Post by ashcatlt on Mar 29, 2011 19:26:24 GMT -5
Lorenzo's Tractor has been around for about 20 years. For most of that time it's been me in some dark and smoky room recording whatever mad experiments that came to mind. Occasionally I trick club owners or party hosts to allow me to provide a soundtrack for at least part of their event. Sometimes I even get other people to act as signal sources for these excursions.
I’d been saying it since I got back here to Duluth (about five years now) and finally decided last year that I was going to get LT into the Homegrown Music Festival. So I've collected a great little group of folks who are already familiar with my stuff. We got a slot closing the loudest club in town on Homegrown's SoupTown Thursday. We've put together a set of my more "conventional" song type things. There's no wholetone scales or diminished madness. All the pieces have vocals. But we've left ourselves plenty of room for experimentation and horrible noise in between and even in the middle of some of the songs. And we've worked out a rig that layers all kinds of incredibly unusual sounds over the top of these relatively simple straightforward pieces.
The basic heart of our system is the same rack that I use with Circadian Nations with some extra things jacked into the mixer, and a whole lot more pedals.
The drums for LT are basically no more than percussive timing cues and occasional dynamic punctuation. We could probably use a drum machine or even an iPod, but with the free form nature of what we're doing, it really wants live input. So I've got my friend Joshua sitting in front of 4 Roland drum pads (mounted on a dual conga stand) with sticks in his hand. These are set to trigger a thumpy kick and three different low toms. I've got the kick drum pedal up by me, but it's set to make a "Slow Crash" sound. When we find ourselves out in the middle of nowhere, I can pick a strategic point to stomp on it and cue the other guys that I'm going to go somewhere. We hope that most of them are able to figure out exactly where that might be... John's got the hi-hat pedal. This is really just a switch that triggers a "Foot Hat" sound so he can tap his toe and add some high frequencies to the mix. The triggers go to the D4 "brain". The audio out from this goes to my Alesis Quadraverb which is set to make a delay which runs as quarter notes somewhere around 80 BPM. This is almost like a metronome, and acts as our tempo reference. I end up sometimes playing off of that tempo, though. The delay might become dotted quarters, or dotted eighths, or something...
But you don't want to read about drums.
My friend John learned to play guitar from (and with) me. He often acted as a "guitar machine" in the early days of LT, and has very comfortably slipped back in. He's been playing his Fernandez Tele, but recently expressed interest in switching to my Rickenbacker. I'm going to have to print out a User's Guide... I can't say for sure how he's got his stuff set up. I know he's using my Boss DD3 Delay pedal. There's an Ensoniq sustain pedal plugged into the Tempo jack. Once we get a reference beat from the drums, he taps out the beat to follow. He's got 2 other delays in there, a DOD phaser (FX20B) and flanger (FX75B), my Death Metal (FX86), and an older version of the Digitech Vocalist harmonizer. This all into my V-Amp Pro set (I think) to the "Brit Blues" Marshal type amp with a good level of crunchy gain. I'm not sure of the order or what he uses when. He seems to be having fun, and it generally sounds pretty cool.
