Orchestral programmme, and a startlingly good flute that appears in the Halionsonic virtual workstation by Steinberg. Using keyboard aftertouch (pressure) and pitch bend, velocity layers I seem to have managed to get a reasonably convincing flute. Sax, well, I find this one difficult. I used some soprano which I find quite easy to make realistic, but alto and tenor... consider them work in progress.

Nothing causes more controversy than the supposed difference between a digital synth and an analogue synth. The fact that the word SYNTHESISER actually implies imitating a sound to start with makes the whole argument very tedious. I’ve seen people swooning over another terrible Tenor sax sound that sounds NOTHING like a sax who then turn round and say that nothing can beat the sound of a real analogue synth, even when the sounds are identical on lab test gear. On this album I’ve used the Arturia MinimoogV, plus the ancient Native Instruments Pro 53 prophet 5 emulator and a few free synths from an eastern european software house including Mini-moogs, Prodigys, Oberheims etc. They are fabulous.

The Pieces Themselves

These pieces were composed using improvisations as a basis - all of which started off on the piano I mentioned earlier. I KNOW that I have occasionally used something I “might have just heard somewhere before” and I can point to a couple of bits of “The Firebird Suite”, a few bits of flute melody that sounds rather similar to a little section of “Magician’s Hat” by Bo Hansson. Maschine may well have got in there somewhere and there’s usually someone who points out that three notes in succession are on a PFM album from 1973. I usually point out that there’s only twelve to start with, but it doesn’t always work. So there’s probably a few cases of that.

The second piece “Andante For Dorothy” is for my Mum who taught me to play the piano whan I was 6 years old. She’s still with us at the great age of 83 at the time of writing but sadly she suffers from Dementia, the cruelty of which I had never foreseen until coming head to head with

During a previous and happily gone sad time in my life I found that I just couldn’t listen to music that was too emotionally involving. I sought solace in the work of J S Bach and Dave Stewart, two geniuses of music for keyboards, music that just exists for the purest of reasons - to be beautiful. I've wanted to do an instrumental album for a very long time, and it was in the realm of Dave’s “National Health” that I wanted to work. He remains my biggest instrumental hero. I have spent nearly 40 years listening to his music and I still don’t get how he does it. This is the closest I’ve ever got and that’s largely due to Luke explaining a lot of what he (Dave Stewart) does, to me.

“The Fourth Movement "Shown” is not entirely instrumental. This piece is really just a solo jam... mainly based around ONE chord. The lyrics at the end of it are on the back cover of the booklet. I suppose it has a little in common with the Tangent album COMM, more late middle aged bewilderment at the world of technology. It’s also almost “Rapping" although I have not attempted to put on some fake voice to do it with.

The Concept

Well, I wanted to make a solo album. And here it is. And YES!, I play all the instruments on it and they are all keyboards. Other than my voice, everything is entirely electronically generated. I’ve always had a beef about keyboards instruments just being referred to as “keyboards” -1 mean, even back in the day Keith Emerson played (as far as I was concerned) Hammond Organ, Sythesisers and Piano. To lump those together as a convenient grouping is understandable but it seriously reduces the truth. You may as well call Jimi Hendrix a strings player as call Keith a keyboards player. He was three (and often more) things. In fact his left hand could have gone solo. His techniques were different on whichever instrument he played and to me, that means he was and still is, a multi instrumentalist. And so I stake my claim that this is the role I am playing here. A multi Instrumentalist. All of the instruments are played in using a keyboards as the interface, but the styles and techniques I have used for each instrument are entirely different from one another. Especially the drums and guitars.

I also reject the word “fake”. I am using modern technology to recreate the sounds of familiar instruments. This is what the first church organs did at the tail end of the middle ages, they imitated trumpets and flutes. And a few hundred years later Mr Hammond made a machine that imitated an organ. And Mr Mellotron made a machine that imitated strings. And I have a machine that imitates church organs better than a Hammond ever did and imitates strings better than a Mellotron ever did. And just to throw a spanner in the works, it also imitates Hammonds and Mellotrons - badly imitating organs and orchestras respectively - and sounding wonderful while it’s doing it..

