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drwex(I'm aware that I've severely fallen off the posting and reading bandwagons. Link me your stuff please. I'll work on posts... um, maybe next week? I have a debrief and an AAR to write.)
Last week we saw Armin van Buuren (AVB) at the House of Blues in Boston. The opening act was a highly forgettable DJ who mostly phoned it in except for the last 25 minutes of his set where he appeared to wake up and start actually doing things. So let's ignore that and talk about AVB.
Or maybe I'll just say "WOW" and let it go at that. Seeing him live you understand why he plays massive stadium shows and royal command performances in Europe. He's head of Armada Music, probably the biggest force in trance music production today, and he's personally launched dozens of people into the business. This is a man at the top of his game and watching him spin live is like watching Serena Williams in person at Wimbledon.
He has a great stage personality and puts on a good show, keeping the audience engaged. His live production is a mix of standards, EDM classics, teases of rock/new wave segments, guest vocal appearances, and one or two completely new things. Seeing him live I also came to understand how he builds the extremely polished pieces that get released. If you search sites like YT you can find a selection of his live shows as well as his collaborative works.
One of the long-time favorites he did at HOB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kivuDS-6HbQ (Turn it Up)
Still my favorite of his high-production collaborations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WOwRVTKJUw
The stage rig he used was a scaled down version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFqWyWr-SII
OK, music nerdery time:
The basic AVB track is three layers. There's a bass/rhythm layer, almost always in standard 4/4 time. However, he manages to avoid much of the "oontz oontz oontz" that characterizes a lot of EDM. He rarely uses this layer for his builds, and simply cuts it out of his drops. He's also the force behind "Who's Afraid of 138?" which refers to 138 bpm, a higher count than most other DJs use. Much of the 138 stuff is done with two or more beat tracks playing off each other, as here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCBpVVbLZ-g
The most interesting stuff is what happens in the middle layer. Calling it just one layer is misleading because it's where most of the instrumentation happens. These layers have the synths and pianos and are really the meat of the song. This is where the builds happen.
Finally, he has what I call the 'float' layer, which is almost always the vocals. Particularly in the vocal trance tracks, things at this layer will bridge and don't quite have their own time signature, but they're not slaved to the main beats. Take https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxvpctgU_s8 - take Sharon den Adel's work here on "In And Out Of Love". You can easily hear her singing a slow love song (sounds to me a lot like 2/4 time for most of it) if you don't pay attention to the high BPM bottom layer.
Unfortunately, even the HOB sound system - which is normally quite good - had problems with this. The guest vocalists weren't nearly as clear as I would have liked and he didn't do any vocal trance pieces in his main set.
Last week we saw Armin van Buuren (AVB) at the House of Blues in Boston. The opening act was a highly forgettable DJ who mostly phoned it in except for the last 25 minutes of his set where he appeared to wake up and start actually doing things. So let's ignore that and talk about AVB.
Or maybe I'll just say "WOW" and let it go at that. Seeing him live you understand why he plays massive stadium shows and royal command performances in Europe. He's head of Armada Music, probably the biggest force in trance music production today, and he's personally launched dozens of people into the business. This is a man at the top of his game and watching him spin live is like watching Serena Williams in person at Wimbledon.
He has a great stage personality and puts on a good show, keeping the audience engaged. His live production is a mix of standards, EDM classics, teases of rock/new wave segments, guest vocal appearances, and one or two completely new things. Seeing him live I also came to understand how he builds the extremely polished pieces that get released. If you search sites like YT you can find a selection of his live shows as well as his collaborative works.
One of the long-time favorites he did at HOB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kivuDS-6HbQ (Turn it Up)
Still my favorite of his high-production collaborations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WOwRVTKJUw
The stage rig he used was a scaled down version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFqWyWr-SII
OK, music nerdery time:
The basic AVB track is three layers. There's a bass/rhythm layer, almost always in standard 4/4 time. However, he manages to avoid much of the "oontz oontz oontz" that characterizes a lot of EDM. He rarely uses this layer for his builds, and simply cuts it out of his drops. He's also the force behind "Who's Afraid of 138?" which refers to 138 bpm, a higher count than most other DJs use. Much of the 138 stuff is done with two or more beat tracks playing off each other, as here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCBpVVbLZ-g
The most interesting stuff is what happens in the middle layer. Calling it just one layer is misleading because it's where most of the instrumentation happens. These layers have the synths and pianos and are really the meat of the song. This is where the builds happen.
Finally, he has what I call the 'float' layer, which is almost always the vocals. Particularly in the vocal trance tracks, things at this layer will bridge and don't quite have their own time signature, but they're not slaved to the main beats. Take https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxvpctgU_s8 - take Sharon den Adel's work here on "In And Out Of Love". You can easily hear her singing a slow love song (sounds to me a lot like 2/4 time for most of it) if you don't pay attention to the high BPM bottom layer.
Unfortunately, even the HOB sound system - which is normally quite good - had problems with this. The guest vocalists weren't nearly as clear as I would have liked and he didn't do any vocal trance pieces in his main set.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 09:52 pm (UTC)