Talking heads and Radiohead tone? What is it?

[sevenisthenumber]

Their is an old Talking Heads song called "Born Under Punches" and a newer radiohead song you can see the clip here at      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyKCwDJ7ZUc

How is he doing this and how did the talking heads do it back in the day? Ive heard that the guitar on "Born Under Punches" is Adrian Below"

[anchovie]

As the title of the video clip says, he's running his guitar through a computer (probably a Mac laptop) and using a program called MAX/MSP. If you look through all the comments on the clip (doing the usual YouTube method of skipping the 90% of comments where people are calling each other idiots) you'll find one where someone reckons you can get a similar effect using the "hold" function of a Behringer delay.

http://www.cycling74.com/products/maxmsp

[soulsonic]

I have no idea what patch that is - Max/MSP lets you put together whatever kind of signal processing you can imagine, so there's no telling what it is unless you actually see the patch itself. It sounds like the guitar is being sampled and then played back in random chunks. Patches like that are popular with alot of sample-based electronic musicians. I couldn't begin to tell you how to program a patch like that, but there are alot of folks out there who specialize in that program who should be able to help you. I believe Native Instruments' Reaktor could probably also be patched to do something like that. I'm more familiar with Reaktor because I use it sometimes, but I've never tried to program anything like that - I know that there are some sample/loop/granular synth patches within Reaktor's library that can do some very similar effects.

I've not heard that Talking Heads song, so I can't help you there.

[Jaicen_solo]

I LOVE that song, in fact I love that whole album (Remain In Light).

Apparently, the songs on that album were all made by recording chunks, and chopping it up into a fairlight or something. It's produced by brian Eno, so, that's all you really need to know
If you listen to "...Punches" you can hear the loops of guitar and bass, there's nothing done to disguise the loop points, so my guess is some kind of sampler would be all that's needed really.

[rackham]

Soulsonic hit the nail on the head.

Max/MSP is pretty much a noisemonger tool. It's much harder to get something 'nice' out of it than put together a patch that rips apart your sample or the audio you run through it.

I reckon that patch uses a random(ish) function to sample the incoming audio and play back the contents of the 'buffer~' object at normal speed but using small (again random) slices until it's turned off again to let the incoming audio back through.

Would be amazing to us a footswitch or one of those playstation dance mats as a controller for something like that.