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Old 11-25-2017, 06:51 PM   #31
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it looks like he has dental implants
really? why?

 
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Old 11-25-2017, 07:21 PM   #32
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jeez

if only they'd spent half the time on the drum sounds/programming as they did on the geetar!

 
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Old 11-25-2017, 10:27 PM   #33
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i always thought this was one of the more fitting fan made videos i'd ever seen on youtube. it's got such a numb quality that fits so perfectly with the song, it's like a professional video produced by the band themselves. except it's super low budget and is one shot through a train window. but it just works beautifully well imho.

 
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Old 11-26-2017, 03:54 AM   #34
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Happy to say I appreciated this one fully at the time. Not counting the Bee Gees song that he didn't write, All Things Change, Mina Loy, Camera Eye, A100, Now and Then, Walking Shade, Tilt, and Strayz are all really good, and even the ones I didn't name have their strong points. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it's better than any album he's released since. I haven't listened to Ogilala yet though.

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Old 11-26-2017, 03:58 AM   #35
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Ok

 
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Old 11-26-2017, 04:26 AM   #36
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oh yeah i always forget about "Tilt"

kind of a lost Corgan gem, imo. if he pulled it out on the Ogi tour i'd probably straight-up "nut"

 
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Old 11-26-2017, 05:33 AM   #37
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Regarding the drum programming:

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It was fortunate for matt walker at the time that ALL the drums were programmed, as he had just torn his acl in an onstage accident, and was in a total leg brace for most of the recording sessions. We used every drum machine made up until about 1985
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main drum machine? there wasn't really one, but the 606's, 909's Drumtraks, linns, and drumulator probably got the most love.... the sounds were mixed and matched as there were many contributing to the drum sounds, so whatever worked best, and billy chose on,.... bon also made a lot of drum sounds from the doepfer... a lot of the synth toms etc came from that.... we spent a lot of time with that,.... and then would further process sounds through a myriad of outboard gear, from vocoders to pedals etc.... there was a real luxury given to creating new sounds, and billy was really open to ideas as long as they did not originate from anyone else's loops or sounds etc.
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"Now(and then).The drum really has a shuffle/shake to it.":

i think the majority of the drum sounds on that song were 909 and processed, there were some optigan parts as well that were processed….
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i think i mentioned earlier in the thread, but at the time Billy had bought pretty much most of the drum machines in existence (not every boutique one of a kind deal), but everything from CR78's, to linns, to the whole roland x0x's, to drumulators, to damn alesis units (NOT USED), (his collection rivals that of the popuar Moby youtube collection)... to old hammond stuff, etc... I also sampled a lot of stuff off one of the Mellotrons we had, and the Optigan etc...

so those were used a lot, and the main processing (outside of the millenials, ssl, various outboard neve's and other compressor/eq's etc), were real plate verb, fairchild, the Eventide Omnipressor played a large role, especially on tracks like "All Things Change"...
Matt Walker and I played a lot stuff through the Sherman Electronics Quad Modular Filter, and an old Binson Echo.... A lot of source drums were also created by Bon Harris through the Doepfer Modular and his trusty Roland System 100m... some stuff was run through an old Roland Vocoder Rack mount, so there was a LOT of post treatment obviously... RE-201 Space Echo's etc...

The idea being mainly to use gear from a certain era and adhere to that without "much" ITB, save some clever work from Bjorn Thorsrud and Alan Moulder with some GRM tools etc probably used a little... and then like most of the synths on the record, a lot of them were parallel treated by reamping through the loads of Smashing Pumpkins amps at our disposal, from orange bass cabs to Ampegs etc... (Bjorn Thorsrud worked TIRELESSLY to make sure everything was done "correctly" and impedance issues and sonic integrity remained intact in this whole process)

we would do stuff on the Oberhem DSX, lay stuff to tape, and play mutes (kinda like Dr. Dre style), etc.... just rambling off my memories, which are probably failing, , but there was a lot of thought and time put into getting the sounds obviously, and ... will post more as my memory gets jogged....

suffice to say, and has been said by me in this thread, Billy was really aiming for authenticity on this, no shortcuts, so we weren't using Kontakt libraries or other soft solutions that existed at the time... Sometimes would mock up a part with something at home or bon or matt would in something like reason etc, but then would rethink and revoice those....

