Sample This! - Revision history

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 '''How much time do you spend on that aspect of the musical process, as opposed to composing?<br>
-It's seasonal work. I'm not the one who actually trims the samples. Bob Rice, my assistant, does that. I build the patches. I'll tell him that I want a certain group of sounds. Our backlog of samples to trim is humongous, because it's far easier to record the samples. We record them on the [Sony] 1610, and then he puts them into the Synclavier, left side first, then rightside, and then lines them up to make stereo samples. The easy part is recording the samples. The hard part is transferring and trimming and cataloguing. He's probably – let's be kind – eight months behind on the sample trimming. And as the samples get trimmed and organized, I build them into various types of patches, according to what composition I'm working on. We have things called ''pintos,'' which are mix-and-match patches. Instead of having a patch that is just a saxophone, for example, you can have a patch that is a few notes of the sax, a few of a clarinet, a few of an oboe, a few of a trombone, all different instruments, appearing on different notes, all of them on the keyboard.
+It's seasonal work. I'm not the one who actually trims the samples. [[Bob Rice]], my assistant, does that. I build the patches. I'll tell him that I want a certain group of sounds. Our backlog of samples to trim is humongous, because it's far easier to record the samples. We record them on the [Sony] 1610, and then he puts them into the Synclavier, left side first, then rightside, and then lines them up to make stereo samples. The easy part is recording the samples. The hard part is transferring and trimming and cataloguing. He's probably – let's be kind – eight months behind on the sample trimming. And as the samples get trimmed and organized, I build them into various types of patches, according to what composition I'm working on. We have things called ''pintos,'' which are mix-and-match patches. Instead of having a patch that is just a saxophone, for example, you can have a patch that is a few notes of the sax, a few of a clarinet, a few of an oboe, a few of a trombone, all different instruments, appearing on different notes, all of them on the keyboard.
 '''How would you use something like that?<br>
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 '''What percentage of [[Jazz From Hell]] was input by typing, and why would you choose one type of input over another?<br>
-There are three different ways to type in. One is in a language called ''Script,'' which I don't know. I don't use that at all. [https://www.discogs.com/artist/527951-Bob-Rice Bob Rice] can type Script. But that's more like writing a computer program, so it has no charm for me. Another way is with their Music Printing program. You can enter or delete notes with the cursor while looking at real music on staves. And if you want to write in tuplets – if you have 7 over 3 or something like that – it's real easy to do it that way. You just make a couple of marks and then redraw the screen. You now have edit blocks that correspond to a septuplet over three quarters, or whatever you want. It could be anything. Then you just enter the pitches. For that kind of stuff, that's the easiest way for me to do it. The third way to type in is a facility called the ''G Page.'' The screen is split into three segments, and you can display three tracks of data at the same time on the screen. In each of those three units, you have three columns of information. The left-hand one tells you the start time of the note. In other words, the beginning of the piece would be beat 1 and all the subsequent beats have numbers. This data reads out either in seconds, beats, or SMPTE numbers; that's all selectable. The center column gives you the name of the pitch and a number which tells you the octave that the pitch lives in. And the right-hand column gives you the duration. All that is editable, so you can move the cursor around, add and delete notes, change start times, which changes the rhythm, and change the pitch and the octave and how long the note lasts. I divide my time between doing stuff on the ''G Page'' and doing stuff in the Music Printing.
+There are three different ways to type in. One is in a language called ''Script,'' which I don't know. I don't use that at all. [[Bob Rice]] can type Script. But that's more like writing a computer program, so it has no charm for me. Another way is with their Music Printing program. You can enter or delete notes with the cursor while looking at real music on staves. And if you want to write in tuplets – if you have 7 over 3 or something like that – it's real easy to do it that way. You just make a couple of marks and then redraw the screen. You now have edit blocks that correspond to a septuplet over three quarters, or whatever you want. It could be anything. Then you just enter the pitches. For that kind of stuff, that's the easiest way for me to do it. The third way to type in is a facility called the ''G Page.'' The screen is split into three segments, and you can display three tracks of data at the same time on the screen. In each of those three units, you have three columns of information. The left-hand one tells you the start time of the note. In other words, the beginning of the piece would be beat 1 and all the subsequent beats have numbers. This data reads out either in seconds, beats, or SMPTE numbers; that's all selectable. The center column gives you the name of the pitch and a number which tells you the octave that the pitch lives in. And the right-hand column gives you the duration. All that is editable, so you can move the cursor around, add and delete notes, change start times, which changes the rhythm, and change the pitch and the octave and how long the note lasts. I divide my time between doing stuff on the ''G Page'' and doing stuff in the Music Printing.
 '''Does it print out the velocity of the key or tell you what voice you're addressing?<br>

