the horns in UK garage

Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
..... said:
not to be that person, but...
I think people are confused about what midi is. Besides being an interface between gear (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), midi is basically just a protocol for triggering sounds. It doesn't really have much to do with the quality of sounds used which can range from "basic midi" presets, to samples (whether "one shot" samples which can be played in different pitches, or "one shots" that have been sampled for each note to make it sound more real as you go up and down in pitch, or long sampled sounds and/or loops of brass) to synths (whether or not the synth sounds are "modelled" on sounding like real instruments, or just using sounds/timbres that are similar which is sometimes more interesting/better way to go).
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We dealt with this in the midi horns thread. Everyone just uses the term as a shorthand for those tacky plastic horn sounds.
 
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0bleak

Well-known member
luka said:
what terminolgoy should they be using o'bleak?
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I guess it depends on the track, but basically things don't necessarily need to have the "midi" prefix as the quality and the way the sounds are generated can vary a great deal when constructing a track using midi.
Unless it does sound really cheap and tacky (which I guess can be fun in ts own way), then maybe "basic midi".

Benny Bunter said:
We dealt with this in the midi horns thread. Everyone just uses the term as a shorthand for those tacky plastic horn sounds.
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ah, ok - I started to read that before i opened my trap, but saw it was 7 pages.
 
B

Blissblogger2

Member
I think what I like about this approach is that it gestures at jazz but doesn't deliver it

(Can you imagine how awful it would be if someone like Courtney Pine starting blowing free over one of these tunes?)

So it's "jazz" in air quotes

The jazziness is subordinated entirely to the rhythmic vamp function, like another little cog in the hyper-syncopated engine

It's also got something to do with the kind of eerieness or just delicious wrongness that is achieved when an instrumental sound is played on a keyboard, when really it should be played on the sounding mechanism of whatever instrument it is meant to be - strings and horsehair with a violin, brass and fiddly little stops and fingertips with horns (not forgetting the embouchure of the blower). The attack of the sound is all wrong.

it's similar to the effect of the mellotron, where brief swatches of instrumental texture - brass or woodwind or strings or whatever - are on loops of tape that are triggered by a keyboard. So you have a horn sound that gets played pianistically.

the classic example of this in all sorts of dance music is vocal samples arrayed on a keyboard and played in a clearly non-human, not-what-a-mouth-and-lungs-would-do way

but it works just as well as with the non-human instruments

actually another hallmark of the nuum is pizzicato string parts. runs through the whole length and breadth of it, almost. well, not so much dubstep.
 
B

Blissblogger2

Member
Made to ponder the mystery of the UKG horn and what is signified by watching this objectively poorly executed doc that's just about worth sitting through for the snippets of old footage



Another thought stirred by it was there seems to be a link between being a UKG player/pioneer and hair loss

It features a preponderance of bald middle aged men in clearly expensive but actually really boring-looking shirts and hoodies

Still I suppose it's covering events that started taking place 30-plus years ago... time will take its toll.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Blissblogger2 said:
I think what I like about this approach is that it gestures at jazz but doesn't deliver it

(Can you imagine how awful it would be if someone like Courtney Pine starting blowing free over one of these tunes?)

So it's "jazz" in air quotes

The jazziness is subordinated entirely to the rhythmic vamp function, like another little cog in the hyper-syncopated engine

It's also got something to do with the kind of eerieness or just delicious wrongness that is achieved when an instrumental sound is played on a keyboard, when really it should be played on the sounding mechanism of whatever instrument it is meant to be - strings and horsehair with a violin, brass and fiddly little stops and fingertips with horns (not forgetting the embouchure of the blower). The attack of the sound is all wrong.

it's similar to the effect of the mellotron, where tape-loops of brass or woodwind or strings or whatever, are on loops of tape that are triggered by a keyboard. So you have a horn sound played pianistically.

the classic example of this in all sorts of dance music is vocal samples arrayed on a keyboard and played in a clearly non-human, not-what-a-mouth-and-lungs-would-do way

but it works just as well as with the non-human instruments

actually another hallmark of the nuum is pizzicato string parts. runs through the whole length and breadth of it, almost. well, not so much dubstep.
Click to expand...

garage also owes more to Todd Edwards than it does funk breaks so scronking jazz wouldn't work, though it would do in some kind of outsider/distorted future garage take on the sound. Actually free jazz over grime beats could be fun...

managed to get a nice sounding digitalised copy of this the other year

jazz as flava not so much process

 
0

0bleak

Well-known member
Blissblogger2 said:
It's also got something to do with the kind of eerieness or just delicious wrongness that is achieved when an instrumental sound is played on a keyboard, when really it should be played on the sounding mechanism of whatever instrument it is meant to be - strings and horsehair with a violin, brass and fiddly little stops and fingertips with horns (not forgetting the embouchure of the blower). The attack of the sound is all wrong.

it's similar to the effect of the mellotron, where brief swatches of instrumental texture - brass or woodwind or strings or whatever - are on loops of tape that are triggered by a keyboard. So you have a horn sound that gets played pianistically.

the classic example of this in all sorts of dance music is vocal samples arrayed on a keyboard and played in a clearly non-human, not-what-a-mouth-and-lungs-would-do way

but it works just as well as with the non-human instruments
Click to expand...

don't know if you've played around with them much, but there are ways in modern DAWS to make playing or programming different kinds of instruments parts sound closer to the modulation in whatever "real" instrument, and in the various multitude of ways notes follow each other, like how much/long particular notes are joined as you move from one to the other, how much particular notes bend in pitch, etc. etc. etc.
controllers made for DAWs are also useful for this, for controlling the various modulations in real time
of course now there are also millions of royalty free legal samples people can buy of virtually any instrument ("real" or electonic) being played, and across a full spectrum of tempos and keys
 
B

blissblogger

Well-known member
A few more examples

Nu-Birth, "Anytime", from about 2 mins in



The same thin parping riff pops up in Somore, "I Refuse (what you want) (industry standard club mix)" at about 4 minutes in



But here's a use of fake horn that's completely different - at 1.46 in Doolally "Straight From the Heart" you hear horn that's
more like 2-Tone (ersatz trombone, even?) with some dubby reverb on it.

 
B

blissblogger

Well-known member
However, denting my thesis somewhat, I realized that you can hear this kind of pseudo-sax in some Masters At Work, probably those same tracks that are so foundational for UK garage.







So, okay, yes, as if often the case, the Americans start something - but the Brits take it further.

The same could be said of other US garage features like vocal cut-ups, hard-swung woody-textured snares, and the plinky xylo-bass (or maybe that's a uniquely Brit thing?)
 
DLaurent

DLaurent

Well-known member
I could never nail this sound, probably as I don't listen to enough garage, but the way I tried was chopping up horn samples like a break and mapping it to different sampler keys.
 
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