It was a great experience, not many records are made like that these days obviously with budgetary and time concerns.... so it was a fairly nice GS way of working...

P.S.:

" "DIA" features electronic drums played by Corgan's longtime collaborator, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin
, as well as the violin and backing voice of Emilie Autumn."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheFut...ace#References

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Old 11-26-2017, 05:41 AM   #38
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https://reverb.com/item/6319302-peav...efutureembrace

 
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Old 11-26-2017, 06:13 AM   #39
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"28 July 2005. Billy Corgan performs a rare acoustic version of "DIA" from The Future Embrace."





P.S.: ...from the same show:

"You Were Mine was performed at a secret acoustic show at The Marquee in Sydney, Australia on July 28th, 2005."


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Old 11-26-2017, 01:24 PM   #40
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This is pretty neat.


 
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Old 11-26-2017, 05:06 PM   #41
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Old 11-26-2017, 05:18 PM   #42
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maximum cringe there

 
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Old 11-26-2017, 05:51 PM   #43
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Looks like a huge amount of time and effort was spent making it. Could see why Billy took the negative reaction so badly.

 
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Old 11-27-2017, 03:26 AM   #44
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As one of the most driven, visionary and obsessive artists in alternative rock, Billy Corgan always produced intensely personal music, whether he was recording under the group identity of the Smashing Pumpkins, or moving into the new millennium as leader of the short-lived Zwan.

Beyond the superficial difference of this being Corgan's first official solo album, there is remarkable evidence of a songwriter who's grown far beyond even the Pumpkins' best and most revealing effort, "Adore" (1998), to produce sounds that stand with the most creative from his past while speaking with a new maturity and emotional honesty.

"Who needs pain to survive? I need pain to change my life," the man who spent much of the '90s whining "woe is me" sings in his new song, "The Camera Eye."

As the album's title indicates, "The Future Embrace" introduces an artist who is proud to be a survivor. He may not know exactly where he's going, but he welcomes the journey.

"I think I'm old enough and comfortable enough now to say that I really don't know who Billy Corgan is," the guitarist and vocalist said a few weeks ago as we chatted in the backyard of his new home overlooking the North Shore of Lake Michigan.

The 38-year-old Corgan has a bit of a New Age aura these days, evidence of a spiritual journey that has progressed since the pseudo-Christian imagery of Zwan's only album, 2003's "Mary Star of the Sea." As part of the media blitz to launch his new disc, he even did an interview with Conscious Choice magazine. But if some of his more "hippie/mystical" comments might seem ponderous coming from another artist, they're welcome from Corgan, who's been painfully self-critical since the teenage years when he first turned to music as a weapon to battle the cool kids who mocked him at Glenbard North High School."I don't think I've hit the sweet spot. I've been so reactive through the years — and insecurities and all these other things drove my decisions so much — that I feel like this is the time to be kind of critical. I still don't feel like I have found my own total space, but I'm working towards it. It could be the type of thing where I may not find it until I'm 50, but when I find it, it will have a nice run."

At first, the most obvious difference on the new album is a digital approach heavy on sequenced keyboards and drum machines and owing a debt to Corgan's heroes in New Order. But listen closer and you'll also notice a return to his roots as a guitarist enamored of English "shoegazer" bands such as Ride and My Bloody Valentine.

"I love the shoegazer stuff," Corgan said. "It's really funny, because one of the guitar magazines turned down an interview with me saying, 'There's no guitar on the record.' They don't realize that it's some of the most inventive stuff I've done. It's more of the way I played in the beginning, when I was 16 to 20, with a lot of effects. It didn't feel sentimental to go back there, it just felt like I went to a point where that stopped, and now I've picked it up again."

Corgan spent a little more than a year working on the disc, starting in the Smashing Pumpkins' now-abandoned rehearsal space and recording studio off Elston Avenue, and moving to the Chicago Recording Company. The project was interrupted only by a monthlong vacation and another month spent in the spring of 2003 recording his acoustic "Chicago song cycle."

The artist is still in the process of sorting through those recordings — he has as many as 28 takes of some songs on video and audio tape — and he's still uncertain about how they will be released. "With iTunes, they're talking about doing video downloading, so I could maybe see doing a video version of the album" as an Internet release, he said.

