Journey of One

[TOTAL]

I wonder if anyone has tried recreating the live sound-space and mixing techniques used by Steve Roach in this performance.

i have asked AI how to go about that  on my MC-707 and h90, and here are some tips.

• Vary loudness of tracks
• Send only some of them to h90
• Start with Spacetime, then try adding slight micropitch before it
• Cut top and bottom frequencies for less pronounced, more background-felt effect
• Detune and time misalign LR channels
• If controlling wetness on the groovebox, make both h90 effects 100 percent

This is all fairly generic, isn’t it?

Do you have any more specific ideas?

[TOTAL]

Here is the performance

[tbskoglund]

Hi there,

Thanks for your post and sharing this piece! Always happy to see another Steve Roach fan here.

Do you have an external mixing board? A lot of the dense layers that he creates are done using a mixing console with precise control of reverbs/effects on multiple FX sends. The H90 would work great for this using Dual Mode since you could have 2 different reverbs or other combinations of effects. With the mixing console approach, the background pads/drones can have a lot more reverb applied while the percussion and acoustic instruments can stay more up front. His use of the mixing board is as much of a part of the performance as his sequencers, synths, and other instruments.

Steve has been a big user of Eventide reverbs and other processing effects over the years so you are definitely going in the right direction using an H90. Try some of the Hall reverb presets with a good amount of the high end cutoff, and turn the decay up to the highest setting. Blackhole, Wormhole, and ModEchoVerb would all be good choices to experiment with.

I would highly suggest reading this TapeOp article where he takes a pretty deep dive into his practice including gear and techniques: https://tapeop.com/interviews/161/steve-roach

[apalazzolo]

Cool stuff.

You’re going to have a blast exploring the H90!!!

The attached program list might help …

~Tony

 

 

 

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[TOTAL]

Many thanks for the replies.

To start with, I do not have a separate mixing board, but my groovebox is effectively acting as one and I am already seeing how central the mixer side is for this kind of music.

At the moment I am mostly controlling perceived distance with low-pass filtering, reverb amount and loudness rather than with panorama.

On the MC-707 I have eight tracks available. At the moment I am using two for drums and percussion and six for instruments. I am not using samples yet, though I will probably start doing so for special effects but I will need my own samples.

For external processing, I dedicate the MC707 internal shared reverb and use that path as the send to the H90, which gives me wet control. I can run that external path in stereo or split it into two mono channels. Given that most of my sounds are not pan-dependent, the dual mono option seems quite reasonable but I have yet to try that out.

Until now I had mostly been using the two H90 effects in series, but I am now trying parallel as well as it is more versatile I think.

There is also another option on the groovebox via the so-called assignable out. I can send one stereo pair or two mono signals that way, but it comes out fully wet, so nothing remains dry and I also lose a track for the return. That seems possible, though perhaps less practical unless I have another hw effect, which I don’t know what would be because of the versatility of h90.

Given these routing limits, I would be very interested in views on what is likely to be the best approach here:

– Split the H90 into two mono or dual paths and treat them as two contrasting spaces

vs

– Use the groovebox outputs in stereo, the more costly method with 100 percent wet Assignable Out, being left with only seven tracks on the groovebox.

Separately, I would love to see an option in a future update to store routing per preset or per Program.

Regarding Steve Roach performance, my impression is that the drums are almost unprocessed and sit more or less as two dry monos left and right, with the centre and depth being filled by the more and less atmospheric material.

The Tape Op interview was excellent by the way. I have been looking for such a zine for quite a while.

And Tony, thank you for the preset list. I still need to have a try once I reconnect the laptop. Never experimented with swirls so that my maybe highly valuable inspiration .

[tbskoglund]

You’re welcome.

I think either using the stereo FX send return, or the 2 mono send/return paths would be the more flexible option for your setup.

Since the MC-707 already has a lot of built in FX, I would suggest using the H90 in stereo since that really enhances the atmosphere of the FX processing and will probably get you closer to the big, lush spaces in Steve’s style of music.

 

 

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