in the early to mid 1990s a young man in Cornwall
England named Richard James managed to change electronic music from a genre that was rigidly
confined to nightclubs and maybe the occasional cheesy TV or film score into literally the most
far-reaching imaginative and Innovative music of the decade by the way I'm not being hyperbolic
at all if anything I'm actually understating this man's impact on music in general and there
are very few people who would disagree with me a Madman of sound and uh process he's been a big
influence in the Nish Nails camp music today for me I think he's definitely the Pioneer a twin is
the king people called Apex twins okay I didn't know anything about them I start hearing like the
weirdest noises I felt violated like my soul was violated in this video we're going to have a
look at something that most electron musicians have only speculated on what software was Apex
Twin using in the peak period of his [Music] career and I'm so excited to make this video
because I can almost guarantee that if you're into experimental audio stuff you're going to fall down
a deep deep rabbit hole with at least one of the things covered in this video before I became an
obnoxious YouTuber the most common question that I would get from other musicians that I met when
I toured or seldomly checked Facebook messages was what software do you use to make the flashbulb
music a part of me kind of hates this question because sometimes it carries the unintentional
suggestion that there's some secret tool out there that made all of my music rather than the
countless hours of experimenting and editing and learning until my eyes and ears bled and Richard
James has more focus and determination and Imagination in his pinky than all of my body does
than most music do and you're about to find out that this video isn't about the software that you
can use to sound more like ax twin it's attempting to Showcase how much of a genius ax twin is which
I personally think is more inspiring as a musician so let's Dive Right In with an instant classic
when I first got my hands on the window Licor p in 1999 I just didn't understand and I didn't
like it all that much either with the exception of the final track nanu because it's just pretty
simple and itic it took a lot of relist before it started growing on me because it was frankly
so far away from anything that I had ever heard before that there was just no way to easily digest
it it turns out that the other two tracks on the window Liquor EP weren't performed or programmed
as much as they were painted Richard primarily used UI software's Metasynth which is still being
updated and sold 25 years later Metasynth more or less allows you to use sound as your medium
and then color represents panning and once you manag to make a Sonic image that you like you can
sequence it among others in software called xx and Metasynth is much more obvious and prominent on
the second song on that which is titled Pitchfork had claimed that it's related to a 4A transform
equation some others have speculated that it's an algorithm that Richard uses in music production
but there's a far-end cross talk in there which is more of a Communications thing or at the very
least not something solely related to software so I think it's just a Kookie song title for a Kookie
song anyway just search aex twin math or Apex Twin equation if you want to hear it I made a long
video about Metasynth some years ago but let's just have a quick look at its core functionality
so nowadays in medicin there's a whole onboard synthesizer that's actually quite [Music] powerful
however in 1999 this was not a thing so I'm going to choose exponential tuning and then I'm going to
load a sampler so I'm just drawing a French horn [Music] so to add Reverb to them
you could just bore one end of the image all right I'm going to make a [Music] beat it's like a good sneeze sad beat okay so now we have it
synthesized and we can bring it into our effects room [Music] that's pretty [Music]
chaotic I don't know when Metasynth got an effect tab but I did have Metasynth in like
2005 or something and it had it then and I guess it probably had it during the window
lior window window Liquor window Liquor era [Applause] minor natural filter I'm going to load in a high hat
Loop and then I'm going to analyze that spectrum and it should now play it with that voice [Music] that's a good Apex pose I [Music] suppose beautiful let's drag
this into audition and see if I can see my face all these lines
here is cuz I didn't entirely use exponential mode in Metasynth but you
could see my eyes and my nose and my smile good Lord wow yeah this is a quarter
of a century ago when this track was made and you could still probably get the same
result from even the Spotify version or something I'm fairly certain that I could
be locked in a room for a month with the much more featured modern version
of medicine then I still would not come close to making anything that sounds as
structured or frankly as awesome as [Music] this Apex twins most popular music or at least the
music that brushed up against popular culture at the time really never represented the aura
