in the early to mid 1990s a young man in Cornwall England named Richard James managed to change electronic music from a genre that was rigidly confined to nightclubs and maybe the occasional cheesy TV or film score into literally the most far-reaching imaginative and Innovative music of the decade by the way I'm not being hyperbolic at all if anything I'm actually understating this man's impact on music in general and there are very few people who would disagree with me a Madman of sound and uh process he's been a big influence in the Nish Nails camp music
today for me I think he's definitely the Pioneer a twin is the king people called Apex twins okay I didn't know anything about them I start hearing like the weirdest noises I felt violated like my soul was violated in this video we're going to have a look at something that most electron musicians have only speculated on what software was Apex Twin using in the peak period of his [Music] career and I'm so excited to make this video because I can almost guarantee that if you're into experimental audio stuff you're going to fall down a deep
deep rabbit hole with at least one of the things covered in this video before I became an obnoxious YouTuber the most common question that I would get from other musicians that I met when I toured or seldomly checked Facebook messages was what software do you use to make the flashbulb music a part of me kind of hates this question because sometimes it carries the unintentional suggestion that there's some secret tool out there that made all of my music rather than the countless hours of experimenting and editing and learning until my eyes and ears bled and
Richard James has more focus and determination and Imagination in his pinky than all of my body does than most music do and you're about to find out that this video isn't about the software that you can use to sound more like ax twin it's attempting to Showcase how much of a genius ax twin is which I personally think is more inspiring as a musician so let's Dive Right In with an instant classic when I first got my hands on the window Licor p in 1999 I just didn't understand and I didn't like it all that
much either with the exception of the final track nanu because it's just pretty simple and itic it took a lot of relist before it started growing on me because it was frankly so far away from anything that I had ever heard before that there was just no way to easily digest it it turns out that the other two tracks on the window Liquor EP weren't performed or programmed as much as they were painted Richard primarily used UI software's Metasynth which is still being updated and sold 25 years later Metasynth more or less allows you to
use sound as your medium and then color represents panning and once you manag to make a Sonic image that you like you can sequence it among others in software called xx and Metasynth is much more obvious and prominent on the second song on that which is titled Pitchfork had claimed that it's related to a 4A transform equation some others have speculated that it's an algorithm that Richard uses in music production but there's a far-end cross talk in there which is more of a Communications thing or at the very least not something solely related to software
so I think it's just a Kookie song title for a Kookie song anyway just search aex twin math or Apex Twin equation if you want to hear it I made a long video about Metasynth some years ago but let's just have a quick look at its core functionality so nowadays in medicin there's a whole onboard synthesizer that's actually quite [Music] powerful however in 1999 this was not a thing so I'm going to choose exponential tuning and then I'm going to load a sampler so I'm just drawing a French horn [Music] so to add Reverb to
them you could just bore one end of the image all right I'm going to make a [Music] beat it's like a good sneeze sad beat okay so now we have it synthesized and we can bring it into our effects room [Music] that's pretty [Music] chaotic I don't know when Metasynth got an effect tab but I did have Metasynth in like 2005 or something and it had it then and I guess it probably had it during the window lior window window Liquor window Liquor era [Applause] minor natural filter I'm going to load in a high hat
Loop and then I'm going to analyze that spectrum and it should now play it with that voice [Music] that's a good Apex pose I [Music] suppose beautiful let's drag this into audition and see if I can see my face all these lines here is cuz I didn't entirely use exponential mode in Metasynth but you could see my eyes and my nose and my smile good Lord wow yeah this is a quarter of a century ago when this track was made and you could still probably get the same result from even the Spotify version or something
I'm fairly certain that I could be locked in a room for a month with the much more featured modern version of medicine then I still would not come close to making anything that sounds as structured or frankly as awesome as [Music] this Apex twins most popular music or at least the music that brushed up against popular culture at the time really never represented the aura of his other work that well I heard the infamously distorted come to Daddy papy mix single right before the EP was released and I was kind of taken back a little
bit little did I know that the full come to Daddy EP or mini album itself would become what is probably the most Innovative and influential album in all of electronic music the second track alone flim is one of the most beautiful heartbreaking deeply thematic Melodies I've ever heard in my life and the drum programming has become a common upper tier goal of real life drummers to emulate and we will dive into how that was made later in this video but the peak of this album and probably Peak aex twin for most people would be buis
bouncing ball which means Ox headed bouncing ball in case you were curious and in the middle of the song it becomes apparent to us the sound that is making up most of the crazy sounds in the rest of the song a ball being dropped on a hard surface the audio of this sample is eventually torn apart in ways that nobody had ever heard before and it's recycled into new comp completely batshit insane sequences the thing is in 1997 there really wasn't a graphical destructive wave editor that could do this cool edit existed back in 1994
but the powerful sound design features didn't arrive until at least Cool Edit Pro in 1998 what we're hearing in buis bouncing ball is composers desktop project which I believe did not have a GUI or front end at the time it ran on Atari St initially and then later was ported to Microsoft Doss in 19 95 CDP has easily been one of the most powerful pieces of software for sound design and while it's now freeware it still has functionality that I've not seen in any other software fortunately over the years third-party front ends have been developed
