Next time you're going to download samples from the Internet

[wub]

Stop and think.

https://www.facebook.com/HyperOnExperie ... 3836172220

11th track and about sampling.

Thundergrip
Soundcloud

I’ve always sampled. Here’s a list of what I’ve done and used to do it;

Age 9: Portable tape recorder with microphone placed in front of TV speaker to record Top of the Pops.

Age 11: Tape edits.
We had an integrated radio, record player and tape recorder. You play a record and record sections by quickly releasing the pause button while in record. Repeating this will allow you to re arrange a song and add stutter effects.

Age 18: Casio SK5 and RZ1 drum machine.
My first sampling tools. SK5 had quite a long sampling time (about 5 seconds on minimum resolution) and allowed you to play a sample spanned over a keyboard. RZ1 drum machine had 4 x 0.2 second samples and came with an audio cassette full of percussion sounds!

Age 20: Cheetah SX16.
What a piece of shit. Never worked properly, atrocious user interface. I returned it.

Age 21: Akai s1000.
Dream machine. It cost £2750 in 1991 which was a big deal. That’s the equivalent of £5000 now (I checked!). Think what you can get with £5k; Computer/software, awesome monitors, MIDI controller and a car.

The Akai opened the door to a world of sampling and fueled a data lust for sounds.

Danny and I even did a sample CD ourselves called Jungle Warfare, but I’ll talk about that later.

We started sampling our friends record collections. All of them. People would come to The Shed with their records and we would completely rinse them. Floppy discs were filled and stored by name of donor.

Films on VHS were also good for samples.

Age 25 and onwards: Akai S3000XL and later EMU e6400.
Both were really good. The Akai was rock solid on timing, but the converters were a little sub par. Gave everything a hollowness and slight brittle edge to the top end. Not shit, but not as good as today's sound. EMU had loads of fancy filters etc and did sound better than the Akai, but the timing was not very good. Layering snares in the EMU showed up timing issues.

By this time I was working with Jay as EZ Rollers. That’s where the real sampling began.

We knew all the DJs in our area and plenty of record collectors. They were all done. For larger collections we would schedule repeat sessions! We would turn up with beers and order a takeaway for our host.

Marathon sampling sessions would take a toll on my back. Often people’s setups weren't conducive for sampling, but my blood lust for sounds would override everything!

In the mid 90s, Jay and I went to a Funk night called Gas Station run by Duncan Filp in Norwich. I remember hearing all those breaks and vocals and practically mucking my pants. We set about sampling everything that Duncan had, which took quite a while. These samples were instrumental when we came to make Weekend World.

We did some house tunes for Twisted in the 90s. Part of the deal was that we could sample the owners collection!

We also bought job lots of records from auctions which filled the studio.

We had so many fucking records! They filled walls, everywhere. We had a record room at the studio with shelves 8 foot high. One day we just got rid of all of them (not the mailouts!) by putting them back in the auction.

We actually reached a point where everyone we knew had been sampled. We had even got people we didn’t know via people we did!

Our next idea was to approach independent record shops in Norwich and pay them to let us sample their stock. This was good. Jay would peruse the records and pass me a stack for sampling. We got some good stuff doing that.

So, you’d imaging that I have a lot of data? I can’t begin to tell you.


Track - Thundergrip

One of my personal favourites.

After each sampling session we would be excited about putting a new tunes together. This track came out of one of those.

I’m struggling to think of where the vocals come from, perhaps you can help?!

I remember sampling the break from a record and being really excited about editing it. We did all the scratches and table stops.

Incidental edits at the end of 8’s are from Mantronix.

Psycho screech.

Awesome drum editing. Reminiscent of Lords of the Null Lines. I loved doing these crazy drum edit intros, and still do. One of my favorites is the intro to Crowd Rocker.

“Can you feel it” pitch sample was done by first looping the sample in the Akai (using crossfade overlap) and then programing the pitch bend manually using pitch controller data. The Akai had a variable hold time for loops, so we manually calibrated the loop sustain to fit in time with the tune. I kid you not.

Distorted bass note is a lift from Dimensional Holofonic Sound - 9 Bad Acid (what a tune).

Love the way this one drops, real groovy. Loads of scratching samples adding to that Hip-Hop influence I love.

Little synth notes playing melodies. The deeper scratchy stab is from an 808 State record.

Littered with Fat Boys samples.

Wobble bass note was made by copying a bass sample, reversing it and splicing the two together in the Akai. A crossfade loop is then applied for sustain.

Intense synth switch layered with Roland JD 800 layered samples.

Drum edit bridge that exits with Scooby Doo sounds. Makes me smile every time.

The track keeps evolving. The addition of the sleazy Jazz riff to the piano/rhodes stab is lovely.

Switch to Korg M1 Techno riff.

We added the drums to the end so people could sample them.

How did we name it?

