I was working in a studio in Canada recently. They had a Fender Rhodes piano there, a standard studio instrument I almost always ignore. I thought, “I’ll use that for a change. How can I use this to do something surprising?” I looked around and found an old amplifier with a rattly speaker. I took the speaker and sat it on the sustain pedal of a grand piano so the strings were all open. The sound from the Fender Rhodes would make the piano resonate in sympathy with it. Then I set up a microphone with a long plastic tube on it, one of those tubes you spin to get a note. The tube resonates at that frequency, so it was selective. (I did this with my engineer, Danny Lanois, who always helps me very much.) I sat down and checked out various notes on the Rhodes. One note – just one note – made the whole system come to life. It made the speaker shake with a beautiful purring sound, like a huge foghorn. The piano was ringing away, and the pick-up through the tube particularly resonated around that frequency and all the harmonics.<\/p>\n
This was a case of having a technological idea and then seeing if anything could be made of it. It would have stopped there if that sound hadn’t appeared. The avant-garde technique would be to go ahead with it anyway, because the process is supposed to be interesting in itself. I don’t go for that. I think if something doesn’t jolt your senses, forget it. It’s got to be seductive.<\/p>\n
Of course, when I got that sound, I was back in the seed position of the other way of working. It immediately suggested a direction I still haven’t resolved. I didn’t find anything more interesting than just the sound on its own. Everything I put on covered up parts of the sound.<\/p>\n
And a second one:<\/em><\/p>\n I walked past an enormous rubber plantation in Malaysia. It was a chaos of trees, thousands of them. I thought it strange they should be planted so randomly. Then I reached a point where I realized they were in absolutely straight rows. Only at one point could I see that.<\/p>\n (Brian Eno)<\/p>\n I think Blogdial is a place where you can see trees in straight lines, and when you see a straight line you know you can accelerate.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was working in a studio in Canada recently. They had a Fender Rhodes piano there, a standard studio instrument I almost always ignore. I thought, “I’ll use that for a change. How can I use this to do something surprising?” I looked around and found an old amplifier with a rattly speaker. I took […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}