Wendy Carlos
The Well-Tempered ComposerBy Randy Alberts
"I'm always looking for what's never been done before, finding fascinating new sounds, and trying to come up with a spirit that seems as if it burst full-grown from the Ether," says Wendy Carlos. "That's the magic of the goal, to belie the care and time spent to create it."
Creating new music and sounds at Ether's edge has been her endeavor since releasing Switched-On Bach in 1968, Carlos's groundbreaking Moog synth classic. The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, as well as her original music, such as Timesteps, Sonic Seasonings (the original new age/ambient album), Beauty in the Beast, and Tales of Heaven and Hell, has influenced countless composers and keyboardists. Her movie soundtrack work is notable, too: The Shining, Tron, and A Clockwork Orange to name three. World-renowned and respected as her music, sound design and experiments in alternate tunings are, Wendy constantly challenges herself-and others-to grow and move on.
"You have to be willing to throw out 99% of your ideas to save the really good ones," says Carlos. "All truly creative people need the scrutiny of a merciless editor and blue pencil. But most recent music seems to ignore this process and has become increasingly more simple minded. That frustrates me. The synthesizer hasn't been used as a tool to move us forward, but rather as a convenient, cheap way to assemble quickly a kind of lowest common denominator product based on quantized grooves, loops, and patterns. Thus, everything is a cliché by design. I remain hopeful things will eventually improve-we have some great tools available. It's an ideal time to begin creating new non-disposable music. C'mon, people, we can do this!"
Carlos, a Peak user since 2004, is now challenging herself by composing music not driven mainly by the core of her creative process, timbre, but rather by linear modality and harmonic progression. Sketching her compositions with pencil and manuscript paper, as she's always done, this new album has been developing for several years. Her inspiration remains the greats from the past, such as: Respighi, Bartok, Stravinsky, Ravel and Prokofiev, who always amaze her by their depth and elegance.
"This time I thought to just put the sound timbre issue aside slightly and compose with the things that MIDI handles best: piano, harpsichord, clavinet, clavichord, drums, and percussion."
And pipe organ. In her newest works Carlos is focusing on her new custom setup powered by three Kurzweil K2600s and two K2000s.
"It looks and feels a lot like a large four-manual pipe organ with a pedal board, expression shoes, and pistons. But it's all touch sensitive, including the pedals, unlike any organ, and can use any timbre at all, from authentic pipe organ samples through to my libraries of synth and acoustic instrumental sounds."
Wendy says that some of these venerable old sounds, including theater pipe organ, combine very nicely with piano, harpsichord, and percussion.
"Again, it sort of ducks the issue of complicated orchestration for me," she notes. "So I'm writing pieces for this limited palette and have lots of music sketches sitting here with comments jotted on them like, 'This makes a strong opening,' 'Try this as a wiry main theme,' or 'Here's a workable counter theme.' It's like fabricating the bricks before you can build the building. With all these new ideas, these bricks, it next becomes a question of creating a unifying theme to tie it all together."
From Audio Tape to Hard Drive
Carlos cut her audio teeth on analog tape, grease pencils, mixing consoles, and calibrated splicing blocks. She got good at it while sharing tips and ideas over the years with fellow engineers who challenged one another to make even the most impossible edits and manipulations seem easy. Today she's doing the same work in a digital 2-track world via Peak.
"The razor blade was my hammer, screwdriver, and pliers," she recalls, "so it was essential to be able to apply that knowledge when digital technology began to dominate pro audio. A skill, a way of thinking, was adapted in a new domain, the new paradigm many of us dove into. Sound Designer was great but grew old-fashioned and clunky compared to newer audio and MIDI software. So I looked around carefully for the next step-the choices were remarkably underwhelming. Then I heard about Peak, saw it developing, and now it's my Swiss Army audio knife. Peak facilitates truly critical editing and manipulating. And it's elegant to use."
Wendy uses Peak Pro XT 5, SoundSoap Pro, SoundSoap, and the Master Perfection Suite on a dual processor 2.5 gHz Apple G5 desktop Mac. She notes the need for multi-track DAW, notation (Finale), and essential MIDI creation and editing software-the latter for her being MOTU Digital Performer. And when it comes to tweaking and generating mono and stereo audio files, working with components of musical works in progress, and getting her music through to final mastering, she reaches for Peak.
"I often need at many stages to perform subtle permanent tweaking, editing, modifying, and at times careful de-noising, as well as the final assembly and optimizing of tracks. That's where Peak shines. In my next projects Peak will appear at the start, several times in the middle, and certainly at the end during final mastering. It's one of the least stress-inducing programs to use and works as dependably as a dedicated physical device. Peak is something I'll be using for years."
Carlos's decision to make Peak her 2-track tool of choice has everything to do with the people who listen to her input when it comes to improving it.
"BIAS is among the most responsive of software companies," she says. "They allowed me to work with them to change the waveform displays to full AC audio plots, not the DC-rectified version used until recently. Very important for critical, fast editing decisions. And their early tape-deck emulation was heavy and sluggish. As of early 2005 they took care of these issues and some others, to my great relief and delight-thank you, BIAS!"
Wendy also has this to say about another new piece of the Peak tool belt.