The night we started this tune we were visited by our friend Shaun Humphries. He was in quite an excited, agitated state and he recanted the story of his day at work. The weather was bad that day, and he had been working at the top of a crane out on the jib.

It had been a rush job done with minimal safety equipment, and with the humour of nervous excitement he had coined a phrase for the way he was holding on: Thundergrip!

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Unfinished track and its all about timing.

Track: Suckers - unfinished
Soundcloud


A little bit more about how we worked in The Shed.

We had quite a few analogue synths and they were pretty cheap back then. As an example the Korg M1 cost £1200, but you could pick up an SH101, MC202 or Juno 6 for well under £200.

We had a TB 303 with MIDI box that cost £300.

I fitted a MIDI expansion to the Jono 6, but used a Kenton Electronics MIDI to CV converter for the 202 and 101.

The Kenton M2CV was a bitch.

It was programed in binary and each bit could take one of 4 states. On, Off, slow blink and fast blink. Coupled with the fact that CV was not fully standardised, you would have to chose the correct setting for different synths, this made programing more of a discovery than a process.

As pitch is defined by the voltage, and not every synth responded the same, sometimes you would have to calibrate the voltage shift over an octave manually.

Using 4 state binary.

You bastards.

The Alesis MMT8 on the other hand, was a dream come true.

Prior to that I had just used an Amiga with little success. Selling that and getting the MMT8 was the best thing I’ve ever done.

They are an absolute dream to program.

I was like a skinny white Bruce Lee on those babies!

They weren’t anything like looking at a MIDI editor on your sequencer. No individual rex slices. No shifting a hi hat to replace the kick or throwing blocks on a screen to create a melody.

They are step sequencers. At each step you could choose the note, note on, note off, velocity and timing. That was pretty much it.

We usually cut a break into three parts; kick, snare and shuffle. We would record the basic rhythm live and then go straight to edit mode and manually fix note lengths and velocities.

There were only 96ppqn, so divisions were on 0, 24, 48 and 72 - simple.

Entering a value above 127 for velocity would default to 127 so I would enter 999 after each step. This was something I could do very quickly indeed.

It was almost like you were constructing beats with your hands. I really miss that. When I made the move to Logic 3 I thought it would only expand the possibilities of editing, but it didn’t. There was something about the process of opening a window, moving a block and repeating for each layer that slowed the process down.

Hyper-On tunes became so complex that we got another MMT8.

I remember setting them both up for the 1st time and coming across a timing problem. The one on the left was running the drums and went into the second MMT8 on the right which played the music. The MIDI chip in the second sequencer gave it’s own data higher priority, throwing the drum timing out in an inconsistent way. My guess is that the chip was simply slotting packets of data in where it could.

Swapping the MMT8s over solved this problem immediately and we never looked back.

But this is a big deal.

I can’t begin to tell you (if you don’t know) the importance of timing. Its why an old James Brown track can have four instrument and sound big and full, and why a modern dance track can have many, many layers and still sound empty.

It’s what’s not in time that make a groove - period.

The timing problem was so horrendous, but when we swapped the MMT8s over and played the music, it disappeared.

It didn’t disappear, it was still there. All the melodies and synths were thrown out of time slightly and randomly by the MIDI chip assigning priorities. I think this added to the groove.

I wish there was an MMT8 daisy chain midi delay plugin. Perhaps I’ll extract the timing info and make up some templates.


Track: Suckers (unfinished)

As we worked on different tracks we would keep a running copy of any progress. Danny called them “Crazy Pats”. All the early Hyper-On tapes are called “Al’s Crazy Pats” or “Tronix Crazy Pats”.

Sample from Public Enemy.

Amen and Apache breaks. This must have been done late in the Hyper-On era as we never used Amen and I found this on DAT.

Kick drum from Terminator by Goldie. Incidentally, the pitch drum from Terminator was done by Rob Playford on an Eventide Harmoniser 2000. Back in the Goldie days Rob had some pretty mad top end gear like the Eventide and a Sony DAT that cost £5k!

Sh101 bassline. This had the best portamento.

This track is far from complete and I think would have been more rolled out than previous Hyper tunes. It sounds a little influenced by “Defender - Bass” etc. I think this must have been done at a time when Jungle Techno was settling into Drum and Bass.

I have a few other bits like this knocking about. Mostly they are odd drum loops, crazy fx and some more basic tune ideas.

Would you like more of these?

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10th track and why “mastering” is my fault. Also, this may be a bit of a rant.

Monarch of the Glen.
Soundcloud

Hyper-On tunes were constructed very simply.

If the beat didn’t sound full enough, we just added more breaks. There was no high passing, no checking of phase, no rex files or Apple loops and no tuning of kicks.

To get beats in time we would run an 808 closed hi hat on 16s, and play the loop with a 1 bar trigger. We manually adjusted the pitch on the Akai and mixed the break to the hi hat.