My guitar and Luke's bass are kind of intermingled and loopy, and easier to describe with a picture:
My pedal chain is really pretty straightforward. The HyperFuzz (Boss FZ2) is set to it's "Clean Boost" setting with a little of the treble rolled off, just like I do in CN. The "amp" is already running at a point where it breaks up nicely when I dig into the strings a bit. The booster pushes it a little further to fill out single note lines and/or get a bit more crunch for the really loud parts. This pedal (like all Boss pedals) is buffered-bypass so always presents a nice healthy impedance to the pickups. From here I run to a single channel module ripped out of a half-normalled patchbay. One of the four jacks is switched, but if you leave that empty, the other three are all connected. This splits my still dry signal off in two directions. One goes to the MoogerFooger (we'll get there...) and the other goes to the Behringer Reverb/Delay (DR400). This is set to Tap Tempo Delay mode, which I set to follow the drums. From here we go to my True Bypass Effect Loop w/Feedback. For the most part, the feedback stays off, but I can get down there and turn it's knob when I feel the need. So, it either sends the signal off to my V-Amp Bass Pro which is set to the Brit Class A (Vox AC30) with a bit more gain than I use for CN, or it sends it through the three pedals in the loop first. This loop creates a warbly weird synthy kind of lead tone. The Boss Pitch Shfiter (PS3) is set to a very short delay (not actually shifting pitch) with a healthy dose of feedback (repeats) and an all wet mix. The delay is short enough that I don't really "feel" it. It runs so fast that it adds some amount of resonance to certain notes, but I try to avoid that "stuck flanger" thing. It basically just smears the note. Then the Vibrato (Behringer UV300) takes and warbles that all over the place. I never did the Rate mod that I was contemplating, but it's slow enough for what we're doing here. The Depth is set pretty conservative. It's not so much like a siren as a broken tape machine. This mess goes into my Rodent, set to maximum gain and standard silicon clippers, tone rolled down a little, and volume set so as to be just a little louder than the bypassed tone. This path is useless for chords, or playing much faster than eighth notes, but sounds a whole lot like a failing analog synth when I play single notes. With all the smashing that the Rat does, the booster has very little impact on this tone. So I've got two basic sounds and then I can make the clean one louder.
Luke's thing is completely other. From his bass (usually his fretless Jazz) he goes into my Boss Stereo Chorus (CH1). The fun thing I've recently found with this chorus is that - when you use both outputs - one is dry, and the other is just the pitch modulated signal which sounds like a vibrato. When heard together they create that chorus sound. It buffers and splits the signal even when bypassed. He can leave it off when he wants more stable pitches, or turn it on and get some of that "broken tape machine" thing. The dry output goes to the MoogerFooger (patience...) and the other goes to his 1337Drive. This is set for a healthy dose of distortion, with the filter on the clean side turned down a bit. The low end comes through punchy and tight. In the effect loop of the distorted side he's got his Dunlop Bass Wah (105Q). From here it goes to my Bass Whammy. This also has a Dry and Effected output. The dry side goes to his V-Amp Bass. The pitch shifted output goes to the Bass Synth (Behringer BSY600), which has its own input to the mixer in the rack. This is a true synthesizer pedal which tracks the input pitch and triggers an internal "analog" synth sound. Well, it tries to follow the pitch. With a clean input, it tracks surprisingly well with no noticeable latency. But we're not giving it a nice clean signal, no! This poor thing gets this huge mess of harmonics and struggles to sort it out and pick one note to play. It actually fails quite gracefully and usually manages to pick a note somehow harmonically related to what he's playing. The original point of the Whammy was to just set and forget it at an octave up, to keep the synth up out of the bass's way, but of course he has to wiggle it. He actually sits on a chair with one foot on the wah and one on the whammy. One fun thing we found with this is that his rig makes just enough noise to trigger the synth even when he's not playing. He can modulate this noise with the wah and whammy and create strange abstract synth things with just his feet.
Then there's the MoogerFooger (thanks for your patience). This is a Ring Modulator (Moog MF102). For those who might not be familiar, it's basically audio rate amplitude modulation. It turns up and down one signal (call it A) based on the instantaneous voltage of the other ( call that B). The output voltage is A x B, but the frequencies sound like a mix of A+B and A-B. That us, if A is a 110 Hz sine wave (the fundamental of your 5th string) and B is a 220 Hz sine (2nd fret on the 3rd string) you get 110 and 330 which is not actually a note in our standard scale. Other ratios add up to all kinds of out of tune notes. Most often a ring mod pedal will have one audio input for your guitar or whatever, and an internal oscillator for the other. The MoogerFooger has that, and it can be adjusted to sub-audio freqs (which sounds like a tremolo) way up to super high frequencies. It also has an LFO to modulate that frequency. But better for our purposes is that it has a second "carrier" input, which overrides and replaces that oscillator. So I'm running my guitar (clean and dry after the boost) to the Audio In and Luke's bass (clean and dry from the chorus) to the Carrier. So what does that sound like? Well it depends on what each of us plays and how they relate mathematically to one another. In general when I'm playing chords and he's playing lower notes, there's so much harmonic information that it kind of just sounds like a nasty form of distortion. It comes across almost like you're listening to a mix of our signals on an FM radio which is just falling off the station with that crazy modulator distortion. It sounds like something seriously broken. When we both play single note things we get a more typical "clangy" "bell-like" metallic synth kind of sound one might expect from a ring mod. By itself this is pretty harsh and raw and ugly. I run it through a Behringer SansAmp clone (TM300) – my prize for this last Quiz - with some pretty serious gain to smooth it out and knock down some of the highest harmonics and then into a homebrew kill switch/power distribution box. I use it rather sparingly, and mixed in pretty subtly, just another little bit of weird amongst all the other layers.