of his other work that well I heard the infamously distorted come to Daddy papy mix
single right before the EP was released and I was kind of taken back a little bit little
did I know that the full come to Daddy EP or mini album itself would become what is probably
the most Innovative and influential album in all of electronic music the second track alone flim
is one of the most beautiful heartbreaking deeply thematic Melodies I've ever heard in my life and
the drum programming has become a common upper tier goal of real life drummers to emulate and
we will dive into how that was made later in this video but the peak of this album and probably
Peak aex twin for most people would be buis bouncing ball which means Ox headed bouncing ball
in case you were curious and in the middle of the song it becomes apparent to us the sound that is
making up most of the crazy sounds in the rest of the song a ball being dropped on a hard surface
the audio of this sample is eventually torn apart in ways that nobody had ever heard before and
it's recycled into new comp completely batshit insane sequences the thing is in 1997 there
really wasn't a graphical destructive wave editor that could do this cool edit existed back
in 1994 but the powerful sound design features didn't arrive until at least Cool Edit Pro in
1998 what we're hearing in buis bouncing ball is composers desktop project which I believe did
not have a GUI or front end at the time it ran on Atari St initially and then later was ported to
Microsoft Doss in 19 95 CDP has easily been one of the most powerful pieces of software for sound
design and while it's now freeware it still has functionality that I've not seen in any other
software fortunately over the years third-party front ends have been developed that make it
a little bit more accessible and allow us to play around with newer builds of CDP unfortunately
it's going to feel extremely dated and frustrating compared to the user interface of modern software
there's sound Loom which I never really clicked with there's sound shaper which is which is
almost tolerable there's also process pack Grain Mill and BRK edit Shimmer tabula vigilance
and so on yes in case you are wondering a 100% free sound design portal is opening up in front
of you right now so at least pause this video and give your family a big hug and kiss and let
them know that you'll miss them before going on this epic Voyage all right so I have a file
called ball. wve it's just a basketball bouncing now composer's desktop project is originally
command based it didn't have a GUI at all so after setting up your system environment which
isn't really all that difficult you would just type Reverb ball. wve as your infile your out
file would be like ball verby do wve then you would have a bunch of parameters after that so you
would have your early reflection gain you would have your mix I'll put that as 0.7 you would have
your Reverb time I'll put that for 2 seconds you would have uh your absorption I'll put that
at 0.5 you would have your low pass frequency I'll put that at 700 meaning 700 Hertz and
then you would have your Trail time and I'll put that at like 3 point 3 seconds all right
and then you press enter and now let's hear it probably the most difficult way that you could
put Reverb on anything in 2024 but fear not there is a GUI sound shaper just feels very wind Windows
98 ah no folder memory that's always good so for example blur frequencies you set the factor every
frequency above 430 htz and then low cut under 100 render and the result while not beautiful
sounding is kind of unlike anything that you could get from any other software
which is what makes it so exciting this is quantize and you can load a text file
to customize how it's quantized [Music] freeze all of these steps a little [Music] bit golly I have no idea what any of this is [Music] but now you might be able to see how a brilliant
man nearly 30 years ago recorded a marble dropping on a glass table and then without this GUI
typed in a bunch of commands into Doss and subjecting himself to hours days maybe even
weeks weeks of trial and error and now you may start to understand how the Masterpiece
beilis bouncing ball was created if you're really confused here and you want some heavy
prep on CDP Trevor wishart's 1994 book audible design has a lot of diagrams that can help
you understand the core of what CDP does and if you're familiar with pilis bouncing
ball you might be wondering what CDP sound generator is creating those low bit modulated
noises in the song This one is easy and fun as one might expect some of Apex Twin's older
music was programmed on outboard gear but when a computer was used it was typically running
software called Dr T's tiger cub seriously I spent two long days trying to get this software
to run in an emulator and had no success however I did find some videos of some folks who
did have some success both with the original hardware and emulators I salute yall for your
patience really inspiring stuff what a lot of rubbish Story Time ages ago when I was