At no point did we use a compressor. Even on the output bus. On any Hyper-On tune.

This led so some infuriating situations in the studio.

The 1st generation of DAT machines were pretty bad. Digital storage on mechanical devices? Everyone bought those little Sony portable DATs which were, at best, an apology for a recording medium.

Everyone who had one, had a broken one.

All the 1st gen DATs were prone to clipping above digital zero (in the red). It was not like audio tape where you could record as hot as you like, one slip into the red would ruin a recording. Rob Playford would record to DAT and then listen back intensely on headphones, just to check for clipping.

We always tried to get the mix as near to zero as possible, without going into the red, but this could take many attempts.

It wasn’t until after Hyper-On that I experimented with compression and a little while later a 3 band dynamic ProTools plugin called Master-X.

Rob Playford was mad keen on Master-X and saw it as a solution to everything! I guess some of it rubbed off on me and I started using it.

The benefits were obvious, the tracks were louder, but at the cost of dynamics.

Around the same time there was a hardware multiband dynamic processor called TC Finalizer. I remember talking to Stuart Hawk at Metropolis Mastering about the Finalizer and what he thought of it, he said:

“Yea, we had one of those in for a while”. He then hung his head and said:
“Oh my God, what it does to people's music”.

That was about 1997. The year the loudness war began?

Stuarts opinion was legit. He runs a mastering suite at Metropolis crammed with Maselec and Sontec eqs, rare German cutting lathes and bespoke monitoring. It was costing us £250 per hour to master there.

I am always asked about mastering and people always get the same balshy answer: are you currently getting £250 per hour to master? Then are you a mastering engineer?

So does that mean that everyone is wrong? Of course not. You do what you want, when you want. If you want to put a saturation, multi limiter, side eq, channel emulator or anything on your output bus, then just do it.

You could argue that all mix decisions should be dealt with prior to mastering, but you can choose for yourself.

Hyper-on tunes have stood the test of time and still sound lively and engaging. Because we had very limited means of processing audio, we chose samples that already sounded good. We made the tunes without bothering too much about the mix, whereas nowadays we spend the whole evening designing snares before we make the music.

Its not wrong, but I do feel that in some cases production has become more important than the musical content.

Pete Waterman said it best: “No one leaves a night club humming a kick drum”.



Track 10 - Monarch of the Glen

What a fucking tune.

We loved doing those ambient intros. The whale sounds came from Pete Gleedall sample CD.

Synth pad came from Classic Gold Synth CD.

The arpeggiated synth was not done with an arpeggiator, it was done manually on the MMT8!

Glorious Korg M1 intro layering many internal sounds.

The half step beat that bridges to the drop had been knocking about for a while and I was dying to use it.

R-r-r-r-r-roll the drums!

Roland Jono 6 bass (like you didn’t know).

Break came from a Time and Space sample CD that demo’d future releases. Nice find!

Loads of synth sounds from the A-D sample CD.

A real drum workout. Gating and pitch effects. Intense programing.

2nd synth was made by layering many sounds in the Akai.

When we were mixing this in the studio at Purple Rain, Hammy came through to the control room and said he liked the slide in the chromatic synthline around 3:20!

Quite dark. I can remember pulling hard core faces when we were making this!

Steppy bridge to breakdown and return of arpeggiated synth to outro.

I love this one.

Hyper-On did a live gig in Sterling, Scotland once. No one moved during our set until we played this track. Then 400 people lost their fucking minds!

How did we name it?

I was sitting in a Chinese take away waiting for my egg fried rice, curry sauce and chips. Leafing through a sunday supplement I came across an advert for a new 4x4 car. It was pictured on the top of a hill, set within a mountainous skyline.

The tagline went: “King of the mountain, Monarch of the glen”.

I left the takeaway and started thinking: that’s a cool name for a tune. So I went back, tore the page from the magazine and cut out the tag line so I could stick it to the floppy disc.

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9th track and the names on the back of the records.

Track 9 - Disturbance
Soundcloud

Once upon a time I stayed in my bedroom for 2 years.

I had a Casio RZ 1 drum machine, a shitty old Technics (with rotary pitch control), a Casio SK5 sampling keyboard and a Fostex 4 track tape machine.

I had a large collection of early Electro and Hip Hop that I systematically sampled and made new tunes out of. I would use the pitch control on the Technics to change the key , and sample into the RZ 1.

I would run beats and melodies down to the 4 track and overdub. Synchronising tracks was done manually with the RZ 1, and if I got the start point wrong I would just have another go at it ‘till I got it in time.

I can remember reaching the back of my record collection and effectively finishing my voyage of discovery as to what could be done with my setup. I’d made an album and it was particularly shit.

Either that night or the weekend after I actually left my bedroom and bumped into Danny. He invited me out.

Danny introduced me to his friend Aaron and with Youngie we all went to a Rave in Hackney. When we got there the police were shutting it down!

