8th track and a proper reminisce.

Track – The Threshold of Sanity
[SOUNDCLOUD]https://soundcloud.com/hyper-on-experience/hyper-on-the-threshold-of[/SOUNDCLOUD]

Today I did a video interview with a freelance journalist called Tim Cant.

He did the Computer Music cover CD interview with Friction which was just the best thing I’ve seen in ages. He filmed Friction going through the process of knocking up a tune and all the decisions he made doing that.

I learnt a lot from this. Infact, copying this idea of watching someone construct music forms the basis of how I lecture. I tour for a month every year doing masterclass in music production for Access to Music colleges.

Tim knows his stuff. He actually knew my stuff better than I did! He played me a remix I didn’t know we’d done and pointed out that there were two versions of Imajica….

It was enjoyable, and I got to reminisce about working with Peshey, Foul Play and Mixrace and a host of other things.

Hyper-On did a lot of tracks for Peshey including the Piano Tune and the Vocal Tune. Peshey is a brilliant producer and a joy to work with.

He would turn up at The Shed with a bunch of samples and a definite idea of what sort of tune he wanted. He would have all the breaks, stabs, bass and vocals and me and Danny would put the tune together for him.

Peshey didn’t have a lot of technical knowledge and would describe the type of rolls he wanted in the drums by conducting with his finger while he followed a drum roll. We made him a conductor’s stick out of a piece of rolled up A4 paper topped with a pen lid.

He used this extensively and it became known as “The Shuffle Stick”.

Foul Play were great remixers. They had such a simple way of remixing tunes that worked every time.

When we engineered their second Omni Trio remix John Morrow put the original track on the technics and played the 1st 16 bars. It was an Amen snare played in a pitched pattern.

He said: “make the 1st 16 bars an Amen snare played in a pitched pattern, but play it differently and put an effect on it”.

It was the same for the next 16 bars, and so on…

I thought this was genius. Copy what’s been done well before and change it to your style. This works on so many levels.

Also, we spoke about the DJ set I recently did as Hyper-On and I was keen to show Tim the patterns I’d noticed in the BPMs over the years 91-94.

The tempo changes from around 127bpm to 163bpm.

To factor this into my set I chose to mix a few tracks within one tempo bracket and the chop mix to another tempo. But I could definitely see patterns by year.

7th Track – Threshold of Sanity

Two great sounds in here that we’d been itching to use; the Hammond and the break.

Its quite a full on intro. I remember that I couldn’t program out the initial stab from the pad that fades quickly and then rises slowly, so I left it in!

Original TB 303 bassline. Gorgeous.

Quite rolled out for a Hyper-On tune.

Love the techno switch.

Quite a few N-Joi influences.

Last breakdown is the SH101. Very Intense. Octave shift was operated manually.

How did we name it?

I was once told the story of someone who went to a big rave somewhere. They did something that made them think that outside the dance tent was another universe with its own reality, very much different than ours.

And when you stood in the doorway from the tent, you stood on the threshold of sanity.