> she used the Yamaha CS-80 as her main composition instrument. She seemed to favour it particularly for its touch-sensitivity, and it was one of the few synths that offered the feature at the time.
This undersells the CS-80. It had polyphonic aftertouch, which most synths don't have today.
Most have velocity sensitivity, meaning each note transmits how much initial force you applied. And most have aftertouch, meaning they transmit how much force you continue to apply after hitting bottom. But for most it's just channel aftertouch, meaning it transmits the aftertouch of the key you're pressing the hardest.
The CS-80 transmitted aftertouch of each individual key, and had nice controls to to adjust how it used that information. A lot of synths can use polyphonic aftertouch but only a few new ones actually have poly-AT keyboards. The ones I know of are the Hydrasynth (out for a couple years now), the Behringer UB-Xa, and the Iridium keyboard (both introduced this year).
Vangelis was also a huge CS-80 fan and used it on the Blade Runner soundtrack. Incidentally, a boutique synth that replicates the CS-80 pretty well (without keyboard) is the Deckard's Dream. It's $4000 but that's way less than a vintage CS-80.
> A lot of synths can use polyphonic aftertouch but only a few new ones actually have poly-AT keyboards. The ones I know of are the Hydrasynth (out for a couple years now),
Interestingly the Hydrasynth is also one of the only modern synths with a touch strip. I think it's clear what the Hydrasynth was going for.
Indeed, and I use my Hydrasynth Deluxe to drive Arturia CS-80 V4. It is the first reasonably authentic recreation, and it is a testament to the brilliant design of the CS-80 that it took this long for virtual analog recreations to reproduce it.
Previous attempts were pretty miserable, such as versions 1-3 from Arturia, and Memory Moon. At best they could be described as CS-80ish.
Poly aftertouch on the Hydrasynth is a revelation. I didn't think I would use it nearly as much as I do, and now I can't imagine being without it. I even play my Novation Summit from the HS.
Thank you to the people in this thread for bringing the Hydrasynth to my attention. I've been looking for a synth to get invested in and this one ticks every single box for me!
The brilliance of the Hydrasynth is not just the sound, but how well organized it is. It is a dream to program due to the signal path button matrix, and the OLED displays for the parameter knobs. Tap an OSC module, and all your params are there, nicely labeled. Same for an ENV, or Filter, or LFO. This saves tons of menu diving. There are shortcuts for quickly assigning modulations thanks to those module buttons, that again would otherwise require a lot of menu diving.
Oh, and the Deluxe adds release velocity, something the original didn't have.
Yeah it’s a great synth. Capable of some crazy sounds with all the LFOs, mod matrix slots and CV inputs. It’s fun to use an LFO in quantised pitch mode as a kind of arpeggiator
I recommend people check out the Linnstrument, it combines aftertouch with a touch strip with an additional y axis for each key. Made by Roger Linn of the LinnDrum fame. The only quirk is that it’s not a keyboard, but more of a guitar layout with each row tuned in fourths, which has its pros and cons.
Roger came to our music hackspace in Shoreditch to show us how he made
it. Inside was guess what.... a RPi. Loads of cool ergonomic/haptic
ideas that make it very playable.
I think I misremembered it as a Pi Zero. But that's even more
impressive!
Now I remember the conversation went on to "efficiency" and Roger
definitely comes from the "optimise for glory" camp. Told a story
about how the Linn Drum machine was really less that 8 bits and used
some trickery to squeeze out quality at a time when cheap 8 bit DACs
were not a thing.
Also the ROLI Seaboard, which is a traditional piano layout but with a squishy continuous silicone surface with raised “keys” which track x, y and z movement
Agreed, it feels like a good trade-off between those two instruments, something that fits right in between. I haven’t gotten used to doing chords on mine, but for melodies it is amazing, if you need MIDI. The keyboard can’t compare. Slap a Vangelis brass preset on it and you’re golden.
Thanks for this and parent too! I didn't realise that this is precisely what I've been missing in my compositions: I never quite understood that poly aftertouch is actually rare!
Gem S2/S3 - from the early 90s. And they haven't been made for a very long time.
Poly-AT is mechanically pretty hard to do so it's quite expensive. It wasn't considered a prime selling feature because not many people really wanted it.
The people who did want it were desperate for it, but it's taken until now for it to start appearing in mainstream products.
The only ones I know of are the Roland A-80 (somewhat rare) and Kurzweil MIDIBoard (very rare), both circa 1988.