And that ain't everything yet. I've got a microphone plugged into a Zoom 9001 set to all wet reverb and from there into a SansAmp GT2 set to some high-gain Marshall thing. My wife uses the momentary switch which I described in the Circadian Nations thread. Gives her something to do when there's no words for her. With even reasonable stage volume this thing howls uncontrollably when the pedal is pushed. Singing relatively loudly can overcome that feedback, but I recently thought to try adding a second, reversed polarity mic here to see if that might tame it.
Then there's what we call our "Mr. Rogers Mic". This is plugged into the front input on my Roland GI-10 Guitar to MIDI converter. This is meant to take a monophonic (single note) input like a microphone or bass, track its pitch and generate a MIDI note, which would trigger a sound on some other module (a Korg 05R/W in this case). Of course, we're not sending this a monophonic signal. This mic sits somewhere on or near the stage and picks up the entire mix, chooses some note or harmonic which is particularly prominent, and spits out that note. This is one of my most favorite party tricks. If you make it trigger a piano type sound it follows any dialog or movement or anything very much like the piano noodling behind a certain happy neighbor's show. For this incarnation, it triggers a glockenspiel sound through some tempo matched delays and a bit of overdrive (all internal to the 05R/W) and really kind of sounds like windchimes tuned to whatever key we're playing.
We’ve been troubleshooting this set for months now. Played our first real gig at Bev’s Juke Joint in early march (Samedi Gras), and…you know… There were still people in the place when we were done. Yeah, actually we got a pretty strong positive response. It was the end of a very long night of drinking. There were some technical difficulties that evening, but nothing I’ve been able to duplicate.
Got another show coming in the middle of April. I’m gonna try to stream our next practice, or record it, or try to get you Nutz a sneak preview.
I’d been saying it since I got back here to Duluth (about five years now) and finally decided last year that I was going to get LT into the Homegrown Music Festival. So I've collected a great little group of folks who are already familiar with my stuff. We got a slot closing the loudest club in town on Homegrown's SoupTown Thursday. We've put together a set of my more "conventional" song type things. There's no wholetone scales or diminished madness. All the pieces have vocals. But we've left ourselves plenty of room for experimentation and horrible noise in between and even in the middle of some of the songs. And we've worked out a rig that layers all kinds of incredibly unusual sounds over the top of these relatively simple straightforward pieces.
The basic heart of our system is the same rack that I use with Circadian Nations with some extra things jacked into the mixer, and a whole lot more pedals.
The drums for LT are basically no more than percussive timing cues and occasional dynamic punctuation. We could probably use a drum machine or even an iPod, but with the free form nature of what we're doing, it really wants live input. So I've got my friend Joshua sitting in front of 4 Roland drum pads (mounted on a dual conga stand) with sticks in his hand. These are set to trigger a thumpy kick and three different low toms. I've got the kick drum pedal up by me, but it's set to make a "Slow Crash" sound. When we find ourselves out in the middle of nowhere, I can pick a strategic point to stomp on it and cue the other guys that I'm going to go somewhere. We hope that most of them are able to figure out exactly where that might be... John's got the hi-hat pedal. This is really just a switch that triggers a "Foot Hat" sound so he can tap his toe and add some high frequencies to the mix. The triggers go to the D4 "brain". The audio out from this goes to my Alesis Quadraverb which is set to make a delay which runs as quarter notes somewhere around 80 BPM. This is almost like a metronome, and acts as our tempo reference. I end up sometimes playing off of that tempo, though. The delay might become dotted quarters, or dotted eighths, or something...
But you don't want to read about drums.