that make it a little bit more accessible and allow us to play around with newer builds of CDP unfortunately it's going to feel extremely dated and frustrating compared to the user interface of modern software there's sound Loom which I never really clicked with there's sound shaper which is which is almost tolerable there's also process pack Grain Mill and BRK edit Shimmer tabula vigilance and so on yes in case you are wondering a 100% free sound design portal is opening up in front of you right now so at least pause this video and give your family
a big hug and kiss and let them know that you'll miss them before going on this epic Voyage all right so I have a file called ball. wve it's just a basketball bouncing now composer's desktop project is originally command based it didn't have a GUI at all so after setting up your system environment which isn't really all that difficult you would just type Reverb ball. wve as your infile your out file would be like ball verby do wve then you would have a bunch of parameters after that so you would have your early reflection gain
you would have your mix I'll put that as 0.7 you would have your Reverb time I'll put that for 2 seconds you would have uh your absorption I'll put that at 0.5 you would have your low pass frequency I'll put that at 700 meaning 700 Hertz and then you would have your Trail time and I'll put that at like 3 point 3 seconds all right and then you press enter and now let's hear it probably the most difficult way that you could put Reverb on anything in 2024 but fear not there is a GUI sound
shaper just feels very wind Windows 98 ah no folder memory that's always good so for example blur frequencies you set the factor every frequency above 430 htz and then low cut under 100 render and the result while not beautiful sounding is kind of unlike anything that you could get from any other software which is what makes it so exciting this is quantize and you can load a text file to customize how it's quantized [Music] freeze all of these steps a little [Music] bit golly I have no idea what any of this is [Music] but now
you might be able to see how a brilliant man nearly 30 years ago recorded a marble dropping on a glass table and then without this GUI typed in a bunch of commands into Doss and subjecting himself to hours days maybe even weeks weeks of trial and error and now you may start to understand how the Masterpiece beilis bouncing ball was created if you're really confused here and you want some heavy prep on CDP Trevor wishart's 1994 book audible design has a lot of diagrams that can help you understand the core of what CDP does and
if you're familiar with pilis bouncing ball you might be wondering what CDP sound generator is creating those low bit modulated noises in the song This one is easy and fun as one might expect some of Apex Twin's older music was programmed on outboard gear but when a computer was used it was typically running software called Dr T's tiger cub seriously I spent two long days trying to get this software to run in an emulator and had no success however I did find some videos of some folks who did have some success both with the original
hardware and emulators I salute yall for your patience really inspiring stuff what a lot of rubbish Story Time ages ago when I was on tour with dyer Escape Plan their drummer at the time Chris peny made a remark to me that he likes how my music and a effect Twins music so often has a linear drumming and I didn't know what that meant and he explained to me that it simply means only one sound at a time much later I would come to realize that Chris Penney is one of the best linear drummers of all
time but in my electronic musician Brain it just meant that I set a drum kit to monophonic or I used the same mute or choke group for every single sound and that's something I almost always did back then and I still do it quite frequently this video would be where you could see how that [Music] worked all right do you know who else frequently uses linear drum programming tracker users trackers were originally a very efficient way to make computer music and are sequenced in top down lines that can only play one voice at a time
per line so if you crammed your entire drum track into a Tracker Lane it would be linear this next statement is entirely speculative by the way but for the type of music you hear in the Richard D James album for example it's hard for me to imagine that it wasn't a Tracker triggering a scuzzy sampler for the drums in 1995 trackers weren't quite capable of playing a bunch of fat last 16bit sounds but what did exist in 1994 was recycle which is propeller head's first software product recycle was extremely Innovative at the time and it
allowed you to detect Peaks and transients in sound files like a drum break for example and then send and Route the individual sounds to a scuzzy sampler like the Akai S2000 what I can say for certain is that the similarly melodic and intricately programmed song V hbin from the 2001 Dr album was using Player Pro on a Mac for the melody here's a clip of presumably the original session shared by Richard himself and I cannot express how difficult it must have been to make a Melody this purposeful and provocative on this software and as you
can see the pany or the thing allowing more than one note to be played at the same time is accomplished by splitting them up into separate Lanes this melody which would be simple enough on a piano is an example of a tracker's weakness not for aex twin though he breezes right through it and makes it look easy let's make a very quick rudimentary and probably shitty sounding version of an fx twin tracker [Music] song bton county in the second left lane on 85 South past Exit 16 [Music] I actually was initially planning on making a
shitty version of fim or V hosin on the poan tracker for this video and then I discovered that a fellow audio you YouTuber digifix Electronics did this 2 years ago and pretty much killed it if you own a Tracker or a Tracker mini or um this thing that hasn't been announced yet you can get it all from his patreon all these links are in the [Music] description one thing that I'm skipping here in aex twins software agraph is almost certainly plenty of super collider which to this day is an updated and free highlevel audio programming
language it was originally created in 1996 by James McCartney who allegedly had visited Richard in London in a sort of private software collaboration tutorial thing what that software was like is anyone's guess however one of Richard's roommates in this period was fellow reflex artist syob or Chris Jeffs Chris made and makes music on his own software that he created in super collider he called the software syab music system and he used it when he played live as well and when I toured with him in the early to mid 2000s he showed me how the software