The Gem S2 and S3 (as mentioned by TheOtherHobbes) from around 1992 - these do indeed have poly aftertouch, but neither of them are weighted.
Ensoniq was the company who most consistently used poly aftertouch in their keyboards during this era, but AFAIK only ever on the synth-weight keys. For their models that had weighted keyboards, they would use a keybed made by Fatar which only provided regular aftertouch, not poly.
No. Frequency Modulation is literally the first derivative of Phase Modulation: so for all intents and purposes they're the same thing. Nearly everyone uses PM -- especially Yamaha -- because it's rather easier to implement and doesn't present nasty challenges when doing self-modulation. Even Chowning's original paper on FM used PM. But everybody calls it FM because nobody ever heard of a PM Radio.
The GP is probably referring to the (false) urban legend that Phase Distortion, a technique developed by Casio, was meant to get around the FM patent. But PD has very little in common with FM (or PM) at all: the relationship largely begins and ends with the fact that they both operate on the phase of the sine wave. But PD is quite different, and its closest cousin is waveshaping. Indeed PD has its own patent.
I think it's a stretch to call it an urban legend. Casio was uninterested in licensing FM and developed a similar algorithm/approach. As far as I know Casio wasn't licensing FM throughout the 80s but still wanted to be competitive in the digital age.
This happened in the wake of the DX7, which was a massive success. Casio's CZ line never really touched it but they had some interesting qualities to them. I had the 101 which I bought for ~ $70 when nobody wanted them and they sell for a lot more now.
I disagree. It's true that Casio developed its own digital synthesis approach as it couldn't do FM. But this was true of Kawai (additive, hybrid single cycle, then PCM), Ensoniq (hybrid single cycle), Roland (single cycle + PCM), Korg (PCM), PPG (wavetables) etc. They all "worked around" the patent but none of these methods were anything like FM. PD in particular was designed to simulate low pass and resonant filters on traditional waves in a clever and cheap way. This really was a far cry from FM. It was inverse waveshaping with a window. It IS true that Casio eventually gave up and moved towards FM in later models (VZ).
I think we're saying the same thing. I wasn't suggesting any of these approaches offered some loophole that replicated FM, but that these manufacturers decided there's enough synthesis techniques that come close in sound that they opted to do so rather than pay Yamaha, as some other manufacturers did at the time.
Even if the underlying algorithms are nothing like FM if you get similar sounds (the gritty, busy waveforms) it made a lot of sense to market it and dilute the appeal of "FM" as THE digital synthesis method of the 1980s, as the DX7 nearly did.
I also wouldn't loop in wavetables with these approaches.
That’s sadly true. Someone(tm) should make a polyphonic AT keyboard, but with proper, rigid keys, perhaps also with a vertical touch sensor on each of them as another controller.
It's also very easy to overload the midi bandwidth with polyphonic aftertouch data, which is likely why it wasn't used in more early synths. The CS80 used it internally since it didn't have midi and could only be routed internally.
> Keyboards capable of generating polyphonic aftertouch are relatively rare, since it requires a more expensive mechanism than what is needed for channel aftertouch. Polyphonic aftertouch is also known as a generator of large amounts of MIDI data, which in older equipment was capable of exceeding the maximum bandwidth of a standard MIDI cable (the so-called MIDI choke),
You can buy a MIDI keyboard with poly aftertouch and just use that to control the synth. I use a Novation Launchpad Pro for this, which is a bit unconventional but I much prefer it to playing on actual keys. There's also the Roli Seaboard, among others. Pair that with Arturia's CS80 emulation and you would hardly know the difference if you closed your eyes.
There is no straight up MIDI keyboard available with poly aftertouch. There are weird non-keyboards, such as the Seaboard and the Linnstrument. The Launchpad Pro is also not a keyboard, and frankly its poly aftertouch implementation is so sensitive, it's almost impossible to use, regardless of what sensitivity level you set. I know, because I have one, and I've tried.
> Incidentally, a boutique synth that replicates the CS-80 pretty well (without keyboard) is the Deckard's Dream. It's $4000 but that's way less than a vintage CS-80.
If you hear from two CS-80 owners (Ty Unwin and Dave Spiers) talking about the CS-80 (back a few years ago when a Yamaha R&D engineer asked a forum what they would want to see in a CS-80 remake, which started a new round on the rumormill) on Sonic Talk, the Deckard Dream sounds nice but it ain't a CS-80 - the thing that was special with the CS-80 was the UI rather than the sound itself.