My friend John learned to play guitar from (and with) me. He often acted as a "guitar machine" in the early days of LT, and has very comfortably slipped back in. He's been playing his Fernandez Tele, but recently expressed interest in switching to my Rickenbacker. I'm going to have to print out a User's Guide... I can't say for sure how he's got his stuff set up. I know he's using my Boss DD3 Delay pedal. There's an Ensoniq sustain pedal plugged into the Tempo jack. Once we get a reference beat from the drums, he taps out the beat to follow. He's got 2 other delays in there, a DOD phaser (FX20B) and flanger (FX75B), my Death Metal (FX86), and an older version of the Digitech Vocalist harmonizer. This all into my V-Amp Pro set (I think) to the "Brit Blues" Marshal type amp with a good level of crunchy gain. I'm not sure of the order or what he uses when. He seems to be having fun, and it generally sounds pretty cool.
My guitar and Luke's bass are kind of intermingled and loopy, and easier to describe with a picture:
My pedal chain is really pretty straightforward. The HyperFuzz (Boss FZ2) is set to it's "Clean Boost" setting with a little of the treble rolled off, just like I do in CN. The "amp" is already running at a point where it breaks up nicely when I dig into the strings a bit. The booster pushes it a little further to fill out single note lines and/or get a bit more crunch for the really loud parts. This pedal (like all Boss pedals) is buffered-bypass so always presents a nice healthy impedance to the pickups. From here I run to a single channel module ripped out of a half-normalled patchbay. One of the four jacks is switched, but if you leave that empty, the other three are all connected. This splits my still dry signal off in two directions. One goes to the MoogerFooger (we'll get there...) and the other goes to the Behringer Reverb/Delay (DR400). This is set to Tap Tempo Delay mode, which I set to follow the drums. From here we go to my True Bypass Effect Loop w/Feedback. For the most part, the feedback stays off, but I can get down there and turn it's knob when I feel the need. So, it either sends the signal off to my V-Amp Bass Pro which is set to the Brit Class A (Vox AC30) with a bit more gain than I use for CN, or it sends it through the three pedals in the loop first. This loop creates a warbly weird synthy kind of lead tone. The Boss Pitch Shfiter (PS3) is set to a very short delay (not actually shifting pitch) with a healthy dose of feedback (repeats) and an all wet mix. The delay is short enough that I don't really "feel" it. It runs so fast that it adds some amount of resonance to certain notes, but I try to avoid that "stuck flanger" thing. It basically just smears the note. Then the Vibrato (Behringer UV300) takes and warbles that all over the place. I never did the Rate mod that I was contemplating, but it's slow enough for what we're doing here. The Depth is set pretty conservative. It's not so much like a siren as a broken tape machine. This mess goes into my Rodent, set to maximum gain and standard silicon clippers, tone rolled down a little, and volume set so as to be just a little louder than the bypassed tone. This path is useless for chords, or playing much faster than eighth notes, but sounds a whole lot like a failing analog synth when I play single notes. With all the smashing that the Rat does, the booster has very little impact on this tone. So I've got two basic sounds and then I can make the clean one louder.
Luke's thing is completely other. From his bass (usually his fretless Jazz) he goes into my Boss Stereo Chorus (CH1). The fun thing I've recently found with this chorus is that - when you use both outputs - one is dry, and the other is just the pitch modulated signal which sounds like a vibrato. When heard together they create that chorus sound. It buffers and splits the signal even when bypassed. He can leave it off when he wants more stable pitches, or turn it on and get some of that "broken tape machine" thing. The dry output goes to the MoogerFooger (patience...) and the other goes to his 1337Drive. This is set for a healthy dose of distortion, with the filter on the clean side turned down a bit. The low end comes through punchy and tight. In the effect loop of the distorted side he's got his Dunlop Bass Wah (105Q). From here it goes to my Bass Whammy. This also has a Dry and Effected output. The dry side goes to his V-Amp Bass. The pitch shifted output goes to the Bass Synth (Behringer BSY600), which has its own input to the mixer in the rack. This is a true synthesizer pedal which tracks the input pitch and triggers an internal "analog" synth sound. Well, it tries to follow the pitch. With a clean input, it tracks surprisingly well with no noticeable latency. But we're not giving it a nice clean signal, no! This poor thing gets this huge mess of harmonics and struggles to sort it out and pick one note to play. It actually fails quite gracefully and usually manages to pick a note somehow harmonically related to what he's playing. The original point of the Whammy was to just set and forget it at an octave up, to keep the synth up out of the bass's way, but of course he has to wiggle it. He actually sits on a chair with one foot on the wah and one on the whammy. One fun thing we found with this is that his rig makes just enough noise to trigger the synth even when he's not playing. He can modulate this noise with the wah and whammy and create strange abstract synth things with just his feet.
