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just da "ask tim" posts

every now and then, i answer some questions.

Lee, again, asks:

the glock comes in at like 1.5 seconds doesn’t it haha? … at 1:30 def some glock =D.

oh that. no i think thats some kind of bad electronic congo sound i pulled from some drum machine.

Eric asks:

Does listening to your songs grant me access to any musical “prestige classes”, or am i going to have to earn experience points by defeating Isaac Hayes with my +5 Vorpal Amplifier of Serious Smoothness first?

clever. i see what you did there, eric.

oh, d&d, how i miss you. my regular d&d group hasn’t played for around 6 months – one of the dudes went and had a baby and it RUINED EVERYTHING. no, that’s not true. i’m sure the birth was just a coincidence. still… a pox on you and your child.

my dungeons & dragons character is theo, he is a carmendine monk wandering the forgotten realms with his brothers. he comes from an order of monks known as the zealots of the written word, they combine kung fu knowledge with wizardry. technically, he is a conjurer. he carries a masterwork kama and has some messed up special abilities. like, four times a day, he can teleport 10 feet immediately in any direction. very handy in melee.

one of his favourite spells is glitterdust – one of the campest spells invented ever, theo rubs his fingers together and then his opponents are covered in glittery gold fairy dust, temporarily blinded. another of his favourite spells is belker claws – claws of smoke jut out from his hands and tear into a nearby enemy causing severe damage. i like to imagine him doing some kind of kung fu flourish at this point.

did i mention he bears a striking resemblance to an adult malcolm jamal-warner?

i’m a fuckin bad-ass

theo and his pals are currently poised on a cliffhanger – at the end of our last session we were about to have our asses handed to us by miscellaneous demons entering an evil church via recently opened gates of hell. should have seen it coming really.

if you want to play theo in your own campaigns – and trust me, you do – here is theo’s character sheet.

send your questions to asktim@iamfauxpas.com. i’ll quote your first name on the blog unless you request anonymity.

every week every now and then, i answer some questions.

Anonymous asks:

I was just wanting to know whether you can buy the shirt with the waterfalls print on it. Cheers

you asked for it, you got it.

now available in a range of colours, styles and sizes at my redbubble store. only $35 australian, plus postage. redbubble is a design-your-own online t-shirt store, and i’m reassured by the fact that (i think) they are based in collingwood. thanks to leigh for the hot tip.

i’m gonna be adding more designs in the next few weeks – i’ve got a lot of odds and ends around that might make good t-shirt designs, if you’ve ever seen anything i’ve doodled, drawn, assembled, and wanted it on a t-shirt, make a request. no worries.

Lee asks:

hey just curious do you use much in the way of analog synths? are you using glockenspiel in chasing waterfalls?

all the synths i use are virtual, they are all ‘in the box’ ie on my computer. i don’t own any analog synths, which often surprises people. my dad had a yamaha dx7 and a dodgy casio, which i spent some time with as a kid, but i don’t use them now. when i say “spent time with as a kid”, i don’t mean i was like a child dx7 prodigy – what i mean is, there’s a VHS somewhere of me as a 5 year old wearing big sunglasses and miming to the hot new single “money for nothing.” that was around the extent of my involvement with my dad’s “music room”.

i am a software kind of guy. some people are gear fetishists, they want the hardware – to them i say, good luck with that. my studio is in my lounge room and my bank account is always close to empty so… its probably for the best that i’m not a gear nerd.

primarily, in terms of virtual synths, i use ableton live’s inbuilt synthesisers, and also the arturia moog modular v which is a really fun and pretty authentic moog emulator. plus a whole raft of plugins and effects to warp and change the sound, obviously. i mostly use ableton’s native plugins. lots of EQ, reverb, and ping pong delays.

oh yes. glockenspiel on chasing waterfalls. i’m curious to know where you think you can hear the glock??

send your questions to asktim@iamfauxpas.com. i’ll quote your first name on the blog unless you request anonymity.

every week i answer some questions.