Amazingly enough, there was another party round the corner. It was at the Zodiac Dance Studio (I think) and it was a night called Distortion (I think).

I am by nature very sceptical, and I engaged the door man in conversation;
“Do you have any lasers or anything?” I asked.
The doorman kissed his teeth and said: “We got ‘nuff lasers Guy”.

It seemed legit, so we went in.

And I saw the light, and it was good.

Aaron was cool as fuck. He rang me and asked if I wanted to go out with him and his mate Jamie. We went to Eclipse in Cambridge.

At sometime o’clock in the morning Aaron and I were chilling in the foyer when he said: “Let’s go and find my mate Jamie”.

What I saw was something new. Jamie had somehow produced his own exclusion zone at the front of the dance floor. He had stupidly long hair and a blue and silver shell suit. He had the biggest smile you had ever seen in your life and was dancing like it was the end of the world. He was having a better time than anyone else, ever.

I had another moment. I thought: why wasn’t I doing that?

The crew were Danny, Youngie, Aaron, Jamie, Jason and Mark Freeman, Scotty, Lee and Shaun. They are my brothers. We formed that bond that you formed with your mates when you first went Raving.

That was over 20 years ago. Shaun, Jason, Scott and Danny all live in Beccles now. Mark is in Carlton Colville. Aaron moved to New Zealand and Jamie lives in Andorra.

Track - Disturbance

Originally this was going to be subtitled: “Inspired by a sweaty session under Kenny Ken”.

It was another night at Eclipse. Kenny was playing the last set. It was one of those beautiful moments at 7am when the lights came on and everyone kept dancing. Kenny was enjoying it too. He had his eyes shut and was bobbing while his hand followed the snare in a cool chopping motion. Biblical.

Danny and I went back to The Shed and starting writing this tune.

Intro pad was from a sample CD called Ambient by Zero-G.

Sliding sort-of white noise fall was made by excessively time stretching in the Akai.

Orchestral choir sample.

Korg M1 melody.

“Tiger tiger” sample is from a William Blake poem.

Funky break before drop is from the film Shaft. I loved the velocity fade back into the drop.

All the gating was done by reducing the note on length within the MMT8.

Loads of Hip Hop FX and vox samples - these were my favourite.

The watery bass note was so much fun.

Lots of drum edits and rolls. Would you call this broken beat now?

Track changes every 8 and 16 bars. The ending has some proper mad edits.

The track name “Disturbance” has no real meaning. Its just a cool name for a tune.

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8th track and a proper reminisce.

Track - The Threshold of Sanity
Soundcloud

Today I did a video interview with a freelance journalist called Tim Cant.

He did the Computer Music cover CD interview with Friction which was just the best thing I’ve seen in ages. He filmed Friction going through the process of knocking up a tune and all the decisions he made doing that.

I learnt a lot from this. Infact, copying this idea of watching someone construct music forms the basis of how I lecture. I tour for a month every year doing masterclass in music production for Access to Music colleges.

Tim knows his stuff. He actually knew my stuff better than I did! He played me a remix I didn’t know we’d done and pointed out that there were two versions of Imajica....

It was enjoyable, and I got to reminisce about working with Peshey, Foul Play and Mixrace and a host of other things.

Hyper-On did a lot of tracks for Peshey including the Piano Tune and the Vocal Tune. Peshey is a brilliant producer and a joy to work with.

He would turn up at The Shed with a bunch of samples and a definite idea of what sort of tune he wanted. He would have all the breaks, stabs, bass and vocals and me and Danny would put the tune together for him.

Peshey didn’t have a lot of technical knowledge and would describe the type of rolls he wanted in the drums by conducting with his finger while he followed a drum roll. We made him a conductor's stick out of a piece of rolled up A4 paper topped with a pen lid.

He used this extensively and it became known as “The Shuffle Stick”.

Foul Play were great remixers. They had such a simple way of remixing tunes that worked every time.

When we engineered their second Omni Trio remix John Morrow put the original track on the technics and played the 1st 16 bars. It was an Amen snare played in a pitched pattern.

He said: “make the 1st 16 bars an Amen snare played in a pitched pattern, but play it differently and put an effect on it”.

It was the same for the next 16 bars, and so on...

I thought this was genius. Copy what’s been done well before and change it to your style. This works on so many levels.

Also, we spoke about the DJ set I recently did as Hyper-On and I was keen to show Tim the patterns I’d noticed in the BPMs over the years 91-94.

The tempo changes from around 127bpm to 163bpm.

To factor this into my set I chose to mix a few tracks within one tempo bracket and the chop mix to another tempo. But I could definitely see patterns by year.


7th Track - Threshold of Sanity

Two great sounds in here that we’d been itching to use; the Hammond and the break.

Its quite a full on intro. I remember that I couldn’t program out the initial stab from the pad that fades quickly and then rises slowly, so I left it in!

