How do "breakcore" aritsts like Venetian Snares and Donna Summer make their music?

Cafe Society
1

I was always a fan of the Aphex Twin/Squarepusher/mU-Ziq brand of intricate IDM, and I’ve followed its progression to “breakcore” with interest. I’ve been particularly blown away by Venetian Snares, Hrvatski (Keith Fullerton Whitman) and Donna Summer (Jason Forrest), guys who make super-fast, spastic, cut-and-paste music that’s an outgrowth of what the IDM guys did with drum-n-bass; its’ super-fast, super-complicated, and dominated by tons of little glitches, stutters, and kooky effects.

Here’s a classic audio clip that illustrates everything you need to know about the genre - Venetian Snares’ “Dance like you’re selling nails.”

And the song that finally made me throw up my hands and go “how do they do it?” - Venetian Snares - “abomination street”.

I’ve used samplers and music software enough to know that there’s no way that these guys are doing all of this note-by-note, by hand - with the number of tiny stutters and glitches and weird little freakouts in there, it would take a year just to do one song. So how do they do it?

Are there plugins that automatically stutter and chop up the loops that they use? Are there pieces of software that they use to manipulate the beats into doing these “random” things? How’s it done? It’s simply too complicated and intricate to be done “by hand.”

2

I’ve never seen such a thing, but it’d be really easy to write. And some of them may well actually do it by hand.

3

This guy just decided to call himself Donna Summer? Did he get permission from the actual Donna Summer and release CDs under the name?

4

I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s that (the real) Donna Summer is past it enough, and Jason Forrest is obscure enough that no-one really gives a fuck about the copyright/trademark issues. Besides, a whole lot of breakcore does stuff with samples that violates copyright in far more egregious ways than the appropriation of an old disco artists name.

(Also, technically, you can’t copright a name, but if she wanted to, Donna Summer could probably argue that the use of that name would cause confusion as to who produced the work.)

VCO3: I’ve got one plug-in that creates random beats and another that stutters and mangles samples according to the parameters you put in. I’ve done very little in exploring the true possibilites of these, but from what I have done, i think you could do some pretty wild stuff. Also, simple things like delay can create pretty neat effects - by getting it to delay at a very quick rate (1/128 of a tick, 1/256 of a tick), and changing that rate you can create all kinds of noise. Mix that up with some other effects and it just becomes insane.

Also, I daresay that even with the machines, a lot of micromanaging is necessary to do stuff to the standard those guys do.

5

Yeah, I’m pretty sure they use a lot of plugins that do this for them. If you have the full version of Fruity Loops, they have some plugins that do stutter effects, time stretch effects, and one they call “weird”. I would imagine that on a program that is more advanced than this one, it would be much more versatile and useful.

6

There are, I believe, plug-ins for ProTools that will do all of that. Also Ableton Live does some pretty amazing things with sampling, time stretch, beat matching, etc. Not to meantion Sample Tank and Reason Adapted.

I listened a bit I don’t think it would be that hard to put those toether. It would take time but I think any semi-proficent recording engineer could do it without much trouble.

Making it sound good, on the other hand, is a lot harder.

Slee

7

An artist here in kansas city named SuperArgo uses Fruity Loops and Cool Edit Pro and produces all this glitch