on tour with dyer Escape Plan their drummer at the time Chris peny made
a remark to me that he likes how my music and a effect Twins music so often
has a linear drumming and I didn't know what that meant and he explained to me
that it simply means only one sound at a time much later I would come to realize that Chris
Penney is one of the best linear drummers of all time but in my electronic musician Brain it just
meant that I set a drum kit to monophonic or I used the same mute or choke group for every
single sound and that's something I almost always did back then and I still do it quite
frequently this video would be where you could see how that [Music] worked all right do you know
who else frequently uses linear drum programming tracker users trackers were originally a
very efficient way to make computer music and are sequenced in top down lines that can
only play one voice at a time per line so if you crammed your entire drum track into a
Tracker Lane it would be linear this next statement is entirely speculative by the way but
for the type of music you hear in the Richard D James album for example it's hard for me to
imagine that it wasn't a Tracker triggering a scuzzy sampler for the drums in 1995 trackers
weren't quite capable of playing a bunch of fat last 16bit sounds but what did exist in 1994 was
recycle which is propeller head's first software product recycle was extremely Innovative at
the time and it allowed you to detect Peaks and transients in sound files like a drum
break for example and then send and Route the individual sounds to a scuzzy sampler like the
Akai S2000 what I can say for certain is that the similarly melodic and intricately programmed song
V hbin from the 2001 Dr album was using Player Pro on a Mac for the melody here's a clip of
presumably the original session shared by Richard himself and I cannot express how difficult
it must have been to make a Melody this purposeful and provocative on this software and as you
can see the pany or the thing allowing more than one note to be played at the same time
is accomplished by splitting them up into separate Lanes this melody which would be simple
enough on a piano is an example of a tracker's weakness not for aex twin though he breezes
right through it and makes it look easy let's make a very quick rudimentary and probably shitty
sounding version of an fx twin tracker [Music] song bton county in the second left
lane on 85 South past Exit 16 [Music] I actually was initially planning on making a
shitty version of fim or V hosin on the poan tracker for this video and then I discovered that
a fellow audio you YouTuber digifix Electronics did this 2 years ago and pretty much killed
it if you own a Tracker or a Tracker mini or um this thing that hasn't been announced yet you
can get it all from his patreon all these links are in the [Music] description one thing that
I'm skipping here in aex twins software agraph is almost certainly plenty of super collider which
to this day is an updated and free highlevel audio programming language it was originally created
in 1996 by James McCartney who allegedly had visited Richard in London in a sort of private
software collaboration tutorial thing what that software was like is anyone's guess however one
of Richard's roommates in this period was fellow reflex artist syob or Chris Jeffs Chris made and
makes music on his own software that he created in super collider he called the software syab music
system and he used it when he played live as well and when I toured with him in the early to mid
2000s he showed me how the software worked and it was some Next Level stuff that definitely did not
exist outside of his own computer one particular piece of this software that totally blew me
away that I still think about all the time was a tb303 style vocal sequencer with text to speech
functionality and that was like 20 years ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Richard for quite
a bit earlier today and he gave me a long list of tools some of which I frankly have never even
heard of some I forgot about and unfortunately some of them cannot be run on Modern computers but
some of them can and the whole reason I'm making this video in the first place is an attempt
to expand my viewers pallet of tools off of the beaten path territory so please try to run
some of this stuff and experiment so the Player Pro tracker that you saw a teeny bit of earlier
didn't support VST plugins or anything like that but it did aowow you to execute code for custom
sense and whatnot and I had no idea this was a thing and despite it being pretty difficult to get
Player Pro running on anything these days this is one of those details that may have been lost in
history unless some jag off said it on YouTube one of the programs that caught me by surprise
was Pratt which I never even considered using in any creative way I had it installed for voice
printing for forensic audio work and I don't think I ever actually used it for that but I just had
it installed and learned it a bit but it turns out that there's a whole lot of exploring you could
do with the voice synthesis and whatnot and I'm excited to check that out in the future one thing