There's a degree of UI design overlap between the CS-80 and Yamaha's electronic organs of the same period, and it's interesting to think about how this pays off for the CS-80.
One of the defining characteristics of an organ is that the sound of the note tends not to change over time and the keys are essentially just on/off switches. Hence, any kind of articulation you want to get into the sound has to be done by working the controls while you're playing.
You then take a synth which is vastly more receptive to having its sound reshaped in real time, and design a UI for it that encourages this, you get a synth that we're still talking about (and struggling to replicate) 45 years later.
What are the important UI differences? The DD replicates a lot of the UI, even to the point of having some of the bottom sliders work backwards, just like the CS-80 did.
I can't say because I've never played one, but if you watch it, you can see that they both have a CS-80 and the DD, and both strongly agreed that it was the UI... and I'd have to take their word for it given that they are both know what they're talking about (Dave is the owner of GForce Software).
Do you have a link to the video? I was able to find Dave Spiers talking about the CS-80 on SonicState, but it doesn't look like the DD was part of the discussion.
That says they made various updates (e.g. MPE support, more presets) but seems to suggest it's pretty similar. The biggest deficit is lack of some effects and the ring mod, which are available in an expander.
The main control area looks very similar. The form factor is definitely different and maybe the CS-80 would be more ergonomic. It certainly oughta be, since prices on reverb.com go from $60K to $90K.
> Do you have a link to the video? I was able to find Dave Spiers talking about the CS-80 on SonicState, but it doesn't look like the DD was part of the discussion.
Here's Ty holding up the DD saying it sounds nice, but its not a CS-80:
... regardless, even Behringer's CS-80 clone sounds a bit out of reach for me, but how long would that take given we're yet to see more demos of the UB-Xa in months!
Hard to know for sure without herself saying so, but in Babooshka she used a CS-80 and you can hear some vibrato, but I don't know if she used aftertouch for that. You can however hear the CS-80 ribbon there very clearly in this song, mimicking the fretless bass. The ribbon was also used a lot in the Blade Runner soundtrack, btw.
It's also in the background of All We Ever Look For (backing a Fairlight sampling a whistle). There's clearly some amplitude control going on but then again it could be something else (clever envelope programming or even just getting lucky with compression).
It’s not that rare in for example more expensive Yamaha or Ensoniq instruments. I used an SY-85 to play an Oberheim Matrix 1000 and it was really mind blowing. I could hold a string chord for a minute without it getting boring, not even trying anything fancy just the natural varying pressure per finger when you hold a chord. Very organic. Sounded like a different instrument.
Arturia has a fab CS-80 recreation as part of their V-Collection. It has poly aftertouch. My physical Roland V-Synth to play it with via MIDI only has a single aftertouch channel -- but the CS-80 is still my favorite of the collection. The default preset alone is amazing and playable for hours.
Everyone already probably knows this, but if you search <Song Name> acapella or <song name> isolated vocals on youtube you can get the vocals to songs you want to cover. Sometimes its the original isolated, but sometimes its just someone singing it. I've been having a lot of fun with Reverbmachine's Legends bank and vocals from youtube. Eurythmics Sweet Dreams for example.
On a tangent, when I was in prison my mom died, and Kate Bush was her favorite music. Also in prison as a coping mechanism I created my own superstition that music on the radio was a message for me (I know it isn't but I needed a way to just get a little space to breath). Like Tom Petty meant the the day was going to turn out ok. So I programmed myself to be super receptive to Kate Bush being popular again and it's been amazing for my mood and productivity. Programming little positive things into my makeup has been really important in getting through stuff, be it addiction or just day to day difficulties.
You might be interested in Meta’s Demucs, which can split a song into drums, bass, vocals and other stems. It’s really very impressive, I can’t quite believe such results are possible!
You can try it out at https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/demucs if you don’t want to install it. If you google “source separation” there are a bunch of hosted services which mostly use either Demucs or Spleeter (which was an earlier, good but not as good, system from Deezer)
These tools are awesome, I have iZotope RX which also does a version of this, but when I'm in the music flow grabbing something off of youtube vs firing up another piece of software can be more conducive creatively for me.
Yeah makes sense! I’m sure we will start to see this integrated into the next generations of a lot of music making software with it being open source. FWIW Demucs sounds a lot better than the RX separation (which I think uses Spleeter, could be wrong) to my ears - it doesn’t have any of that mushy “low bitrate” kind of sound, it’s much crisper
I wonder how hard it would be to write a Max4Live device that wraps this? That would be awesome, have the original track in my project for reference, and have a Max4Live device generate isolated stems of the different parts.