worked and it was some Next Level stuff that definitely did not exist outside of his own computer one particular piece of this software that totally blew me away that I still think about all the time was a tb303 style vocal sequencer with text to speech functionality and that was like 20 years ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Richard for quite a bit earlier today and he gave me a long list of tools some of which I frankly have never even heard of some I forgot about and unfortunately some of them cannot be run
on Modern computers but some of them can and the whole reason I'm making this video in the first place is an attempt to expand my viewers pallet of tools off of the beaten path territory so please try to run some of this stuff and experiment so the Player Pro tracker that you saw a teeny bit of earlier didn't support VST plugins or anything like that but it did aowow you to execute code for custom sense and whatnot and I had no idea this was a thing and despite it being pretty difficult to get Player Pro
running on anything these days this is one of those details that may have been lost in history unless some jag off said it on YouTube one of the programs that caught me by surprise was Pratt which I never even considered using in any creative way I had it installed for voice printing for forensic audio work and I don't think I ever actually used it for that but I just had it installed and learned it a bit but it turns out that there's a whole lot of exploring you could do with the voice synthesis and whatnot
and I'm excited to check that out in the future one thing that Richard told me about that I simply cannot believe that I've never heard about previously and I am literally obsessed with now is youpic which was designed by Yannis and AIS and um holy [ __ ] I've never wanted to play with a synthesizer more in my entire life instrumentalists instrument makers musicologists but also physicist ists and mathematicians will find in the system a host of possibilities for experimental application speaking of things I had never even known existed when Richard was a teenager he
was using an add-on for the ZX Spectrum called Ram music machine which had midi in and out and it even supported very low resolution sampling news to me finally unsurprisingly he used a lot of stuff from kkam and without getting into specifics you should just go down the uram lab's rabbit hole as I cannot think of a more dedicated group of researchers and developers focusing on music and audio technology and frankly it's surprising that I've not done a video on ircam software yet and I'm sure I will in the very near future so while some
of the things that we covered in this video is old and inaccessible now a lot of it is accessible and a lot of it is free which gives you no excuse to not try and get it running and play with it yourself and if you do please let us see your results in the comments because again that's why I'm making this video after DRS came out in 2001 the Apex Twin would go on a 13-year Hiatus Richard James did not he amassed a ludicrous amount of analog gear and released over 5 hours of music and
as many as 15 different releases under alternate alias' before releasing syyro in 2014 but I had quite a few debates with other longtime FX twin fans who thought that he had lost something from his Peak years I completely disagree I think apx Twins Peak is defined by The Listener and I think we lost something in that period for example do you remember earlier when I said that I didn't really like window Liquor when it first came out well I paid good money for it at the time and I had trusted that I would eventually hear
something that I didn't hear in the first few listens and holy [ __ ] I 100% did I have no idea how many listens it took for me to personally declare to myself that the Richard D James album or come to Daddy are among the most Innovative albums ever made but it certainly wasn't the first impression I had when listening to them at the risk of morphing to Rick biato before your eyes I do have to point this out we just don't have that listening experience anymore when we evolved from having to take the bus
to a bunch of different music stores to find an obscure and overpriced experimental electronic music CD all the way to a song just being fed to us on the Spotify algorithm we lost patience and we lost the obsessive focused mind [ __ ] that came with an apx twin album in the 1990s but do you know why nobody has accurately reverse engineered or deconstructed or recreated any of the music that Richard James has released in the last 15 years it's because it's ahead of its time it's next level and nobody knows what the [ __
] is going on in those songs when I was in my early teens I was an awkward Jazz guitarist programming Buddy Rich and Jean Kupa solos on a drum machine in South Chicago while house music was taking off it's hard to overstate how popular electronic music was in Chicago at that time but electronic music was remixes of of the Speed Racer theme or somebody saying it's time for The Percolator over and over for 20 minutes to a 44 beat I loved creatively programming drum machines and synthesizers to do things that humans couldn't but I was
ashamed to show my music to anybody because of the stigma of making electronic music that didn't work in a dance club that is until I heard ax twin and then I realized that I indeed can do whatever I want and there are thousands of musicians who benefited from the same young parasocial relationship with Richard's music in that period if there's a takeaway from this video other than a bunch of cool software to check out it would be the overall attitude of Richard James for some reason or another he has no creative boundaries at all his
music sounds 100% like someone exploring for their own benefit not like something that is made to appeal to others or please spotify's algorithm or get used in Tik toks I'm sorry you or I will never never sound like ax twin but we can appreciate that he did the hard work for us by showing the world that there doesn't have to be any rules in electronic music or music at all and on that note by the time you're seeing this I'm probably renovating a new studio so I'd better put on my work boots and get out
of here by the way let me talk about my sponsor really fast it's you if you enjoyed this and you want to see more like it consider joining my patreon I have loads of unreleased and released music audio assets field recordings and a really positive community you don't see those on the internet anymore and I have monthly songwriting challenges it's great you should totally join it's as little as $1 thanks for watching do not stop creating bye
