Broken: Guitars, or no?

[eversonpoe]

No more "real" than the rest of that record. Drum solo is made from samples played on a keyboard and the "Ruiner" solo was recorded straight into the DI with no amp or mic, just like the rest of them are. Those are just about the only solos that weren't "fixed" in the Logic sequencer, however.

i thought the "drum solo" in piggy was the only example of trent himself actually playing live drums. there's no way those are samples from a keyboard, there's too much differentiation in the expression.

[Fixer808]

Certainly, but were those sounds computer generated? In the mid-eighties, I'd go with most certainly not.

Not an Atari or a Tandy, by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe... MAYBE a NORAD computer that had its own room at an airbase, and a bored USAF programmer...

[allegro]

The Mac had some mean MIDI software in the mid-80s. But primitive by today's standards.

[Pyract]

No more "real" than the rest of that record. Drum solo is made from samples played on a keyboard and the "Ruiner" solo was recorded straight into the DI with no amp or mic, just like the rest of them are. Those are just about the only solos that weren't "fixed" in the Logic sequencer, however.

i thought the "drum solo" in piggy was the only example of trent himself actually playing live drums. there's no way those are samples from a keyboard, there's too much differentiation in the expression.

KB: Toward the end of the song "Piggy", it sounds very much like live drumming.TR: Okay, I confess, that one thing was live. For that part, I had a rigid, weird sixteenth-note pattern going. A kit was set up in the dining room, and I was playing along, fuckin' around, testing out the drums. I'd go in the other room, start the machine, run back in, put the headphones on, and play along. I couldn't hear it very good and I was way out of meter. So I just played as insaneley as I could so I could hear how the drums were going to sound on tape. When I listened back, I thought, "Hey, that's pretty cool. Someday I'll come back and fix it." And of course, I never did. That was it. That was the final take. A lot of what I do is accidental. I luck into things. I think that due to laziness---not coming back and fixing things---they end up becoming more interesting. My instinct is to repair, edit. "I'll get to it later". But then I'll get so used to hearing it, I'll end up leaving it alone.

http://www.theninhotline.net/archive.../key394a.shtml

[Leviathant]

The Mac had some mean MIDI software in the mid-80s. But primitive by today's standards.

MIDI is all about sequencing notes and events though, not sound generation or audio processing.

[allegro]

MIDI is all about sequencing notes and events though, not sound generation or audio processing.

Well, yeah.

[jmtd]

Neat. Maybe I'll listen to Art of Noise tonight.

[Leviathant]

Neat. Maybe I'll listen to Art of Noise tonight.

Heh, to bring it back around on topic - even the Art of Noise brought in Duane Eddy on guitar when it came to doing Peter Gunn, because if you didn't use a real guitar in a 1986 electronic music recording, you usually ended up with something that sounded like, well, the music in that Apple video.

[frankie teardrop]

Neat. Maybe I'll listen to Art of Noise tonight.

sorry to divert quickly again- but 'moments in love' never ceases to give me chills.

@Leviathant - agreed. i like my minimal synth (all primitive late 70s/80s analog electronics, and nothing but), but it's definitely limited and very same-y sounding without at least one guitar. throw a guitar into a dark electronic sound-alike track and you're instantly clan of xymox level awesome.

[Leviathant]

Which one of these diversions counts as Diversion One? Useless trivia: Before I discovered Pretty Hate Machine, my favorite CD was "The Best of the Art of Noise." Their sounds really date pretty terribly (Hello, Fairlight!), but I don't care.

[frankie teardrop]

Which one of these diversions counts as Diversion One?

i see what you did there, @Leviathant .

dated? sure. pioneering? totally.

[Jinsai]

i thought the "drum solo" in piggy was the only example of trent himself actually playing live drums. there's no way those are samples from a keyboard, there's too much differentiation in the expression.

I guess it might have been harder back then, but still possible, and you could do it with a pattern that was entirely programmed and not even performed "live" on a controller. Even back before dedicated drum software included "humanizing" features, it was possible to fake it with meticulous editing in a sampler. You'd have to go through it all and slightly nudge the notes off the grid to emulate human imperfection, as well as individually adjust the velocity of notes (and slightly change the pitch of hits with relation to the velocity on some of the sounds).

[eversonpoe]

I guess it might have been harder back then, but still possible, and you could do it with a pattern that was entirely programmed and not even performed "live" on a controller. Even back before dedicated drum software included "humanizing" features, it was possible to fake it with meticulous editing in a sampler. You'd have to go through it all and slightly nudge the notes off the grid to emulate human imperfection, as well as individually adjust the velocity of notes (and slightly change the pitch of hits with relation to the velocity on some of the sounds).

given my experiences, it would be way easier to just record it on a real (or even electronic) drumkit.

[SM Rollinger]

Yeah, i remember Trent saying that the Piggy solo, was actually a "milking" session that ended up just working in the song as is. He talked about how they would set up the drums in different rooms with different mic setups, and just bang away on them. Then take the results and manipulate them however needed.
edit: the link to the keyboard magazine article above, is what i remember reading. just saw it after the fact.

[botley]

http://www.theninhotline.net/archive.../key394a.shtml

I stand corrected!

[Powhatan]

in the late 90s I had the pleasure of doing quite a handful of mixing sessions working with one of the recording engineers from the Broken album.
Of course I had asked him about his days working with Trent back then (I was not working in the business at that time). He had a lot of respect for Trent and was very proud to have been a part of that record, even though it sounded like it didnt go how he expected. He told an amusing story of how excited he was to work with him and the first day he brought all his great guitar amps to the studio ahead of time and meticulously set them all up to be nice and ready to have Trent audition some mean guitar sounds (a skill he was recognized for and thought that was WHY Trent had hired him for the gig). He said Trent finally showed up and he told Trent to plug into the amps and Trent just looked at him and said something to the effect of "what are you doing?...thats NOTHING of what Im about".
Trent just plugged the instrument direct into the computer and tweaked the sound in the box - which - back then was not very common The engineer said he was pretty confused and just said "then why the f did you hire me?" haha But he was clearly very proud to have worked with him for the time he did.

Side note - I remember buying that 94 issue of Keyboard magazine as soon as it hit the shelves, excited to read all the juicy details of the recording/mixing process of TDS as Trent was always good to go into a lot of detail for us studio nerds.