Looks like the meat of this is using a JS script to invoke Spleeter using execSync so it might be quite simple to adapt to Demucs, maybe I’ll give it a go!
Oh yeah of course, but in my experience it’s quite rare for these multi-tracks to end up online. Demucs can in many cases extract an acappella which would be good enough to make a remix with (of course using ML trickery, so it’s not going to be the actual real acappella and might have some leakage from other sounds in the track etc.)
Me and my siblings were raised by a single mother. She's still alive but I have a memory from when I was six or seven of her sitting for hours on end with headphones on, smoking cigarettes, sipping wine and listening to Supertramp. Three years later I discovered music (The Beatles White Album). Mom told me it's my dad's favorite record.
To this day they're two of my favorite bands.
Music has this weird property of connecting you to different people and different times. It's some kind of magic.
Sorry to hear you've had it so rough. Hope you're ok.
I know all the 'tramp fans say Crime of the Century is their best, and it's definitely classic prog rock, but I still love Breakfast in America despite its commercial pretenses. My best friend in high school and I first heard it on 8-track (!) and we enjoyed every song.
I have nothing to add on the synth/music aspect, but thank you for sharing your personal story. The idea of programming your mind to get through tough times really resonated with me.
It's actually been a super great tool because it randomly breaks me out of the moment/pattern I'm in. If a song comes on it snaps me out of any bad loop and I have space to remember it's just a bad day not a bad life.
My favorite running up that hill moment is from a few years ago. Big Boi from Outkast waxing poetic about how running up that hill is his favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSdHgq3oBD8
Thank you for this. I haven't thought about Kate Bush since the 80s (she got replaced by Tory Amos and Sarah McLachlan in that genre in the 90s), and I was never a big fan but I knew this song. I didn't realize the impact she had on other people and thought the choice of her song in Stranger Things was meant to be kitschy but I guess not!
I think people forget what a huge success she was/is. I was too young to experience this first-hand but I'm glad I started listening in the last few years. Her music, particularly her voice, sounded odd to me at first, but I think it's brilliant now. I think you can particularly get a sense of what a great singer she is when you listen to the vocal part of covers of her songs -- she can't be matched IMO.
This is so good it almost makes me not want to throw up in my mouth when I hear that Kate Bush song for the 90th time in a day because of Stranger Things.
I remember seeing a breakdown of The Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" that made me lose absolutely any respect I might have had for the composition of that song. This writeup kind of had the opposite effect; I get what went into the song and how much the tools they were using defined it, but it's somewhat more interesting as a result.
I know what you mean about The Prodigy video (and even more so the Daft Punk sample source ones), it’s a bit disappointing to learn a track is almost entirely samples, but I think there is also a real art to picking those samples. If you’ve not been on it before check out whosampled.com and prepare to lose some time, lol.
I have to say I’m more impressed by artists who’s music is largely sample based but they twist them into entirely new forms (eg DJ Shadow and Future Sound of London) than just lifting a few loops wholesale though!
I've been in a 90s hip hop rut for the past couple years and I'm pulling myself out of it by making playlists of the original songs getting sampled (one great thing about good hip hop is that any given song or pair of songs tends to produce a pretty excellent playlist), and one thing I've discovered is that RJD2, a musician I was into in the mid-aughts during an instrumental hip hop phase, puts essentially zero effort into things; the best example I can think of there is "Bless The Telephone", which he "covered" from Labi Siffre in the funniest possible way.
Finding stuff like that will definitely give you a new appreciation for DJ Shadow (both, for what it's worth, were excellent live).
Deadringer's how I got into him. And I still like a lot of it! And I saw him at Abbey Pub and it was a fantastic show. But also: his cover of "Bless The Telephone" is just him playing a recording of "Bless The Telephone". :)
Entroducing is one of the albums that got me into music production as a hobby. But to put some shine on some other great samplers while we're at it, The Avalanches' Since I Left You is also fantastic is comprised of around 3500 samples.
On top of the effort, the infinite patience, it's also one of the most amazingly musical things ever put together with electronics (one box!) Shadow stands in a class of one.
I'm a huge FSOL fan and I think what they did with sampling to produce albums like ISDN was ground breaking stuff.
Daft Punk not so much. Rather than composing the samples together they use the entire sample as the hook. Maaaybe they might speed it up a bit but that's usually it.