Fans who attended the acoustic performances may be surprised that there is no evidence of that mode on "The Future Embrace." Corgan said he was determined to create a sustained mood and sound on this album, avoiding the "Billy's Junk Shop" approach of collecting unrelated musical ideas.

"I felt like I had kind of done the 'We're going to do the acoustic song, then we're going to do the big metal song' thing. I thought of albums in the '70s and '80s by the Cars or the Buzzcocks, where you put the record on, and it had one vibe. If you love the vibe, you love the album, and if you didn't like the vibe, you just didn't like the album."

The collaborators on his solo bow — producer Bjorn Thorsrud, keyboardist and computer programmer Bon Harris (Nitzer Ebb), keyboardist Brian Liesegang (Filter) and drummer Matt Walker (Filter and, briefly, the Pumpkins) — joined the project one by one as the songwriter felt the need for additional input and other perspectives.

"In the beginning, it was just me and Bjorn," Corgan said. "Then I thought, 'I'm in over my head' — kind of like with 'Adore' — 'I'm messing with keyboards but I don't really know what I'm doing; I really need Bon.' He had been studying orchestral scoring under some guy who used to do charts for Charlie Parker, and like a jazz guy, he would chart the songs into parts, so I got this other kind of feedback — more tonal.

"That was a big turning point on the record. Then we reached a point where the three of us started to burn out on each other." Enter Liesegang and Walker. "They had none of the baggage that we had. We were at a point where we were over-thinking, and it was nice to have people come in and go, 'That rocks!'" Finally, veteran shoegazer and Pumpkins producer Alan Moulder came in to sort it all out in the mix.

When I told the notorious perfectionist that he still seemed to be struggling with his tendency to overcook things in the studio, he laughed.

"Hold me to this: My plan on making my next record is to spend a lot of time writing, but to record it really quickly," Corgan said. "We're talking about using a lot of musicians, sort of Beach Boys-style, and doing the stuff live. Put 14 people in a room, and because you know it costs a lot of money, and the clock's running, you've got to do it. [Snaps his fingers] Hold me to that, all right?"

A live ork-pop album is just one of several plans Corgan has for the future. He would also like to raise a family — "I really want five or six kids," he said — but first he has to find a mate. "I'm ready, ready for love," he plaintively croons in "I'm Ready," a song his collaborators wanted to keep off the album. Corgan said it's his favorite.

"I finally severed, for good, this nine-year relationship with my ex-girlfriend [model Yelena Yemchuk] that really ended two years before that, but there was still all this drama," Corgan said. "I kept saying to Bjorn, 'I don't want write about breaking up with my girlfriend, that's so lame.' I would write the lyrics and go, 'Oh, those are pretty good, I like the way they feel.' Then I would sing the song and think, 'It's another f—ing break-up song!'"

So instead of dwelling on a failed relationship, I asked, you decided to consider what might come next?

"I know what comes next," Corgan said. "But I lack the confidence to believe that I'm actually going to get it. As my therapist says, 'You have to stop believing that every woman is going to fail you.' I can see what a great relationship for me would now be, but until I actually see it, feel it and trust it, I still have that feeling that it's just a bomb waiting to go off."

In the meantime, Corgan has the distraction of the limited but ambitious tour supporting "The Future Embrace." When he performs two sold-out shows July 5-6 at the Vic Theatre, he'll be accompanied by Liesegang and Walker, a mix of live instrumentation and recorded backing tracks and a cutting-edge light and video show. The new technology is hard to explain, he said. "But it's going to be very energetic, and like nothing you've ever seen before."

The one thing fans should not expect is Smashing Pumpkins songs.

"What's unfortunate about what we would call a second act of a career is that if you don't continue to exploit your past or let them knock you around and turn you into what they think you should be, they basically stick their boot in the back of your neck," Corgan said.

"I'd like to climb up to the Neil Young rung. This is going to sound like a quotable cliche, but I'd like to be the Neil Young of the digital age. I think if Neil was my age now, he would be doing some of the things I'm about to do: the free music, the ability to interact in the way that the technology is now going to allow. Just as much as he pioneered an auteur rock star, I think I can pioneer a sort of auteur digital rock star."
http://www.spfc.org/news-press/inter...ontent_id=2812

 
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Old 11-27-2017, 06:37 AM   #45
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Old 11-27-2017, 12:42 PM   #46
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"Mina Loy," "The CameraEye," "Now (And Then)," and "Sorrows (In Blue)" rank up there with some of the best songs Corgan ever wrote, and could have easily stood their ground on later Smashing Pumpkins albums. Even the worst song on the record ("I'm Ready") doesn't plunder the depths we'd hit with TbK.