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 We spoke with Zappa in December '86, twenty years and four months after the release of his debut album [[Freak Out!]], five years after our June '80 interview with him and the two keyboardists he was then working with, and just as he was assembling a new ten-LP package, [[You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore]], with a projected release date of February or March '87. This collection features live cuts recorded over two decades by Zappa and his various bands. Any similarity to the recent Springsteen five-album retrospective is coincidental. When we joked that by releasing twice as large a compilation he was doing [[Bruce Springsteen]] one better, Zappa responded off-handedly, "Well, I don't think there will be any comparison between his live set and this thing. This is going to be a real musician's album. I think I'm going him at least ten better."
 ----
-[[Image:KBD_87-01_Ann_Summa.jpg|frame|Picture by Ann Summa]]
+[[Image:KBD_87-01_Ann_Summa.jpg|frame|Picture by [[Ann Summa]]]]
 '''Was all of [[Jazz From Hell]] recorded on Synclavier?<br>
 No. There's one cut on there, a guitar solo, that was done with a band on the '82 tour. That's "St. Etienne." Everything else is 100 percent Synclavier.

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:52, 25 April 2026
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	[[Category:Interviews with Zappa]] [[Category:Articles about Zappa]]		[[Category:Interviews with Zappa]] [[Category:Articles about Zappa]]
		+	[[Category:1987]]

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 Readers of [[Guitar Player Magazine|Guitar Player]] have had several encounters with Zappa over the past couple of decades. Certainly most ''Keyboard'' regulars are familiar with his work too, if only through the long string of brilliant keyboardists who have filed in and out of his bands: [[George Duke]], [[Eddie Jobson]], [[Ian Underwood]], [[Don Preston]], [[Tommy Mars]], [[Peter Wolf]], and so on. In the tradition of [[Miles Davis]] and [[Wikipedia:Art Blakey|Art Blakey]], Zappa has established himself – perhaps not intentionally – as a mentor for talented newcomers. Unfortunately, these hot shots tend to come and go, for a simple reason: To get a gig playing Zappa music, you have to be a Class-A whiz kid on your instrument. Word gets around, stardom beckons for the erstwhile sideman, and suddenly it's time to start auditioning again.
-Such is life for Zappa, whose career has taken some unorthodox turns. He has been involved in a lawsuit with one record company, severed connections with another label when they refused to release a song he had written about military conscription, fired musicians for using drugs, testified before Congress, written an article titled "[[Edgard Varèse: The Idol of My Youth]]" for [[Stereo Review]], "played" a bicycle on an old [[Ontario Composer, Steve Allen, To Play Wacky Duet|Steve Alien show]], been arrested for pornography, and been assaulted and [[71/12/10 London UK Rainbow Theatre|pushed offstage]] by an irate fan in London. He has composed orchestral works that have been played on both sides of the Atlantic, performing one of them with an orchestra under the baton of [[Zubin Mehta]]; the concert began with Zappa's spoken cue, "Hit it, Zubin." He has also written songs that ridicule, satirize, or (he insists) extol hippies, fascists, drunks, druggies, Scientologists, truck drivers, disco music, Jewish girls. Catholic girls, Valley girls, Montana, France, and the Ilinois enema bandit. He started out as a drummer with a group called the Blackouts, then began playing guitar at age 18. He wrote his first movie soundtrack in 1960, for [[The World's Greatest Sinner]]. In addition to the previously mentioned keyboardists, his bands have included such musical heavyweights as violinists [[Don "Sugarcane" Harris]] and [[Jean-Luc Ponty]], drummers [[Terry Bozzio]] and [[Aynsley Dunbar]], and guitarists [[Adrian Belew]] and [[Steve Vai]].
+Such is life for Zappa, whose career has taken some unorthodox turns. He has been involved in a lawsuit with one record company, severed connections with another label when they refused to release a song he had written about military conscription, fired musicians for using drugs, testified before Congress, written an article titled "[[Edgard Varèse: The Idol of My Youth]]" for [[Stereo Review]], "played" a bicycle on an old [[Ontario Composer, Steve Allen, To Play Wacky Duet|Steve Alien show]], been arrested for pornography, and been assaulted and [[71/12/10 London UK Rainbow Theatre|pushed offstage]] by an irate fan in London. He has composed orchestral works that have been played on both sides of the Atlantic, performing one of them with an orchestra under the baton of [[Zubin Mehta]]; the concert began with Zappa's spoken cue, "Hit it, Zubin." He has also written songs that ridicule, satirize, or (he insists) extol hippies, fascists, drunks, druggies, Scientologists, truck drivers, disco music, Jewish girls. Catholic girls, Valley girls, Montana, France, and the Ilinois enema bandit. He started out as a drummer with a group called the Blackouts, then began playing guitar at age 18. He wrote his first movie soundtrack in 1960, for [[The World’s Greatest Sinner (The Film)|The World's Greatest Sinner]]. In addition to the previously mentioned keyboardists, his bands have included such musical heavyweights as violinists [[Don "Sugarcane" Harris]] and [[Jean-Luc Ponty]], drummers [[Terry Bozzio]] and [[Aynsley Dunbar]], and guitarists [[Adrian Belew]] and [[Steve Vai]].
 We spoke with Zappa in December '86, twenty years and four months after the release of his debut album [[Freak Out!]], five years after our June '80 interview with him and the two keyboardists he was then working with, and just as he was assembling a new ten-LP package, [[You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore]], with a projected release date of February or March '87. This collection features live cuts recorded over two decades by Zappa and his various bands. Any similarity to the recent Springsteen five-album retrospective is coincidental. When we joked that by releasing twice as large a compilation he was doing [[Bruce Springsteen]] one better, Zappa responded off-handedly, "Well, I don't think there will be any comparison between his live set and this thing. This is going to be a real musician's album. I think I'm going him at least ten better."