I definitely agree, but can’t argue with the end results that Daft Punk come up with (they’re not really my kind of genre but I don’t think you can argue they make great songs) and there aren’t that many artists out there making such catchy and successful sample based songs, so they definitely still have some skills which are quite unique (but maybe it’s more like deep music knowledge and recognising catchy hooks, than surgically splicing samples together)
I didn’t realise his stuff was all sample based. I’ve heard some of it and saw him live once, it’s a bit “frenetic” for me (I’m drawn to smoother more hypnotic stuff in general) but definitely cool!
I guess it depends which era/album you happen to catch; Long Stories (2019) is pretty chilled out, and the Chaos Theory soundtrack is somewhere in the middle.
What was it about the "Smack My Bitch Up" remake video that made you lose respect for the composition?
Remaking an existing hit song is much easier than making a new hit song. Making a hit song is very very very hard, even if you're using some samples along the way.
Same goes for Daft Punk. Those samples were all sitting there for the taking for years, but no one else put them together in such an electric way, supplemented perfectly with their own synths and drum machines, mixed brilliantly (there's a lot of unique and creative mixing and engineering going on) etc.
I did a little remake of the main loop of LCD Soundsystem's Someone Great. It wasn't particularly hard (once I had access to the right synths). But to have sculpted idea to use those sounds, notes, chords etc. all put together like that is brilliant.
Hearing that "cello" sample that Bush used made me feel like looking into a marble quarry and trying to see sculptures waiting to be released from the rocks.
It's really, really hard for me to disrespect Kate Bush or her music. She is a profound genius who strives to say something very specific with each song of hers, almost as if she's engaging her audience in a conversation, so I guess I tire less easily listening to her music than to most artists because of that.
I'm a big fan of Imogen Heap who is very similar to Kate Bush in that she brings together technical sophistication in composition, a love of technology in the service of art, and something deep and meaningful to say in each song. It's hard to conceptualize that much awesome incarnate in a single person.
If you like both of those artists, I'd suggest checking out Kimbra. She has heavy jazz influences and incorporates so much meaning into her music and videos. She does similar vocal layering to Imogen Heap and her live mixing of her own vocals is simply amazing.
Oklou's album "Galore" might also appeal to an Imogen Heap fan, with interesting self-made layering of vocals, electronica, some cathartic moments, and the videos are pretty darn good too.
I mean, there are a lot of artists whose fandom can say the same thing. I might feel the same way about Joe Strummer, or Glenn Mercer from the Feelies, or Elliot Smith. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying it's all pretty subjective. I don't actively dislike Kate Bush, but I'm not tuned into her the way you are, and so I get different vibes from her songs than you do --- like I said elsewhere on the thread, she has big-time Tina Belcher energy for me. I think the snowman song ruined me for her.
>when I hear that Kate Bush song for the 90th time in a day because of Stranger Things.
Personally, I started listening to her because of the much smaller "wuthering heights fandom". Regardless of how people get into her, it's good to hear people are finally listening to her in the states.
At least in America, it feels like Running Up That Hill is more popular now than in the 80s. In the 80s, I never heard it on the radio and I had no friends who even knew of Kate Bush.
I grew up in America and had the famous Kate Bush "leotard" poster on my bedroom wall. She wasn't as well known in the US because she didn't tour much outside of the UK. But she still had a cult of devoted fans in the US. Also, you have to remember that in the late 1970s the record companies were casting around for anything new that didn't sound like disco. That's how she got her first contract, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd sort of discovered her and helped her make her first demo, then presented it to his record company contacts. She's a genius artist and she deserves all the new attention she's getting.
I can't stand those because he never actually answers what makes them great...he just kind of analyzes the chords and tells you what they are, and plays some of the melodies. There's a lot of je ne sais qua about composing "great" music and I don't think I've seen a YouTube Explainer personality really able to capture that magic in their explanations.
The first 100+ videos in that series are pretty great. He was often able to obtain the master record and play each track individually. Hearing all these cool little details that usually get lost in the mix really changes your perspective on a song. He also goes over chords and stuff in these videos, but also adds some context and explains why these things work well together in a really simple way.
I feel like this has been missing in more recent videos though.
That's so true, and yet, I think your answer also explains why "what makes them so great videos" can work, in a way. The explanations given by Beato or whoever may be lacking in terms of the true why (is there really one?), but the enthusiasm of the presenter and the segments they choose to highlight can focus your attention on certain parts of the music and give you some of the insight they (apparently) have, even with it being unspoken. That's how it works for me anyway.
