Learning how to stutter (to good effect)
The arrival of Hail to the Thief, Radiohead's followup release to Kid A contained a nice surprise for us here at Cycling '74: we were mentioned in the "thanks to" section of the album notes.
Suddenly, we had a whole bunch of new people who'd never heard of MSP googling us, what with stage shots of the mysterious MSP stuff in action and gear-o-centric web articles with MSP patches on those laptop screens and everything. Things like that floating about in the interwebs shook loose all kinds of interest by the band’s legion of fans.
It was a little vexing for us at Cycling ’74, though – several Roman legions’ worth of bedsitter Radiohead fans downloaded the Max 5 demo, fired it up, were presented with the standard pristine white screen, and went crazy – "How was this supposed to make me sound like Radiohead?" they cried in frustration. Shout-outs from famous stars can be a mixed blessing.
That interest remains, enshrined in the occasional video demo of someone's version of it in action, as well as the ever-popular patch grovel.
My "look what I found on the Web" pointer for you this week follows in the train of this interest: a nice, straight-ahead tutorial on creating Jonny Greenwood's stutter-effect. It combines the kinds of insightful thinking that reverse engineering patches often provides with a great presentation of how to do it. Watch it below, and then write the guy a nice thank-you note.
by Gregory Taylor on October 6, 2015