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 '''Can you give us an example of each of those approaches on [[Jazz From Hell]]?<br>
-Well, "[[Night School]]" started off with just eight chords that I played in on the keyboard. Everything else came after that. And "[[While You Were Art II]]," that's really got a strange story to it. There's a song on the [[Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar]] album called "[[While You Were Out]]." A group at Cal Arts [California Institute of the Arts], led by a guy named Art Jarvinen, came to me and requested an arrangement of "[[While You Were Out]]" for their ensemble, so they couId play it at a concert that they were giving in Los Angeles. So I had [[David Ocker]], who was my assistant at that time, type into the Synclavier the actual transcription that [[Steve Vai]] did that is in the guitar book ([[The Frank Zappa Guitar Book]], published by Hal Leonard). That just gave me the chords and the melody line, which wasn't suitable for the instrumentation of their ensemble. Once the data was in there, then it was a matter of arranging it so that they could play it. So I put it through a bunch of permutations. For one thing, I squared off the rhythm to the nearest 32nd-note, instead of having all the tuplets and weird stuff going on. Then I hocketed the material, so that the line was bounced from instrument to instrument. And did a bunch of other stuff to it.
+Well, "[[Night School]]" started off with just eight chords that I played in on the keyboard. Everything else came after that. And "[[While You Were Art II]]," that's really got a strange story to it. There's a song on the [[Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar|Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar]] album called "[[While You Were Out]]." A group at Cal Arts [California Institute of the Arts], led by a guy named Art Jarvinen, came to me and requested an arrangement of "[[While You Were Out]]" for their ensemble, so they couId play it at a concert that they were giving in Los Angeles. So I had [[David Ocker]], who was my assistant at that time, type into the Synclavier the actual transcription that [[Steve Vai]] did that is in the guitar book ([[The Frank Zappa Guitar Book]], published by Hal Leonard). That just gave me the chords and the melody line, which wasn't suitable for the instrumentation of their ensemble. Once the data was in there, then it was a matter of arranging it so that they could play it. So I put it through a bunch of permutations. For one thing, I squared off the rhythm to the nearest 32nd-note, instead of having all the tuplets and weird stuff going on. Then I hocketed the material, so that the line was bounced from instrument to instrument. And did a bunch of other stuff to it.
 To aid in their performance, since it was already typed into the Synclavier, I produced a little practice cassette for them to play the piece by. When Art came to pick up the musical parts, he listened to it and he said, "There's no way that we can learn this in time for the show. It's too hard." So I said, "No problem. We'll Just have the machine play it. All you do is go onstage and pretend that you're playing your instrument. You'll have wires coming out of your instruments, leading to some speakers, and play a cassette, and nobody will know the difference." Well, they did it. And guess what? Nobody knew the difference! The music critics of the [[Los Angeles Times]] didn't know, the music critic from the [[Wikipedia:Los Angeles Herald Examiner|Herald Examiner]] didn't know, the man who was in charge of the concert series didn't know. The only person in that audience who knew was [[David Ocker]], because he had typed it in. Nobody knew! We've seen rock and roll videos where you have a model pretending to play an instrument. In this case, you have musicians pretending to play instruments. They were actually looking at the sheet music, and moving their hands the way you would normally do it.