One thing I often notice is that if you listen to music with other people, you hear new things in it, because you are partially hearing it the way they do through reading their reactions.
Song writing is an art it's not like a technology where you can point to power usage and how v 2 is better than v1 to show the thing is now better, great.
He goes into great detail about the entire songs it's never just "point to a thing" and say "there it is". He'll describe how the choice of the wording, the chords, what scale e.g. "mixolydian vs dorian", how it all combines to make the song great.
He doesn't do any of that in his video about Running Up That Hill. Can you point to a favorite video of yours that I might be able to check out for more of what you described?
One of the (or maybe both) Nirvana ones are pretty good. He goes into how Cobain uses upper extensions/suspensions to give a melancholic feel. I think one of the Pearl Jam ones he throes the vocal chart on there too.
He's at his best when he's analyzing the vocal melody against the chord harmony (ie: they're using the #4 on the F for a Lydian feel to the 3rd on the Am)
Rick's "What Makes this Song Great?" does mention quite a lot maybe each is different maybe you'll like a different one. He has one on Rush song Limelight try this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P-yUOlOC5M&t=877s
I bought Hounds of Love when it came out. It was rarely off of my turntable, and I still have a regularly played CD in the car. It kinda makes me a bit sad when an album as special as that (for me any way) is appropriated by advertising agencies or the likes of Netflix and then just ruined. Kinda in the same way many favourite but little known tunes are devalued when they're gotten hold of by advertising agencies. I've never been able to play Leftfield's Phat Planet after Guinness wrecked that for me.
Thankfully I don't listen to music radio or watch TV/Cable/Sat so I'm not being exposed to the oversaturation of once upon a time nice things.
I know there are people that feel really passionately about Kate Bush and I guess I just don't get it. She's fine! I respect the initiative she took in the 80s. But as a songwriter, for me at least, she has real Tina Belcher energy.
Could you briefly explain what a Tina Belcher energy is for those who haven't seen enough of "Bob's Burgers" to know the characters and their personalities? (I know that show has received quite a bit of acclaim and is almost certainly something I should watch, but I have a "no new scripted series on Fox" policy after how they handled Firefly, Futurama, Lucifer, and Terra Nova, so now wait until I'm sure a Fox series is going to have a proper ending before taking it up).
What I like about Kate Bush's songwriting is that many of her songs cover relations or are from viewpoints that are quite different from those usually found in popular music.
For example "Breathing", from the viewpoint of a fetus during or shortly after a nuclear war. "The Kick Inside"--consequences of incest. "The Infant Kiss"--Governess dealing with children possessed by the spirits of the dead previous governess and the dead lover of the previous governess.
The best way I can put it without going too deep down this rabbit hole is "benign adolescent prurience". She writes a lot of erotic zombie fiction.
Also: there are more good episodes of Bob's Burgers than there are of the Simpsons. You're seriously missing out.
Also I feel bad pointing this out but one thing fetuses don't do in the womb is...
She's just so weird! If you like Kate Bush a lot, and I sort of get why her weirdness is endearing, you'll like Tina Belcher. Just a lot of the same energy.
I'd heard that Kate wrote hundreds of songs before she was 17/18, many only released years later, so maybe that's where you're getting the "adolescent" vibe from.
I would argue that it's not about "songwriting" per se as much as a total commitment to expression that exceeds almost anybody else while still being pop. That, combined with her fantastic voice -- which is way too high for most pop and only works because she has a tremendous instrument and really wraps it around the lyrics. The fact that she sings over her whole range is both the hardest thing to get used to and one of the things that makes her a giant.
Finally, it's what she represents, which is an artist who was able, over and over again, to pursue her exact vision while giving zero fs what EMI wanted -- and was able to release top selling albums (in the UK) in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s.
She's probably the only pop artist that is worth engaging with as a genuinely mind-broadening experience that should be undertaken precisely becauseyou might not like it at first, like some classical or jazz.
> This is so good it almost makes me not want to throw up in my mouth when I hear that Kate Bush song for the 90th time in a day because of Stranger Things.
I love this song, but I wonder if I'm the only one who thought it was really out of place in that scene, even kind of forced in.
It too me out of the scene rather than keeping me in.
I understand your perspective and think it’s a totally valid response. I actually found the out-of-placeness sort of charming — it reminded me of being an adolescent and having opinions and feelings about music for the first time… while completely misunderstanding what the song was saying.
