Real and fake amps: get your peanut butter out of my damn chocolate.

Sometimes all a track needs is a little something to make a piece pop - I'm partial to 'almost there' amp modellers where the sounds are good but they don't quite hit the amp they're gunning for.

Match it to an actual amp on a wide stereo pan, and go to town.

Works very well on verge of overdrive Vox stuff, duelling Jazz Chorii work well too.

track analysis: the button-thief emerges, out of its league.

Another one of the imaginary band sessions; occasionally I'll be doing a piece and can hear exactly what an old friend or bandmate would have played, and I'm obligated to channel that spirit.

Three tracks:
- Mustang into Devi Ever Soda Meiser, everything dimed.  Instant square wave fuzz with the right attack, hitting the limiter on the preamp.   Delay in effects loop, three and five steps up respectively, 1600ms.
- Mustang into Boss GL-100, light OD settting, ART SGE multi-tap delay (800 ms), 1600 ms six tap Digitech Time Bender delay.
- Mustang into Ampeg Scrambler clone, Boss GL-100 and Roland JC-50, 800 ms single delay.   GL-100 + JC-50 "fuzz" for faux vocal invasions as the song end.

 the button-thief emerges, out of its league by rfurtkamp

Old pro gear is better than free plugins.

I like things with knobs.

Your fancy plugins, even free ones, will be obsolete in a year or two, and I'll keep chugging along with these transistorized wonders.

For peanuts, you can acquire rack units that nobody remembers except "Yea, I saw an ad for that" that produce marvelous noises and splatty evil - and that can help you shape sound for a decade or more to com

track analysis: instep, mis-step, at the hour of judgement

 instep, mis-step, at the hour of judgement by rfurtkamp

Occasionally it's good to have the record button on standby at all times. Other times, well, you hit the button when a good idea strikes and you're conflicted: does the world really, truly need a stutter-step missing link between horn-driven yuppie jazz of the 1980s and me?

It was a case also of minimalism; I can hear where the horns go, and it was better to include them by omission, writing the duelling guitar pats around where they would have been.

Other than the obvious percussion, this is three tracks: 80s-inspired electric piano guitar synth patch, an octave down Danelectro lipstick Roland Vguitar with a light OD and echo, and a very modern rock guitar patch that uses just a hint of synth to round out the mean.

Seasick sailors and tape echo simulators

I am convinced that people programming the
dedicated digital replications of the Echoplex and other
tape echoes have never actually owned one for any
length of time.  If the tape warble was half as
bad as the simulators make it out to be, the tape
would be crushed and the roller jammed up and a
giant mess and swearing would have ensued. 
Tape echo had character, not a seasick sailor
vomiting at half-mast every note.   The only time I really noticed the warble or meaningful degredation was on some very short tape loops or if I let the loop really circulate for too long without cleaning.

These things were echo units, not one of the nigh-useless Eventide harmonizer factory presets.

I will say I don't miss having to clean the damn heads on my old RE-301 Chorus Echo between every set.

Don't miss that all.

Track analysis, "ready to come home now"

A newer track, studio improv as usual.   Which, to people who aren't familiar with the process, is non-rehearsed, non-scripted passages, recorded one at a time (since I do not have six arms).  Either the track works or it doesn't - I accept flaws and move on, or I scrap the entire thing.

Composition:
- two clean tracks, Fender Mustang (very soft pan, left/right split) to Fender Hot Rod Deluxe.
- distorted/fuzz track, hard left: MXR Blue Box (2 octave down fuzz) into Boss GL-100 "Guitar Driver" rackmount preamp.  Digitech Timebender analog delay on the verge of self-oscilating for effect.    Adds a nice low-end splatter and crackle and ambience to fill out the scene.
- distorted warble, hard right: Devi Ever Soda Meiser cranked, into Boss GL-100 again.  Adds cracking transistor warble with an overdefined tape saturation-style low end.
- fuzz background, center pan.  Boss GL-100 "HM-2 setting" into Devi Ever Soda Meiser.  Adds just the right amount of texture to the process.

Mix together lightly, and there's an audio headache (literally) - the central genesis of an idea, under siege from everything else - the outside world, the pain, the passing of the moment.  Some of these things may be beautiful in their own right, but the integrated whole is one of dis-ease and moment-to-moment being.

ready to come home now by rfurtkamp

Where to find music I may reference here

http://www.freejazzfromhell.com - my Soundcloud account.   Downloads enabled, streaming on (although some may suffer at their streaming rates given how much I like to pack in on the extreme side of channels).   This is your first stop if you want streaming stuff or non-bulk packages or the newest material.

http://www.furtkamp.com - album archives, and some rarities and oddities.  25+ albums up, more to come.

If a music file I've linked to isn't showing or lists as unavailable....

...check http://www.furtkamp.com - all my archives I've digitized are available free of charge.  Soundcloud only hands me 12 hours at a time and when you're recording a song or two a day....it goes away fast.   My basic web site has no such limitations.

If you are dumb enough to buy from Amazon or iTunes, just send me money or pizza direct and cut out the middleman.

Thanks.

Why I'm here.

I'm not interested in making the greatest rock album of all time.

I'm not interested in making a million dollars off a hit single.

I'm not interested in radio play or touring or acclaim or being the next great producer.

I just want to make neat sounds and get the damn voices out of my head for a few minutes.

I like toys, new and old, I like spending time in the company of decaying sounds that aren't quite the same every iteration.

I like pretending to be my own echo unit.

I like squelching walls of mistracked wierd, of synth noises coming from nothing.

I don't have much time left on this earth (but really, do any of us)?   I'd rather spend it making glorious noise than moping.

I don't get much out of brickwalling noise; the  decay, the trailing fade all vanish at 0db, and it's like watching classic films on a one inch screen rendered at eight frames per second.  There's no point.

I'm just a nobody though.  I recorded my first albums on bulk-erased 1/4" and 1/2" language lesson reels that the university threw out, using a Sony tape machine that I bought at a thrift store for $15 and 'stabilized' the transport speed with a spring from a Stratocaster's tremolo unit.   But I have logged a lot of time behind a desk, whether it was for me or for the many people I've called friends.

What I have noticed though is few people actually comment or post in any meaningful manner about making fun or interesting noises, and I'm not talking about that electronica stuff that masquerades as "experimental" music today.  

I'm talking about music made by human beings, flawed and all, without piles of studio trickery - even if it's just one person and a multitracker, be honest.   Save the flaws, relish the flaws, embrace and work with them.   

This will be my ongoing commentary as I record various pieces and play with hardware, music, and life itself.

It's that latter part that makes experimental, weird music come alive - you aren't just throwing out random notes hoping for the best, you're making an environment for a moment that wasn't there before, and dong so from scractch.  With pure improv, you're doing so without a roadmap, a virtual God in an empty sonic landscape.

Smash your little clay men responsibly.

In the end, though, Phil Spector taught me everything I needed to know about recording - your most important production device is a good .45.

There's nobody who can save you production-wise or mix-wise in wierd noise land - you're going to have to learn to do this the hard way, since "how to make a contemporary single" goes straight out the window once you're dealing with bells, bleeps, whistles, and epistles to Satan.