Richard, again, asks:

do you think the 12 months of the year were named with the northern hemisphere’s seasonal patterns in mind? did you still picture santa claus delivering gifts in the cold winter or did you imagine him flying around in the summer time? did being in the southern hemisphere make you disbelieve in santa claus sooner than the average northern hemisphere kid? your starry night skies are different from ours. does being in the southern hemisphere make the average person more worldly down there? more in tune with the cosmos?

ok richard, its clear you have a pathological obsession with the differences between the northern and southern hemispheres. i think its time i asked you some questions. did you lie awake at night as a child wishing you were from ‘down under’? did you have posters of olivia newton-john covering your bedroom walls? do you think that any of the character actors from the simpsons did even a vaguely passable imitation of an australian accent on the ‘australian’ episode of the simpsons? honestly, those accents were so bad, the whole episode may as well have been in spanish.

you are obviously very curious about australia. this should clear everything up:

do you realise that despite the term ‘throw another shrimp on the barbie’, a lot of us refer to shrimp as prawns? and that prawns are actually not bad on the barbie? did you know that shrimp on the barbie is the name of a comedy film (using that term very loosely) from 1990 starting cheech marin of walker texas ranger fame? did you know that cheech & chong are coming to melbourne as part of the 2009 melbourne comedy festival?

can’t wait.

Lynton asks:

“Live from Doom” – is this from the fabled “live” Faux Pas gig?

“live from doom” is the fourth and final track from the waterfalls EP that i released digitally (and for free) a couple of months ago. its a live recording that originally made its debut on this very blog, in august last year. i posted it online about an hour after i recorded it.

this is how i made that song. i have a thing attached to my guitar called the roland gr-30, which is a special pickup that slides under the strings of my guitar. it takes the notes that i play and converts them to midi data, which can then be understood by my computer. my computer can then use notes that i play to control whatever virtual instrument that i want it to. at the moment i’m using it a lot to play sax solos on my guitar (true) but for ‘live from doom’ the guitar is controlling a few virtual synthesisers – a couple ambient ones, and one fuzzy lead synth. so all of the sound in the song is being generated by just me playing the guitar, live.

the live faux pas gig alas remains nothing but a fable, for more information please see my previous blog post, “why there is no faux pas live show.”

send your questions to asktim@iamfauxpas.com. i’ll quote your first name on the blog unless you request anonymity.

every week i answer some questions.

Julie asks:

Is there any chance that this new art work will appear on a T-Shirt!?
Please?

julie is referring to the new artwork for the free digital waterfalls ep, generously provided by wonderful melbourne artist and musician royce ng of brothersister records:

yeah. wow. royce did an abso-fucking-lutely amazing job with this artwork and i’m still a little bewildered as to how to repay him for it, but anyhow. i had this image as the background on my phone for about 12 months, in the lead up to putting the EP out. i still do actually.

i don’t have any immediate plans to make more t-shirts. they’re not cheap to get made and the last batch i made haven’t exactly flown out the door. so, yeah. wow, this answer is a bit of a downer, all of a sudden.

Ilah asks:

was wondering if u could solve a debate me and a friend are having..
that first track from chasing waterfalls, we both feel some kind of eerie familiarity with it. first thing i thort of was old skool platform gaming on the super nes or mega drive. he’s thinking something classical.
so erm, was there some kind of background to how u came to that tune, or did it just spoing straight outta ur head?

let me preface this answer by saying that ilah actually addressed me as “dr tim” when he asked this question, which infinitely multiplies the chance that i will answer it.

chasing waterfalls had a very very complex gestation process, it mutated in many ways over the 2 years it took me to finish it. i tried a lot of different melodies, a lot of different types of sounds and instruments, before it all kind of started to hang together in a way that satisfied me. so, i can’t really say that anything prompted the song as a whole, more that it is just the end result of a lot of very different influences. i could probably pinpoint what prompted me to use very specific sounds, but on a general level, every track that i make is very much just a melange of all the different musics that are going in and out of my ears at any time.