This is an interesting pair of takes because my problem with it was that it was just about the most on-the-nose, boring, predictable song they could have put there. I was just joking that they should have put Cloudbusting there instead, but it was pointed out that there's an early 90s version of that song that is clearly going into Season 8 of the show. Just pick any other song from the Chocolate War soundtrack instead. "I Have The Touch" would have worked even better.
I hope most of them die. There’s too many characters. The first season was fun but it just keeps growing and growing. It’s like the teenage angst MCU, each set of characters has to have a scene where they talk about their feelings with one another and it’s boring at this point.
Fascinating -- What about the SmackMBU breakdown made you lose all respect? Love that Rage sample they used in that track -- iconic! Sampling/Curating/Slicing is an art in itself.
If you haven't heard it yet, Placebo's version I think is almost as good as Kate's. I know that's a strong opinion but it reminds me of Hurt from NIN vs Johnny Cash. Both very good takes of the same song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5GuBa4Bbnw
The Meg Meyers and Placebo versions are more "committed" than the the Kate Bush version.
Kate Bush was recording a song, which may or may not turn out to be great.
Meyers and Molko were recording a hit song, they already knew the power the song had and they lean into it far more than Kate Bush could.
That said, I prefer the Placebo cover over the Meg Meyers one. The Chromatics, who I generally like otherwise, cover is not their finest work.
I prefer the sounds of the Kate Bush original for sure, a re-recording of it would be my ultimate. Draw it out. Higher highs, lower lows, don't be afraid to give us some space to feel the weight of what we're experiencing.
Not sure if it has been recommended yet, but this is a great video about the writing and composition of this song "Running up that hill: how Kate bush became queen of alt-pop"
I mean he tells you what the chords are and describes what you can already hear with your ears, like "here's a pad"...why do people find this worthwhile to listen to?
This 100%. The thing I like about his videos is that he decomposes songs into their individual pieces and lays them out to show you what they are. As a music loving non-musician, there are so many layers to songs that I never realized were there (did you know there were female vocals in Foo Fighters’ Everlong? I didn’t, until Rick showed me). Anyone looking for Rick to point at a specific thing and say “this is what makes this particular song great” is missing the point. He’s taking the song apart and showing you all of the different pieces that together make it a great song. You may not ever have noticed many of those elements before, but without them that song wouldn’t be as good.
Plus we all don't like the same thing. And we like the same things for different reasons.
Rick shows you the construction of songs that we all hear and he shows what went into the construction of a song. Some of it may be a guess some extremely precise.
He's also more musical than lyrical he's even said in some of his videos he can't dissect lyrics as he does music.
He's also in a contact battle with YouTube algorithms and DRM he's always getting blasted for a few seconds of music. I'm amazed that he has survived YouTube's idiotic controlling behaviour.
But he doesn't tell you how it was composed. It would actually be very difficult or impossible to explain how something was composed. That's why I'm confused. This video is like if someone tried to tell you "what makes this painting great" by pointing out the painting's objects and their colors.
His series should rather be called "Breaking Down This Song", because that's mostly what he does. He very rarely actually explains or gets into what actually makes the song (in his opinion) great. Most of the time it's just a slightly more advanced "reaction video", and those are much easier to make, I'm sure.
He's a musician giving us a tour of the song, which I enjoyed. He does explain why at 4:54.
Maybe drop your "fascination" with rejecting him and just listen you'd find it a simple enthusiast tour/lightweight music class, and appreciate it as nothing more.
Fun fact: German synthie pop band "Münchner Freiheit" used a very similar synth intro in their 1986 hit "Tausendmal du" (a thousand times you). Their song was published just 6 months after Kate Bush released "Running up that hill". Plagiarism or Coincidence?
There's a whole lecture (at Keele University, Dr. Dori Howard) analyzing The Hounds of Love album and Kate Bush's concept. Also showcasing the Fairlight CMI (Cliff Bradbury) which as said became Kate Bush's preferred composition tool.
Wow, thank you! I was walking by my daughter’s room and this song was playing and I was mystified. I told her “That song is almost older than me! How did you find it??” Total WTF moment for me.
Yeah, not only is it featured in a few scenes, it's mentioned by name. One of the key characters needs to listen to it on her Walkman in an endless loop to protect herself from a psychic monster. The finale prominently featured Master of Puppets by Metallica which is apparently starting to climb the charts now as well.
