Musical Genius of the Day

I’ve started a new feature on the Caterwaul blog:  interviews with fascinating musicians, artists, writers, dancers, and visionaries…from an artist’s point of view.

My intention is to furnish the audience with a conversation that would transpire inside an artist’s studio, without the trappings of pop-culture or paparazzi.

The first interview is with one of the Bay Area’s absolute best underground producers, George Cochrane.  George produces consistently fantastic music of all genres and styles.  He plays drums, bass, keys, synthesizers, button-and-knob machines, and sings…and he’s a studio engineer, too.

July 9, 2010

Jeremy Richardson, the Coppercat, interviews George Cochrane (Origami, of DJ2 and Cubik & Origami, Andrew Phelan and Origami, The Fingermonsters, and The White Pinecone)

Q: When you write, do you manifest lyrics or melody first?
Do you coalesce them with effort or serendipity?

A: Lyrics tend to come to me in little snatches that float into my head while I’m making a sandwich as the raw loop blares in the other room. I often find myself running back into the studio to jot things down before I forget them. The vocal melody tends to get improvised on the first take, and refined in subsequent takes.

Q: Uptempo or Downtempo, BPM, Key Signature, Major/Minor…how do you decide from track to track?
What’s your method or madness?  Logic or whimsy?

A: If I get to choose, (I.E. it’s not a specifically commissioned track/remix) the tempo and tonality is typically dictated by my mood, the music I’ve been listening to, or the recent trajectory of the stuff I’ve been making.
This means I make a lot of widely-varied stuff, which is a blessing and a curse, I guess. It makes marketing/promo a pain but hey, you’ve got to do what makes you happy.

Q: If you were on Permanent Vacation on a desert island, and could only have one,
which would you pick: AutoTune or a Vocoder, and Why?

A: Vocoder, for sure, because most of them can be used as a cool little fixed filterbank, and I think that it’d be more entertaining as I while away the hours in my bamboo chaise lounge. Plus, I could say “Pin-a Cola-da” through it, to the tune of “Around The World“, when I got thirsty.
On the serious, I prefer Melodyne over Autotune nine times out of ten. I only use Autotune when I’m lazy or I WANT messed-up audio.

Q: A BPM  you’re obsessed with and a story that pertains to it is:

A: When I made a lot of tech-house (I guess I still do), I enjoyed the beautiful shape of 126 BPM. The numbers themselves, and the pace- Just fast enough to get you up and dancing, but not TOO fast. I have an unnatural affinity for even numbers, too.
These days, most of my housier stuff lives around 115-122 BPM. There just seems to be more room for expression when you’re not tripping over the next beat so fast.

Q: The Secret Recording Technique you probably shouldn’t share is:

A: My favorite thing of late- if you’re making crunchy, square-wavey music (Electro House, Dubstep, etc) and you’re valuing slam and attitude over fidelity, try cascading a gluey compressor and couple of mastering limiters on the mix bus, each set to a few dBs of gain reduction. Put some “character” plugins between them, and if your DAW does it well, push the signal into a little (digital!) distortion at a couple of points in the chain, making sure to get the signal back out of the red with the final mastering limiter.
I cannot believe how huge I’ve gotten things to sound that way. It’s all a matter of harnessing chaos. A lot of the work we engineers normally do to retain clarity is counterproductive in those styles. You just want to CRUSH it and CRUSH it again, and give it a good kick in the cojones for good measure.

Q: Care to predict the date of the RIAA fall? Obvious extra points for specificity.

A: Not soon enough. I think it’s going to take quite a few older folks retiring and taking their inflexibility with them, as seems to be the case in many other media-oriented governing bodies. I think everyone going out and making a living through smaller entities instead of the majors is going to help hasten that transition.

Q: iTunes: love, hate, or indifference?

A: I like the iTunes store a lot. They charge artists less per sale than most other online sales outlets, and it’s a nice place to preview albums before you download them illegally (KIDDING!). They do have a distressing habit of omitting songs from records, especially back catalog stuff, which is weird, and the DRM is a pain.
Then again, most days I “pay” an artist by buying their album on iTunes, and then I grab a high-quality, unrestricted copy from a download site. It’s pretty stupid that we need to do that, but I’m glad the conduit to give money to artists is there.

Q: Frets or fretless?

A: Frets, these days. My intonation is in terrible shape from lack of fretless practice.

Q: What is the analog gear you “wish they’d remake?”  What is your current favorite DSP plugin?

A: I wish there was a smaller, lighter replica of the Sequential Circuits Pro-One. Same control layout, routing options and sound, but the size of, say, a thick laptop. COME ON DSI! I can get the sounds I want so much faster on that box than anything else, and it’s all about that layout and the logic of it. I spend every day shaking in terror that it’s going to catch fire and my career will be over.
My favorite processing plugins at the moment are the Softube stuff. The Amp Room plugins are incredible, I often use them on a return in my sessions and just send stuff there to add touches of grit to different things. The Trident A-Range EQ and FET Compressor are golden, too.
My favorite plug-in instrument is probably U-He’s Zebra. It just sounds incredible and the modular structure is fun. With Live 8′s ability to only include certain synth parameters in the automation lists, it’s really nicely controllable, too.

Q: I remember that you had a bunch of interesting basses. Is there any way you’d
give us a list of all or some of the bass guitars, amps, and synths you’ve had?

A: Haha damn, this is going to be quite the list:

Basses

Past-
Hohner P-Bass
Charvel Eliminator
Gibson Grabber
Mexican Fender Fretless Jazz Bass
Crazy custom 6-string fretless (wish I still had this!)
Ibanez ATK 5-String

Current-
Eko Fiddle Bass
Warwick Streamer 5-string
Fender Precision (1974, love it)
D’Armond Ashbory

Amps:

Past-
Peavey Minx
Peavey DataBass (AWFFFFULL)
SWR Redhead (devoid of character)
Ampeg B25 (tube, awesome, way too quiet)
Eden Traveller (quite nice, stolen)

Current-
Traynor Bassmaster (tube, just loud enough)
Ashdown combo (lovely tone, a bit fragile)

Keyboards/Synths: (sticking to keyboards because modules would make this list way too long)

Past-
Ensoniq ESQ-1 (died catastrophically… sad)
Roland MC-202
Emu Emax
Octave Cat (died catastrophically… really sad)

Current-
Sequential Circuits Pro-One
Roland Juno 106
Roland SH-101
Fender Rhodes 73
Hohner Pianet

Q: The strangest sound Matthew Kent-Stoll (Cubik) ever converted into a phat beat was:

A: Probably the various sounds one can make with a gas cartridge in a soda siphon. Clink! PSSSSHHHHHHH

Q: Your Intergalactic Space Cruiser, if/when you have one, will be shaped like:

A: I think it’d look like that crazy warp ship in Mass Effect. The spinning part in the center would be an amazing dance club/gourmet restaurant. (what a view!

-Jeremy Richardson, Caterwaul: The Coppercat blog

Tags: cat, cochrane, copper, Coppercat, cubik, genius, george, interview, musician, origami, pinecone, white
Categories: Music News, Uncategorized

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