Original TB 303 bassline. Gorgeous.

Quite rolled out for a Hyper-On tune.

Love the techno switch.

Quite a few N-Joi influences.

Last breakdown is the SH101. Very Intense. Octave shift was operated manually.

How did we name it?

I was once told the story of someone who went to a big rave somewhere. They did something that made them think that outside the dance tent was another universe with its own reality, very much different than ours.

And when you stood in the doorway from the tent, you stood on the threshold of sanity.

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7th track and more influences.

Track - A Certain Emotion
Soundcloud

In the late 80s and early 90s Danny and I went to a lot of club nights and raves and saw a lot of live acts.

The ones I remember were; Shades of Rhythm, N-Joi, Rhythm Section, Guru Josh, Prodigy, Altern8.

I regret never hearing Adamski or 808 State play live. I heard Adamski was amazing. There was such a massive buzz about him.

To advertize Adamski’s album they used the styling of a Lucozade bottle, but Lucozade complained and got the advert pulled. A while later when they realized how big Adamski was they produced adverts that played on their association with NRG.

Influences.

The Prodigy were/are excellent, both musically and live. The first time I heard Charly Says on a system I came up so hard a bit of wee came out.

As Hyper-On Experience we had tried to hook up with The Prodigy’s manager, but nothing came of it. His 1st album was called “The Prodigy - Experience”.

Influences.

N-Joi were the Dons for me. I’ve heard them half a dozen times and it was always brilliant. They had a raft of analogue synths on stage and sequenced using an Alesis MMT8.

After one of their gigs in Yarmouth I went up to them and asked what equipment they were using, one said: “I can’t tell you”. They immediately organized the putting away of all the equipment so I couldn’t see.

I can’t see the point in this and the whole “I’m not gonna tell you how I do things” business. The way I see it, even if I gave you my hard drive full of samples you would not make Hyper-On/EZ Rollers tunes. You would make your tunes with my samples.

When we were deciding what we were going to do live we came up with the idea of uniforms. Danny bought and altered some clothes for us. They were meant to be red with black piping down the arms and legs. But it later transpired that he had bought all the gear from a womans shop and the red actually looked pink on stage! We even had pink sailor hats with HE embossed on them...

The horror.


7th Track - A Certain Emotion (Al’s Theme)

Making music is an intensely personal experience. You are, in effect, attempting to communicate your emotions without words.

I sometimes see it like a mirror. The music you make reflecting how you feel.

I guess I was just a skinny messed up kid, or something, but I remember this tunes meaning a lot about how I was feeling at the time.

Sampled pad with Korg M1 piano.
Sampled vocal note and Korg synth.
Vocal sampled looped in the Akai using crossfade overlap.
Korg flute playing hookline.
Sampled Hammond.
“Stirring Stuff” sample came from sampling the radio.
Dropping to standard 4x4.

The modulated synth bassline was a variation of an eq trick we used to do. We would effect a synthline by massively boosting the midrange and then sweeping the eq frequency. This one was done in the same way, but modulating a phasor effect in the Korg.

As Hyper-On we didn’t do many 4x4 tracks. I guess this was a final gasp before Danny removed all the kicks!

Still managed to slip in the cheesy: “One, two, three, four” sample at the end

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6th track and influences.

Track 6: Imajika
Soundcloud

My first love was Hip Hop.

When I was 13 I lived above my parents shop in West Wickham high street. I remember lying on the lounge floor, watching Top of the Pops with the family, when a band called Tik And Tok performed Cool Running. They were dancing like robots to electro beats. It was 1981.

It felt like the hand of life reached out and touched me and I knew from that moment what I wanted to do.

I wanted to Breakdance/Rap/Beatbox/Graffiti and make music. For ever.

I even made a rudimentary sequencer on my Commodore Vic 20! I knew nothing about quantising, but programmed the Vic 20 to record me triggering internal sounds played on the keyboard and loop them (badly). Casting my mind back I think there was a simple counting system that stored a value between keystrokes and played them back.

I spent a few years rolling around the high street on bits of lyno. I considered this perfectly normal behaviour.

Around 1986 I heard House music. They were using the electro beats, but in standard 4 by 4 formation. There were vocal samples played like drum beats, melodies and basslines.

I liked it. So I started making it.

But I also liked Hip Hop, so I combined the two.

The problem was I kept the 4x4 beats, but put breaks over the top. It didn’t groove.

I remember Danny getting really frustrated with me, and one day he just exclaimed: “WHY DO WE ALWAYS HAVE TO HAVE THAT FUCKING KICK DRUM RUNNING THROUGH EVERYTHING!!!”.

He may have had a point.

At that time there were hints of Jungle Techno in Rave, but no real definition.

Until Rhythm Section made “Feel the Rhythm” (Coming on Strong) 1991
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiiHaexxK_I

Check this tune out - all the way through.