the computer game/chiptune element of it is definitely something people are noticing though. like anyone who grew up in the 80s/90s i spent some time playing these games so there’s an element of familiarity with that kind of game theme music. but also more recently, i’ve been getting interested in 8-bit producers, people who are doing interesting things with their nintendo DS, or reprogramming old computers like commodore 64s to make cool contemporary electronic music. someone i’m listening to heaps at the moment is eero johannes out of finland, who is making some of the most beautifully rendered chiptune-flavoured type stuff out there at the moment. synthesised funk.

but to be honest, i don’t get very involved with the actual practical side of this – i don’t actually reprogram my nintendo DS (don’t even have one), i don’t have a big .sid collection. i don’t own retro consoles or even mess around much with emulators. i don’t own any vintage synths. except for my dads DX7. i’m in awe of wacked out dudes like disasteradio outta NZ – who famously last year released a song on Atari cartridge – but i’m not a techie type guy. i just like some of those sounds.

its funny cos the part of the song that sounds the most ‘computer gamery’ – i actually was trying to create the sound of a steel drum but ended up with nintendo kinda sound instead. so its kind of like, half way between super mario theme and a caribbean steel drum! yeah.

oh, the classical vibe. surely your friend is picking up on the string section in the middle of the track, that was recorded live for me by my old-school friend jacob, who is a classically trained violinist. he wrote that part of the song and it matched perfectly into what i was already building. he has a background in classical music, but is also well-schooled in pop (he’s a huge nick cave fan actually).

so yeah. the word of the day today is MELANGE

every week i answer some questions.

Richard asks:

here’s my question. it’s a general question i’ve always wanted to ask any southern hemisphere-er. you in particular could probably provide a good answer though. i wonder if you get this question all the time though and are sick of it. oh well, here goes. basically just… what is it like to be in the southern hemisphere? do you feel the rest of the civilized northern half of the world looks down on you.

hmmm. i’ve never been asked to speak on behalf of an entire hemisphere before. well the truth is.. the southern hemisphere is a mystical place where we all ride technicolor unicorns across rainbow bridges of joy, with our animal totems on our shoulders and sticky lemon sherbet through our hair. we also like to put shrimps on the barbie.

but yes, australians do have something of a complex about being down south. one of our previous prime ministers very famously was heard oversaying that australia was the ‘arse end of the world.’ constantly being referred to as ‘down under’ doesn’t help. as if our entire nation is down someone else’s pants. i was talking with an american tourist a couple of weeks ago and he was saying that he expected australia to be ‘more european’ which i didn’t completely get, but i thought it was fascinating when he remarked that australia seemed very similar to other countries in the southern hemisphere, for example brazil.

i have a strange feeling we are going to hear more from you, richard.

Dan asks:

i really dig the claps, kicks, snaps, snares etc. in chasing waterfalls. especially the snare. What drum machine/s are you using and where could one find a snare as meaty as that?

you can find it right here, buckaroo:

MP3: Snare drum from Chasing Waterfalls

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

a little background on where it came from: i’d like to tell you i have an extensive collection of drum machines, or even an extensive collection of drum machine samples on my computer, but no, often with my drum sounds i am taking snares, kicks, claps out of other songs, treating them to sound different, and using them myself. i download and listen to a vast amount of music, and often randomly go through it looking for the tiniest of micro-samples, or one-off drum hits, that i can then reprogram myself into my own songs. some lawyers would have you believe this is a form of copyright infringement – i think taking someone elses snare drum and mutating it to your own ends is about as much of an infringement as taking the note of C sharp and inserting it into your melody. but this is a complex issue – frankly it is more complicated than that, and i could go into detail trying to explain where i stand on this, but it would confuse both of us and be generally boring.

most melodic samples i use come from music that i like – often, surprisingly, drum hits and one-off sounds ceom from music that i don’t really like, which is definitely the case with the song where this snare comes from (sorry guys) – its a riot in belgium remix of a track made by kim from the presets, called “wet n wild”.

send your questions to asktim@iamfauxpas.com. i’ll quote your first name on the blog unless you request anonymity.