Awesome writeup and very topical with Running up that Hill being popularized again by season 4 of Stranger Things (on Netflix, I would also recommend the series, by the way)
Syntorial (on desktop or iPad) is an app which teaches you synthesis by doing - it’s a full synth which you can use in its own right, and it introduces you to each part and gives you challenges to recreate a certain sound using that part. I can’t say I’ve done the full thing but it’s a cool concept.
You can also just download some free/cheap synths (or get a free trial of Ableton or some other music making software which comes with its own included synths) and start messing around of course haha, there are a tonne of good ones around, including on iOS if you use an iPad (the advantage being the touch screen makes it maybe more fun than using a mouse). GarageBand on Mac is maybe a fun place to start experimenting too.
Happy to advise more if you have specific things you’re interested in!
Vital is an amazing free virtual synth. It rivals the pay ones at this point and makes it on most of my tracks (though Arturia Pigments is my favorite VST).
The only bummer about synths now is that at 9 I learned a lot of networking concepts from having to adjust the MIDI setup of my keyboards/drum machines/sequencer (and then be able to get them back how my dad wanted them without him knowing I changed everything). Other than that I can't imagine if I would have had these capabilities at an early age. I mean, oh, you want a free symphony to play your music? OK. https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/bbc-symphony-orchestr...https://www.spitfireaudio.com/bbc-so-discover/application/
One aspect that might be interesting, depending on what you are looking for, it's eurorack and more specifically software like VCV Rack that lets you emulate the experience in an app really easily.
True, because Max comes with bandlimited oscillators and envelope
generators ready to go. In Pd you need to build them yourself or
import libraries.
> and is more fully featured out of the box
True. See above. A lot of things you'd make from scratch in Pd come in
the standard namespace of Max.
That said, there's nothing you can do in Max that you couldn't do in
Pd is you're a decent DSP coder, and that low-level entry point is
half the fun IMHO. Don't forget they were originally the same
codebase. MSP is Miller's initials (For those who don't know Miller
Puckette named it Max as homage to Max Matthews).
I'm surely in a minority, but I couldn't stand that song when it came out, and I haven't changed my opinion. That said, I love most of Kate Bush's work.
Oddly, while I didn’t really remember the song growing up (in US, probably wasn’t played on my stations), I pretty much loved it since hearing it on SiriusXM First Wave about 10 years ago.
I’ve loved hearing how it was used in Stranger Things (a show I also have always loved).
I’m sure that there are plenty of talented musicians working today. I haven’t heard of gen z kids needing to listen to 80s music, that might a mirage caused by an incredibly popular TV show throwing its entire weight behind one song from the 80s.
It goes well behind the show and the song. My dentist and his office are all zoomers and they have the best music of the 80s blasting all day, music that I grew up with. It’s weird for me because I start remembering all the songs and the lyrics, but it’s entirely new for them.
While not to this scale, it's happened several times before. Don't Stop Believin' from the Sopranos and Only You from the final scene of The Office were both thrown back into the limelight 25-30 years after their release.
I’d wager that there are plenty of gen z kids listening to billie eilish and lil yachty and the entirety of mumblerap that would disagree with the idea that there’s no good pop music outside of the 80s.
edit: I’m not debating that 80s pop continues to be popular among younger people as it has since… the 80s. I was specifically responding to the comment about gen z needing to plumb the depths of 80s music due to some perceived lack of palatable pop music today. It’s genuinely a silly idea. Who is buying olivia rodrigo tickets? Or dua lipa or doja cat or lizzo or megan thee stallion
This undersells the CS-80. It had polyphonic aftertouch, which most synths don't have today.
Most have velocity sensitivity, meaning each note transmits how much initial force you applied. And most have aftertouch, meaning they transmit how much force you continue to apply after hitting bottom. But for most it's just channel aftertouch, meaning it transmits the aftertouch of the key you're pressing the hardest.
The CS-80 transmitted aftertouch of each individual key, and had nice controls to to adjust how it used that information. A lot of synths can use polyphonic aftertouch but only a few new ones actually have poly-AT keyboards. The ones I know of are the Hydrasynth (out for a couple years now), the Behringer UB-Xa, and the Iridium keyboard (both introduced this year).
Vangelis was also a huge CS-80 fan and used it on the Blade Runner soundtrack. Incidentally, a boutique synth that replicates the CS-80 pretty well (without keyboard) is the Deckard's Dream. It's $4000 but that's way less than a vintage CS-80.