All musical instrument sounds are, if not synthesised, certainly contrived. You could level the word “artificial” at a violin as much as you can at a polysynth when you think about it. And for all the technology I have used, unless I’d been a performance DJ, it would have simply sat there, mute, unless I’d come along and played a keyboard at it. So no. This is not fake. It’s me.

That’s not why I made the record. Yeah, by the time you get your mitts on it, we’ll have done a whole load of stuff about how it’s all one man and it’s all keyboards, very clever, yeah yeah yeah.
Nonsense! It can still be rubbish! I made this record because I wrote some music I wanted you to hear. This was just one way of doing it. It was cheap, I might make a profit out of it and I didn’t have to argue with anyone about the mix. I missed the fun of working with others, but found a lot out about myself and what I can do.

I multiplexed myself. I’m not the first to do it, the history of modern recording is full of one man and his instruments albums, one of which went on to become one of the world’s best ever selling records. And in the future there may well come a day when all the manual interfaces are no longer needed. When our brains can simply create the music we hear inside us. When the creation of music can become as much a part of our conversation as our languages. When the symphony trapped inside the body of a fourteen year old girl who has never played a musical instrument wows the world with its vision, melodic beauty, sound textures that have never before been heard on planet Earth, I feel fairly certain that there’ll still be someone complaining that there’s nothing “real” about it and that it needs an accordion...

Actually, nothing ever did.

I would like to thank Luke Machln for his Insight and belief and the time he took to teach me what I needed to know. Lalle Larsson for making it imperative that I ask. Sally Collyer for Inspiration strength and all her Jazzrock albums. Ian Oakley - from the beginning. Jonas Reingold, Jakko, Morgan Agren, Guy Manning, Tony Latham, Theo Travis, Dan Mash, Jonathan Barrett, Chris Wright, Kathryn, James, Rosa, Ed & Sarah Tilllson, Dagmara Nowik, Ashley Clarke, Thomas Waber, Jessica Lausen, Fred Lessing, John Sealey, Eric Perry, Nellie Pitts, Stacey Doller, Alison Henderson, Martin ReIJman, Jill Lerner, Stephen Lambe, Geoff Banks, Jon Patrick, Cliff Pearson, Rolne Stolt, Paul & Amanda Brow, Jeff Reed, Staff and Students of Leeds City College Media department, Dave Stewart, Keith Emerson, Chick Corea, Liz & Carl Machln, Michael Gardiner, Freddie Palmer, Brian Watson, Ed Unltsky, Olga Odessa, Martin Stephen, Rob Reed, Andy “Progtastic" Clarke, The CRS -Miles, Andy, Steve P, Brad Blrzer, Martin Nellson, Mike Briggs, Isabella Brocklehlrst, Tim Vogt, Jarod Bishop, all members of The Tangent Facebook Society

Вступление

Когда мне было 5 лет, в подарок на Рождество мне подарили спирограф [такая детская игрушка для вычерчивания хитрых геометрических фигур типа спирали Архимеда. - прим. tatuk]. Я никогда не умел рисовать, но с помощью этой штуки у меня стало что-то получаться на бумаге. Фигуры, имеющие форму и порождённые мной и чистой математикой с геометрией, выглядели потрясающе. Пятьдесят лет партнёрства со спирографом оказались очень полезны. В 1985 году мой друг и я купили на двоих компьютер, чтобы делать на нём музыку. Играть мы уже умели, но хотелось достичь чего-то большего. Подобно спирографу, компьютер открыл нам дополнительные двери и позволил стать выше. Большую часть своей карьеры я использовал его лишь как инструмент для получения демо и макетов. Но в этот раз с макетами покончено. Вот так.

Гитары.

Буду честен на эту тему. Большинство гитаристов ссылаются на мои гитары как на "фальшивые". Они на 100% правы. Это так. Но в какой-то степени это работало с Люком Мэчином, который заставлял меня играть много играть на этом чёртовом инструменте. Он был моей путеводной звездой в обучении гитаре.