Then there's the MoogerFooger (thanks for your patience). This is a Ring Modulator (Moog MF102). For those who might not be familiar, it's basically audio rate amplitude modulation. It turns up and down one signal (call it A) based on the instantaneous voltage of the other ( call that B). The output voltage is A x B, but the frequencies sound like a mix of A+B and A-B. That us, if A is a 110 Hz sine wave (the fundamental of your 5th string) and B is a 220 Hz sine (2nd fret on the 3rd string) you get 110 and 330 which is not actually a note in our standard scale. Other ratios add up to all kinds of out of tune notes. Most often a ring mod pedal will have one audio input for your guitar or whatever, and an internal oscillator for the other. The MoogerFooger has that, and it can be adjusted to sub-audio freqs (which sounds like a tremolo) way up to super high frequencies. It also has an LFO to modulate that frequency. But better for our purposes is that it has a second "carrier" input, which overrides and replaces that oscillator. So I'm running my guitar (clean and dry after the boost) to the Audio In and Luke's bass (clean and dry from the chorus) to the Carrier. So what does that sound like? Well it depends on what each of us plays and how they relate mathematically to one another. In general when I'm playing chords and he's playing lower notes, there's so much harmonic information that it kind of just sounds like a nasty form of distortion. It comes across almost like you're listening to a mix of our signals on an FM radio which is just falling off the station with that crazy modulator distortion. It sounds like something seriously broken. When we both play single note things we get a more typical "clangy" "bell-like" metallic synth kind of sound one might expect from a ring mod. By itself this is pretty harsh and raw and ugly. I run it through a Behringer SansAmp clone (TM300) – my prize for this last Quiz - with some pretty serious gain to smooth it out and knock down some of the highest harmonics and then into a homebrew kill switch/power distribution box. I use it rather sparingly, and mixed in pretty subtly, just another little bit of weird amongst all the other layers.
And that ain't everything yet. I've got a microphone plugged into a Zoom 9001 set to all wet reverb and from there into a SansAmp GT2 set to some high-gain Marshall thing. My wife uses the momentary switch which I described in the Circadian Nations thread. Gives her something to do when there's no words for her. With even reasonable stage volume this thing howls uncontrollably when the pedal is pushed. Singing relatively loudly can overcome that feedback, but I recently thought to try adding a second, reversed polarity mic here to see if that might tame it.
Then there's what we call our "Mr. Rogers Mic". This is plugged into the front input on my Roland GI-10 Guitar to MIDI converter. This is meant to take a monophonic (single note) input like a microphone or bass, track its pitch and generate a MIDI note, which would trigger a sound on some other module (a Korg 05R/W in this case). Of course, we're not sending this a monophonic signal. This mic sits somewhere on or near the stage and picks up the entire mix, chooses some note or harmonic which is particularly prominent, and spits out that note. This is one of my most favorite party tricks. If you make it trigger a piano type sound it follows any dialog or movement or anything very much like the piano noodling behind a certain happy neighbor's show. For this incarnation, it triggers a glockenspiel sound through some tempo matched delays and a bit of overdrive (all internal to the 05R/W) and really kind of sounds like windchimes tuned to whatever key we're playing.
We’ve been troubleshooting this set for months now. Played our first real gig at Bev’s Juke Joint in early march (Samedi Gras), and…you know… There were still people in the place when we were done. Yeah, actually we got a pretty strong positive response. It was the end of a very long night of drinking. There were some technical difficulties that evening, but nothing I’ve been able to duplicate.
Got another show coming in the middle of April. I’m gonna try to stream our next practice, or record it, or try to get you Nutz a sneak preview.