that Richard told me about that I simply cannot believe that I've never heard about previously and
I am literally obsessed with now is youpic which was designed by Yannis and AIS and um holy [ __ ]
I've never wanted to play with a synthesizer more in my entire life instrumentalists instrument
makers musicologists but also physicist ists and mathematicians will find in the system
a host of possibilities for experimental application speaking of things I had never even
known existed when Richard was a teenager he was using an add-on for the ZX Spectrum called Ram
music machine which had midi in and out and it even supported very low resolution sampling news
to me finally unsurprisingly he used a lot of stuff from kkam and without getting into specifics
you should just go down the uram lab's rabbit hole as I cannot think of a more dedicated group of
researchers and developers focusing on music and audio technology and frankly it's surprising
that I've not done a video on ircam software yet and I'm sure I will in the very near future
so while some of the things that we covered in this video is old and inaccessible now a lot
of it is accessible and a lot of it is free which gives you no excuse to not try and get it
running and play with it yourself and if you do please let us see your results in the comments
because again that's why I'm making this video after DRS came out in 2001 the Apex Twin would
go on a 13-year Hiatus Richard James did not he amassed a ludicrous amount of analog gear
and released over 5 hours of music and as many as 15 different releases under alternate
alias' before releasing syyro in 2014 but I had quite a few debates with other longtime
FX twin fans who thought that he had lost something from his Peak years I completely
disagree I think apx Twins Peak is defined by The Listener and I think we lost something in
that period for example do you remember earlier when I said that I didn't really like window
Liquor when it first came out well I paid good money for it at the time and I had trusted that
I would eventually hear something that I didn't hear in the first few listens and holy [ __ ]
I 100% did I have no idea how many listens it took for me to personally declare to myself that
the Richard D James album or come to Daddy are among the most Innovative albums ever made but it
certainly wasn't the first impression I had when listening to them at the risk of morphing to Rick
biato before your eyes I do have to point this out we just don't have that listening experience
anymore when we evolved from having to take the bus to a bunch of different music stores to
find an obscure and overpriced experimental electronic music CD all the way to a song just
being fed to us on the Spotify algorithm we lost patience and we lost the obsessive focused mind
[ __ ] that came with an apx twin album in the 1990s but do you know why nobody has accurately
reverse engineered or deconstructed or recreated any of the music that Richard James has released
in the last 15 years it's because it's ahead of its time it's next level and nobody knows what the
[ __ ] is going on in those songs when I was in my early teens I was an awkward Jazz guitarist
programming Buddy Rich and Jean Kupa solos on a drum machine in South Chicago while house
music was taking off it's hard to overstate how popular electronic music was in Chicago at that
time but electronic music was remixes of of the Speed Racer theme or somebody saying it's time
for The Percolator over and over for 20 minutes to a 44 beat I loved creatively programming
drum machines and synthesizers to do things that humans couldn't but I was ashamed to show my
music to anybody because of the stigma of making electronic music that didn't work in a dance club
that is until I heard ax twin and then I realized that I indeed can do whatever I want and there
are thousands of musicians who benefited from the same young parasocial relationship with
Richard's music in that period if there's a takeaway from this video other than a bunch
of cool software to check out it would be the overall attitude of Richard James for some reason
or another he has no creative boundaries at all his music sounds 100% like someone exploring
for their own benefit not like something that is made to appeal to others or please spotify's
algorithm or get used in Tik toks I'm sorry you or I will never never sound like ax twin but we
can appreciate that he did the hard work for us by showing the world that there doesn't have to be
any rules in electronic music or music at all and on that note by the time you're seeing this I'm
probably renovating a new studio so I'd better put on my work boots and get out of here by the
way let me talk about my sponsor really fast it's you if you enjoyed this and you want to see more
like it consider joining my patreon I have loads of unreleased and released music audio assets
field recordings and a really positive community you don't see those on the internet anymore and
I have monthly songwriting challenges it's great you should totally join it's as little as $1
thanks for watching do not stop creating bye