[пропущены технические подробности устройства синтезаторов Энди Тиллисона и приёмов игры на них]

Концепция

Итак, я хотел сделать сольный альбом. Вот он. И — да, я играю на всех инструментах, и все они — клавишные. За исключением моего голоса, все звуки полностью генерируются в электронном виде. Мне всегда хотелось изменить популярное мнение о клавишных инструментах как просто "клавиатурах", пусть даже в дни, когда Кейт Эмерсон играл (насколько я знаю) на органе Хаммонда, синтезаторе и фортепиано. Объединить их вместе для удобства — это понятный шаг, но это серьезно снижает их возможности. Вы можете называть Джими Хендрикса музыкантом, играющим на струнах, подобно тому, как называете Кейта музыкантом, играющим на клавишных. Джими был словно три (а то и больше) в одном. На самом деле одна только его левая рука могла играть соло. Его методы игры зависели от того, на каком инструменте он играл, и это означает, что он был и остается мульти-инструменталистом. Именно такую функцию я здесь и представляю: мульти-инструменталист. Все инструменты играются при помощи клавиатуры в качестве интерфейса, но стили и методы, которые я использовал для каждого инструмента, полностью отличаются друг от друга. Особенно барабаны и гитары.

Я также отвергаю слово "фальшивые". Я использую современные технологии, чтобы воссоздать звуки знакомых инструментов. Это примерно то же самое, что делали в средние века первые церковные органы: они подражали трубам и флейтам. Несколько сотен лет спустя мистер Хаммонд изобрёл устройство, которое имитировало орган. А мистер Меллотрон сделал машину, которая имитировала струнные. У меня же есть машина, которая имитирует церковные органы лучше, чем когда-либо делал Хаммонд и струнные — лучше, чем когда-либо делал Меллотрон. И лишь для того, чтобы добавить трудностей в работе, она также может имитировать хэммонд и меллотрон, плохо имитирующие органы и оркестры, — и при этом звучит замечательно...

В какой-то степени все звуки музыкальных инструментов (если они не синтезированы) звучат неестественно. Вы можете адресовать слово "ненатурально" как скрипке, так и синтезированному звуку. Вся эта технология, которую я использовал, была немой, пока я не пришёл и не сыграл на клавиатуре. Так что — нет. Это не подделка. Это — я.

Но это не объясняет, почему я сделал такой альбом. Да, к тому времени, когда вы будете держать этот диск в руках, вас загрузят по полной программе на тему того, что это все — один человек плюс все эти клавиатуры, очень умно, да, да, да...
Ерунда! Все эти усилия вполне могут являться хламом. Я сделал эту запись, потому что написал музыку и хотел, чтобы вы её услышали. И это был лишь один из способов достичь результата. Это было недорого, может быть, даже прибыльно, и мне не надо было ни с кем спорить в процессе микширования. Я упустил это сомнительное удовольствие от работы с другими людьми, но сумел многое узнать о себе и о том, что я могу делать.

Я сделал себя многоканальным. Я не первый, кто это использовал, — история современной звукозаписи полна альбомами, сыгранными одним человеком на всех инструментах, один из которых впоследствии попал в список самых когда-либо продаваемых дисков в мире. А в будущем вполне может наступить день, когда все обычные интерфейсы станут больше не нужны. Когда наш мозг сможет просто создать музыку, которую мы слышим внутри нас. Когда создание музыки станет такой же неотъемлемой частью нашего общения, как и обычный разговорный язык. И когда симфония, запертая в ловушке сознания четырнадцатилетней девочки, не играющей ни на каких музыкальных инструментах, поразит мир своим видением, мелодичной красотой, звуковыми текстурами, которые никогда прежде не звучали на планете Земля, я твёрдо уверен, что кто-нибудь будет обязательно жаловаться, что в этом нет ничего "настоящего", и что тут просто необходим аккордеон ...

На самом деле, ничего пока толком не сделано.

Энди Тиллисон

Andy Tillison - one man army