In his newest video, musician and YouTuber Benn Jordan takes a deep dive into the gear utilized by digital legend Aphex Twin on a few of his most necessary works.
The video – titled The Batsh*t Software program Aphex Twin used – begins with a have a look at Metasynth, a chunk of software program that enables customers to “paint” to sound: “Metasynth kind of lets you use sound as your medium after which color represents panning and when you handle to make a sonic picture that you just like you possibly can sequence it amongst others in software program known as Xx,” Jordan explains.
The software program, which continues to be being up to date and offered 25 years later, was instrumental within the making of Aphex Twin’s 1999 Windowlicker EP.
Subsequent, Jordan delves into the instruments utilized by Aphex Twin to create the advanced, layered sounds attribute of tracks like Bucephalus Bouncing Ball from his 1997 EP, Come to Daddy.
“The sound that’s making up a lot of the loopy sounds in the remainder of the music [is] a ball being dropped on a tough floor. The audio of this pattern is finally torn aside in ways in which no person had ever heard earlier than and it’s recycled into new, fully batshit insane sequences,” he explains. “The factor is in 1997, there actually wasn’t a graphical damaging wave editor that would do that.”
In response to Jordan, what we’re listening to on Bucephalus Bouncing Ball is Composers Desktop Challenge (CDP), a robust, command-line-based sound design software program that “didn’t have a GUI or entrance finish on the time”.
Whereas the person interface will really feel extraordinarily dated by immediately’s requirements, it “nonetheless has performance that I’ve not seen in some other software program,” says the musician.
A number of the different softwares mentioned within the video embody PlayerPro, an early tracker utilized by Aphex Twin, and Tremendous Collider, a high-level audio programming language created in 1996 by James McCartney.
Watch the complete breakdown beneath.
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