Vocal loops and vocal fx. Synth stab melody. Sub bass and breaks. Piano breakdown.

And the arrangement! 1 bar drop out at the ends of 8s and 16s where breaks are used as drum rolls.

Sound familiar?

Rhythm Section were Ellis Dee and Rennie Pilgrim (and someone else who I forget, I’m so sorry!).

I bumped into Rennie Pilgrim a few years back. I turned into a proper Fan Boy and told him how his music had been such a big influence on what I was doing. It was apparent to me that he had heard this before and with grace he explained how it had happened:

“Alex, I said to the guys in the band: why don't we speed the breaks up and add these house riffs?”

He then smiled like a Cheshire Cat.



Track 6: Imajika

Sampled pad intro with Korg M1 presets. Outrageously cheesy Jazzy vibe playing.

Juno 6 sub, of course.

Breakdown to rave stab played in a joyful pattern. Drum rolls.

There is a sample that says: “Well you'd better hurry up Sir!”. Dj Peshay loved this and said: “No one uses samples like that!”.

Lots of Norman Cook - Skip to my Loops samples

2nd breakdown has a more Rave/Happy Hardcore feel to it.

3rd switch seems a little dubby.

4th switch with vibe sound is a little intense! I guess you’d call it a bridge nowadays, but we extend it before returning to the original riff.

The title came from a Clive Barker book - Imajica. I just couldn’t remember how to spell it!

I told you that we used to work standing up? We danced all the way through making this tune. Danny has a big smile.

The Smiley Rock Remix.

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5th track and the concept of naiveity.

Track: Ascension (To The 9th Level)
Soundcloud

Track: Ascension (To The 9th Level) prototype version from tape (low quality)
Soundcloud

I’ve been asked by a few people about the chances of Hyper-On returning.

Its a nice idea, but I fear I’ve learnt too many rules about making music to recapture my youthful enthusiasm.

We made those tunes at a time when UK underground dance was exploding with experimentation.

Simply put: we took Hip Hop ideas (breaks/bass and sound fx) and added the ideas of American House and European Techno (stabs/piano and synths).

We just speeded it up a bit and called it Jungle Techno.

There were very few pigeon holes to describe the music played at raves at the time. It just seemed that every track had a breakbeat and the variation came from the samples used, or synth patterns played.

It was at a moment before things settle into their respective genres of music. Before “music” entered Drum n Bass and before House entered the charts.

It’s possible that the very early 90s rave scene defined all the genres that we now have under the banner of “Dance”.

How do you recapture that?

Track 5: Ascension (To The 9th Level)
Track 5a: Ascension (To The 9th Level) from tape.

We started with the orchestral stab pattern that comes in halfway through the tune. I loved this, but had some difficulty wrapping a tune around it. The tape demo shows this.

Eventually we got a load of new sample CDs and came across the spooky intro pad and quirky synth loop.

The drums sound a bit Tod Terry and the sub is Juno 6.

There are plenty of little Hyper-On drum edits and tricky programing that we loved doing at that time.

Each one of these had to be manually entered into the hardware sequencers - a process that I enjoyed immensely! I don’t play an instrument as such, but I could program the fuck out of that MMT8!

Loads of Malcolm McLaren Buffalo Gals samples.

Every 16 bars changes. New samples come in towards the end of the tune. New riffs are introduced late in the song - Danny did a lot of these.

Love this track.

The tape version;

This one is insane.

The 1st breakdown synth was the Korg M1. I can remember playing it in.

Breaks are Mantronix.

2nd Breakdown: All Korg M1 classics

Not sure where we were going with the Queen samples.

3rd Breakdown: My favourite synth pattern and the Buffalo gals samples.

4th Breakdown: Sounds like the MC202 on bass.

5th Breakdown: Sh101 and MC202.

6th Breakdown: Korg M1 and Sh101.

7th Breakdown: 7th? Are you kidding me? And what's with the cheesy guitar riff?

How did we name it? Just put this on full blast, grit your teeth and see if you can make it...

[wub]

4th track and more waffling.

Track: Watch Us Now
Soundcloud


When I hear sounds I see colour, shape and movement. Its dulled a bit over the years, but its still there.

Synth sounds, like the harmonically rich orchestral rave stab, appeared orange with a burnt yellow hue, and have a surface texture like a sponge crossed with heavily ridged bark. Its sort of a rounded rectangular shape that bends a little and raises...

They are enjoyable to see! And many hours were spent experimenting with these sounds as they were the most fun.

As for why Hyper-On tunes seem to completely change every 8 to 16 bars - I’m unsure.

Rave tunes at that time were very disjointed. There were so many breakdowns! I guess the stop/start arrangement of the tracks at the time were an influence, but we didn’t bother repeating the last 32 bars - we just played something else!

I think we were telling a story. Like it describes a journey where at the end you feel glad you’ve made it. That pretty much summed up the Rave days.