"ImpulseVerb is a wonderful addition to Peak," she notes. "It sounds so much better than the older types of digital reverb."
The Lost Scores
As a self-described "archaeomusicologist" Wendy in 2004 baked, transferred, restored, edited, and released two collections of her movie soundtrack works to 20-bit Hi-D discs. As the cover photos suggest, Rediscovering Lost Scores Volume One and Volume Two required a lot of digging through analog masters to recover the soundtracks, including many tracks cut from the final films by their directors. In addition to other movie soundtracks the restored and remastered scores include Tron, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. Stanley Kubrick used but a fraction of Carlos's riveting original score, textures, and various individual live instrument and electro-acoustic sound tracks. If The Shining's opening music, or that during the slow drive Jack's family takes up to the Overlook Hotel still haunt you, now you can hear all of it and where they were originally intended to lead to musically. The original score everyone knows is heard in more richly orchestrated versions, which depict the "lost worlds", the film left unexplored.
Carlos tried earlier versions of SoundSoap as she wrapped up Rediscovering Lost Scores. The SoundSoap Pro plug-in interested her at the time but didn't arrive soon enough to meet the album's deadlines. She is now making use of it often, optimizing selected DAW tracks, both new and old, and transferring many irreplaceable selections from her collection of vinyl LPs and tapes to clean new CDs. SoundSoap Pro will get a workout on all her future archaeomusicology digs.
"I've spent my whole life learning how to hear subtleties in audio, including distortion, to correct them," says Wendy. "Glitches in bad edits, small thumps in amplitude level, kicks from high frequency content and edited DC elements. Even the newest SoundSoap II non-pro version has become a formidable tool, while the Pro version is even more flexible and useful, if more complicated. There are presets to get you going, but you've got to be willing to spend the time to tweak it and make it fit like a glove. Otherwise, it's like picking a coat off a rack without altering it for the best fit. In less critical cases you can just reach for SoundSoap II-still, it's best to have both of them around."
"As for my collection of carefully stored master tapes recorded years ago, SoundSoap Pro remains the wisest choice cleaning tool," Carlos adds. "When you spend the time and care with it, it is essentially undetectable, magically making compromised audio sound very good again."
'Cause It's Piiiitch-Craft
Wendy says she smiled when discovering Peak's PitchCraft plug-in contains presets of most of the alternate tuning scales she assembled 20 years ago for Kurzweil. Included are several of her own originals, such as "The Harmonic Scale," "Carlos Alpha," and other variations of temperament, including native scales from Africa and Asia. She suggests these tunings will be well worth exploring for live vocal and instrumental performances.
"To find those tunings in PitchCraft was a lovely surprise. Alternate tuning is something I've fooled around with most my life. Not many people know much about it, so it's my pleasure to share the few things I've learned. When you expand beyond the straightjacket of 12-tone equal temperament there are a lot of fascinating ways to tune scales. From ethnic models to mathematical and acoustic models-and let's not forget just intonation, too."
She says a pitch correction tool is usually applied to a singer who doesn't have an especially good ear-but that's not how she's using this one.
"I think of PitchCraft as a means to explore extremely hard to sing scales, especially without accompaniment, to nail a particular alternate tuning. In equal temperament, a slop factor in pitch works to your advantage within orchestras to cover the tuning compromises. Everyone plays their own version of each note, which provides a lovely chorus tone that can hide the multitude of somewhat out-of-tune intervals and chords that ET allows. But when it comes to a small ensemble or soloist, you really have to hit pitches within a few cents if you're going to sound exactly in tune. PitchCraft should help line up those subtler intervals to produce the quality you need especially with sophisticated alternative tunings."
Practice, Practice, Practice
The most interesting creative people are those who grow through several different historic stages. Wendy Carlos is one of those people. It's as if they are different artists at each stage in their careers, although some traits and personal obsessions will tie the periods together. Over the years a mature composer and performing artist will work through dynamic shifts in their music, each step growing from what came before, and expanding the experiences of the curious listener, too.
"That certainly applies to people who have covered a great deal of stylistic territory-Bartok, Stravinsky, or Prokofiev, for instance," says Carlos. "They all went through many different periods. We can't forget Beethoven, for heavens sake, and the funny, beautiful way Haydn and Mozart interacted together: at first Haydn taught Mozart, then later Mozart taught Haydn. Overall it's an intricate human evolutionary process, isn't it?"
Wendy, calling herself "a good second-rate composer," is quick to point out her weaknesses. She disagrees with those who since her earlier Switched-On Bach work consider her an important performing artist, as well, and to those who treat her pioneering synthesized Bach realizations as sacrosanct.
"Good grief, I'm not a real performer!" she laughs. "They should listen to people like Gould, Landowska, Yo-Yo Ma, and many other specialists to hear definitive Bach and traditional classical repertoire. I'm a performance dabbler whose main ability is in creating new music and sounds: Just because I sight read easily and play sort of glibly doesn't mean I have great technique, nor ever will. That has to be a gift, one you work at and dedicate your life to. Somehow my strengths as a composer were shoved to the side when those albums to demonstrate the synthesizer became so successful. I'm very grateful, but will always be aware that it was also a two-edged sword that made it much harder to obtain recognition for what I think I do best. But as the French shrug, 'c'est la vie!'"