← Older revision		Revision as of 05:29, 5 September 2021
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−	By [[Jim Aikin]] & [[Bob Doerschuk]]<br>	+	By [[Jim Aikin]] & [https://www.facebook.com/bob.doerschuk Bob Doerschuk]<br>
	[[Keyboard]], February 1987, USA<br>		[[Keyboard]], February 1987, USA<br>

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 '''That reminds me of something that one of the members of [[wikipedia:Kraftwerk|Kraftwerk]] once said, that they were like scientists working in a musical laboratory, and when they found something true, they put it down on tape.<br>
-Well, I don't know whether I would go that far, because to say that it's true is pushing it. But the albums do in a way represent a catalog of the various experiments. Whether or not the experiment is successful or a failure, you be the judge yourself. But before you judge, you really should ask yourself whether you have enough data to make that judgment. For a guy who has never heard [[Anton Webern]] or [[Igor Stravinsky]] or [[Edgard Varèse]], or [[Tōru Takemitsu|Takemitsu]], or [[György Ligeti|Ligeti]], or [[Krzysztof Penderecki|Penderecki]] ... If you don't know what that stuff is, where it comes from, what it sounds like, and what the intention of it is, how can you even what the intention of it is, how can you even attempt to take a guess at what extrapolations ample, in the song "[[Brown Shoes Don't Make It]]" [from [[Absolutely Free]]] most people hear only the words. They don't realize that there is, in the middle of that song, a completely academic and rigorous 12-tone string quartet going in the background. The other thing that was funny about that song was that by playing "[[God Bless America]]," "[[The Star-Spangled Banner|Star-Spangled Banner]]," and one or two other patriotic songs at the end, all at the same time, I was making a musical joke about [[Charles Edward Ives|Ives]]. So I've been doing this stuff for a long time, but the people who write about it are usually more interested in their bylines and the way they can diddle their words around. If they're in the word business, they concentrate on the words that I've written, and the results haven't been all that enthralling. But I think that this album and the next couple of albums are going to raise some eyebrows in different parts of the musical world. Even if you don't understand what it is that's going on, I think you have to appreciate that the sound quality of what's on there is truly exceptional.
+Well, I don't know whether I would go that far, because to say that it's true is pushing it. But the albums do in a way represent a catalog of the various experiments. Whether or not the experiment is successful or a failure, you be the judge yourself. But before you judge, you really should ask yourself whether you have enough data to make that judgment. For a guy who has never heard [[Anton Webern]] or [[Igor Stravinsky]] or [[Edgard Varèse]], or [[Tōru Takemitsu|Takemitsu]], or [[György Ligeti|Ligeti]], or [[Krzysztof Penderecki|Penderecki]] ... If you don't know what that stuff is, where it comes from, what it sounds like, and what the intention of it is, how can you even what the intention of it is, how can you even attempt to take a guess at what extrapolations ample, in the song "[[Brown Shoes Don't Make It]]" [from [[Absolutely Free]]] most people hear only the words. They don't realize that there is, in the middle of that song, a completely academic and rigorous 12-tone string quartet going in the background. The other thing that was funny about that song was that by playing "[[God Bless America]]," "[[The Star-Spangled Banner|Star-Spangled Banner]]," and one or two other patriotic songs at the end, all at the same time, I was making a musical joke about [[Charles Ives|Ives]]. So I've been doing this stuff for a long time, but the people who write about it are usually more interested in their bylines and the way they can diddle their words around. If they're in the word business, they concentrate on the words that I've written, and the results haven't been all that enthralling. But I think that this album and the next couple of albums are going to raise some eyebrows in different parts of the musical world. Even if you don't understand what it is that's going on, I think you have to appreciate that the sound quality of what's on there is truly exceptional.
 '''Do you have any plans to take the Synclavier on the road?<br>

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 <blockquote>"They laughed when he put down his guitar ..." But when he sat behind his Synclavier, the laughing stopped and some serious music began. Rock's most outspoken iconoclast speaks up on the resources of his new instrument, the lost art of live performance, and the album sticker controversy.</blockquote>
-[[Frank Zappa]] was born too soon. After years of running side-men through impossible charts and resigning himself to the distractions and imperfections of live performance, he's finally got what he wants: an instrument on which he can nail down the complex sound blends, polyrhythms, and lines that could formerly come together only in his head.
+[[Biography|Frank Zappa]] was born too soon. After years of running side-men through impossible charts and resigning himself to the distractions and imperfections of live performance, he's finally got what he wants: an instrument on which he can nail down the complex sound blends, polyrhythms, and lines that could formerly come together only in his head.
 No, it's not a souped-up guitar. Though he is known as a guitarist of formidable originality, Zappa hasn't touched the instrument much during the past two years. These days you'll