Track 4: Watch us now

The name came from a sample we had, but Danny had introduced it as part of his spoken repertoire. Danny was a good dancer and would laugh and throw one liners at everyone. He might, on occasion, throw a move and say: “Watch us now!!!”.

The intro whistle was a blatant steal from a track we had heard Rob Playford do (or was involved with). I loved this sound and couldn’t wait to use it.

The sub is from the Juno 6.

Breaks from Norman Cook - Skip to my Loops

Orchestral sound came from sitting in The Shed constantly doing 30 second samples of the radio on the Akai. I would listen to classical music hoping to find a killer sample! We had no DAT at that time.

Synth is Sh101. I think the phase fx came from modulating the pulse width of an oscillator with a slow lfo. Its nice to hear this synth in its pure form as nowadays we would process the fuck out of it.

Other Synth is the 202. This whole tunes is a bit of an analogue work out.

Strings are pure Korg M1 classics!

The vocoder sample “Break it down suicidal” was made on the Boss SE 50 and was a sample from UK Hip Hop group Hardnoise (I think).

[wub]

Third track and about the recording process and samples.

Track 3: Another Rave
Soundcloud

Reposted because I put it on the wrong friggin account.

All the tracks were written in The Shed, but we chose to hire outside studios to mix the EPs.

The first EP - Fun for all the family was mixed in Norwich at a studio called Beaten Track by Rob Playford. All the others were mixed at Purple Rain in Yarmouth.

I remember the studio owners smiling as they realised we wanted to mix ourselves so they did fuck all!

I don't remember much about the first studio, but Purple Rain was a studio I visited many times. It was run by a guy called Hammy (Richard Hamilton). I think it was a Studiomaster desk and monitoring was on Tannoy dual concentrics and NS10s (with tissue paper over tweeters).

I think the fx we put on the bassline to Lords of the Null Lines was from a Zoom fx unit, there were also Drawmer compressors.

It got to the point where Hammy would just let us in and we would be left alone to mix all day.

Sampling was something we did a lot. We also bought many sample CDs.

The most influential samples CD we had was Norman Cook - Skip to my Loops. This was by far the best produced sample pack and had the most amazing breaks. Along with Zero-G Ecstatic Goldmine these made up the bulk of the breaks used by Hyper-On.

Synth sounds came from a CD called A-D (analog to digital).

We also had quite a sweet deal with the shop in Norwich where we bought the Akai sampler. They would let us sample all the presets from the new synths that turned up!

Like most sample hunters we would rinse peoples record collections. This is something that I still do today, in fact it’s possible that I’ve spent most of my adult life bent over a Technics gently coaxing a stylus to the start point on records.

Track 3: Another Rave

I can’t remember how we came up with the name.

The lead stab was made by layering many sounds in the Akai.

I remember it wasn't tuned to “C” and to get the pattern I used a lot of black keys!

Also, Rob Playford chose to alter the arrangement and did this in a rather smug way that annoyed me. He explained as he altered the sequencer that : “This is called arrangement”.

Yes mate, I knew that, thanks.

I had a tape from a Rave Pack where this tunes was played and the MC chanted “Every day’s my birthday!”.

Its mostly sample with the SH101 following the lead in the 4th and 5th breakdown.

4th and 5th breakdown! You don’t hear that in tune descriptions nowadays!

[wub]

2nd track and the shed at the bottom of the garden.

Track: The Frightner
Soundcloud

My landlady’s shed where we worked was unbearable, so somehow I persuaded my young sister to let us use hers. It was an old bath house detached from the main cottage by a small yard and set in the middle of a terrace of three houses.

It was a popular place.

Every evening after work Danny and I would meet and make tunes and our friends would visit. Youngie (one of the names on the back of the records) made a platform up one end to store the flight cases and serve as a chill out area for visitors. I also carpeted it.

We always referred to it as “The Shed”.

Conversations would go like this:
“Are you down the shed tonight?”
“Yes”

Many people passed through including; Mastervibe, Foul Play, Peshey, LTJ Bukem, Conrad, MixRace, Rob Playford, and half of Beccles. I’ll chat about working with these people later.

We did get a few complaints. One night during a pause in the music the mixing desk picked up a police transmission. They must have been right behind the shed, in the carpark, because I could hear every word on the monitors! The next day I visited my neighbours to pacify them. I told them that if they had a problem they could always come and see me. They said: “Why do you always play the same tune”.

Track2: The Frightner

We had some new samples we were itching to play with and started with that low booming sound (from Pete Gleadall’s sample CD) and the acid synth sampled from Breakers Revenge by Arthur Baker.

The whole track seemed to fall into place without us trying. From start to finish it took 6 hours.

At the end of the night, when we played the final tune back, I had a moment.

I couldn’t believe we had made a tune like that so quickly, and I became uneasy to point where I had a panic attack.