 
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Old 11-27-2017, 01:00 PM   #47
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color palette inspired by this album:


 
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Old 11-27-2017, 01:21 PM   #48
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Quote:
Originally Posted by FoolofaTook View Post
I played it to my cousin who has a masters in music from some fancy school in vienna.

he said (in thick euro accent) "jonny this is very bad music." I was pretty butthurt. lol tfe sucks.
this made my night

 
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Old 11-27-2017, 01:41 PM   #49
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some guitar stuff extracted from that gearslutz thread, some of it repeated

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the guitar sounds were painstakingly worked on. ...as every song has only ONE take of guitar, with one sound, and one pass only. If he made a mistake, rewind, start over from the beginning.
Quote:
I am not sure if he wants me to divulge his signal path right now, but to give clue, it was pretty much made out of one device, and on occassion we threw one of his huge huge collection of vintage pedals.
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the guitar ALWAYS came last in the process, which i will go into more depth later…
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the guitar melodic line then applied would exist on the froth of the result, and being a step removed from the original composition, in that billy would compose the new part as a reaction to the interactions attained in the aforementioned process….
Quote:
The "one" piece of gear, I guess it's no big deal, as the actual guitar signal path was quite simple on the record.... Billy is used to having his amazing array of amps with controls over everything to go to different pedals/signal paths etc... decided he was going to stay with one dsp unit, and one amp (well kinda, a pair of them just for "stereo").... once in awhile we would dig into his massive boxes of pedals for a little something, but most of the sound design for the guitar was done on one box, and again, would spend a day tweaking one box on ONE sound, for ONE performance and that was it. I think I mentioned it before, but he was insistent on doing everything in one pass, no overdubs, etc... and the fact that the parts were written on the fly, over an arrangement of a song that had been written another way, etc
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...kinda like a zoom but more in the Eventide realm....
Quote:
..and if you knew the amps used…. kinda funny… think bad metal combo amps from the 80's….
(the peavey amps posted earlier in this thread)

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so those were used a lot, and the main processing (outside of the millenials, ssl, various outboard neve's and other compressor/eq's etc), were real plate verb, fairchild, the Eventide Omnipressor played a large role, especially on tracks like "All Things Change"...
unclear if he's talking about the guitar signal here, but the omnipressor is analog anyway

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Old 11-27-2017, 04:55 PM   #50
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Originally Posted by cork_soaker View Post
unclear if he's talking about the guitar signal here, but the omnipressor is analog anyway
Yeah, no mention of what the mysterious Eventide-like dsp unit is.

If you look at one of the pics earlier in this thread, you can see his guitar cable going directly into what looks like a pair of 1u rack units...

Enhance!


 
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Old 11-27-2017, 05:29 PM   #51
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they look identical, so i'm assuming one's a backup

 
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Old 11-27-2017, 06:47 PM   #52
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Maybe



SOMEONE NEEDS TO ASK BILLY THIS QUESTION.

// Actually that lestermagneto guy from GearSlutz (is it Bjorn?) was active on the board 1 week ago. Maybe we should ask him? Anyone have a GearSlutz account?

Last edited by Funbags : 11-27-2017 at 06:54 PM.

 
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Old 11-27-2017, 07:30 PM   #53
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i'll do it

 
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Old 11-27-2017, 07:38 PM   #54
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ok i did it

 
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Old 11-27-2017, 08:01 PM   #55
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Jolly good show sir!

 
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Old 11-27-2017, 09:00 PM   #56
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so much fake science went into such a boring record

 
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Old 11-28-2017, 11:36 AM   #57
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// Actually that lestermagneto guy from GearSlutz (is it Bjorn?)
i thought it was brian liesegang.

 
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Old 11-28-2017, 12:37 PM   #58
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that's correct

 
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Old 11-28-2017, 12:37 PM   #59
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"brian" lol

 
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Old 11-28-2017, 02:31 PM   #60
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"brian" lol

 
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