Perhaps Danny felt the same, and as we shuffled about mumbling to ourselves Danny came up with the name: “The Frightner”.

Because it scared us.

[wub]

1st track and how we got signed to Moving Shadow.

Track: HE Anthem
Soundcloud

Around the time I started working with Danny, Jay started DJing a lot more. Jay managed to get himself on a few mailing lists for promos, one of which was Moving Shadow.

I think I remember Jay speaking to us a few times about sending our tracks out, but me and Danny were totally focused on the music. I had previously completed a solo album that received a very negative response and I think that had slowed me down.

Somewhere along the line we assembled a 12 track demo tape to send to Rob Playford at Moving Shadow. I can remember the last track being unfinished so we cut it short and added a sample off a Cold Cut record that said: “Honey, I’ve got rhythms I haven't used yet!”.

Cocky bastards.

We went down to see Rob at his house in Stevenage. We chatted at length in his studio in his spare room and the conversation went well. I liked what he had to say and he liked our music, so we agreed to release 3 EPs from the 12 tracks we had sent him. This was later changed to just 1 EP with the pick of the 12 tunes.

1st track: HE Anthem

We wanted to write a big piano tune like the ones we were hearing at Raves.

We had the piano riff and all the beats sorted, but no vocal. We bought a vocal sample CD in the hope that it had a useable sample. The first track on the CD had the vocal we used and every other sample was crap!

I couldn’t believe how well the male vocal sounded and it slotted in the tunes just fine. We then played it out live that night, I think!

The piano was a Korg M1 preset , loads of people used this.

The knocky round bass note was also a staple sound for Rave at that time and is made by distorting a 303 with a fast decay filter envelope, but we sampled it of a record.

The gritty synth stab phase effect was made by layering the same sample in a keygroup on the Akai s1000 and altering the pitch of one of the samples a very small amount. This made the waveforms move out of alignment over time - phase effect.

There is a synth break towards the end of the song that seems heavily influenced by the group N-Joi. They were a big influence, but I’ll chat about influences in another post.

Alex

[wub]

The shed at the bottom of the garden - equipment.

Circa 1994

Left wall:
Roland Juno 6 with midi retrofit
Korg M1
Alesis something or other
2x Alesis MMT8
Alesis datadisc
Dat machine
Akai S1000
Floppy discs
Sample CDs

Back wall:
Hi Fi amp
Tape Deck
More floppys
Another Dat machine
Kenton M2CV converter
Roland SH101
Roland Mc202
JBL 4208
Warfdale Hi Fi Speakers
Yamaha 01 Digital desk
Boss SE 50 FX
Emu vintage keys
Behringer composer compressor.

This picture was taken just before Hyper-On ended and EZ Rollers started.

We always made music standing up.

About the gear:

The Juno is an absolute beast. It has the most amazing arpeggiator and I still have that synth today. It has the bigest sub bass in the world and was used on every Hyper-On tune. It also did the bassline on Walk This Land.

The Korg M1 was pure Rave. The piano, strings and synth sounds were magical. All the "music" parts of our tunes were done on this especially the intro to Monarch of the Glen.

The Alesis synth was quite a late addition and didn't have that many good sounds.

We bought the MMT8 because we has seen N-Joi use them. We had 2 so we could do drums on one and music on the other. There was a big difference with the MIDI timing depending on where in the MIDI chain you put them. The memories were dumped to the datadisc for storage.

Akai s1000. World class - period. The timing was rock solid and much better than the EMU 6400 we later got. It had so many cool features like velocity controlled sample start, individual everything for each key group and could stack 4 sample on one key group.

The Yamaha mixer was also a late addition and most Hyper-On tunes were written on a shitty Samik mixer.

The Boss SE50 fx unit was amazing too. The phasor, reverb and delays were really cool.

The EMU vintage keys was new and as far as I can remember was not featured heavily in Hyper-On, but EZ Rollers kaned it.

The JBLs came late to the party and most tunes were written on the Warfdale Hi Fi speakers.

Most synths in Hyper-On were analogue. We made extensive use of the Juno, 202 and Sh101. The 101 is an amazing machine and cost me £140. The Juno was £75 and the MC202 cost about £190.

The best thing about this setup was that you could dance while you made music! Instead of nodding your head in front of a computer while you drop ash on the keyboard.

[Sharmaji]

absolutely fucking ace, wub.

which one of you lot said jungle was boring, again ?

[fragments]

Fucking love sampling. Really enjoying that studio pic as well. I still download samples off the internet, but us them less than if I sample something off a vinyl (or whatever) I try to make the best of it. Even if it gets totally destroyed or layered into another sound.

[nameless133]

Fuck yeah! I gonna sample from every song I like.

[killakam98]

This makes me wanna use FL2 again
Great read, really inspirational.

[Karoshi]

Awesome! cheers wub, really enjoyed that