Any Questions? - Flintstones

The first sampler used by Any Questions? was a Roland S-220 purchased in 1990 at a Medley Music sales event.  This 12-bit, 30kHz sample-rate sampler was really a pain to use.  With only 256k of internal memory, you would get a maximum sample time of 4.4 seconds.  Samples could be stored and loaded on a built-in 2.8" Quick Disk drive.  This format was certainly not "quick" and even at that time in 1990 was hard to come by.  We quickly abandoned this sampler and moved on to the far superior Ensoniq EPS Performance Sampler.

I mention both of these samplers in this post because "The Flintstones" sample featured in the SoundCloud clip below is one of the very first samples that we ever recorded.  In fact, it might be the first.  

At Der Palest des Goldes in 1990, we sat a microphone on an ottoman in front of our 13" Zenith CRT television and sampled what was coming out of the small TV speaker at the time into our Roland S-220 Sampler.  What was playing on our TV at the time was The Flintstones cartoon from the '60s.

A few months later, we purchased the Ensoniq EPS Performance Sampler and re-sampled The Flintstones sample from the Roland S-220 into it.  After doing so, we recorded the short sound collage that we share with you now.

Ttam Troll · Any Questions? - Flintstones

Any Questions? - Smashing Babies (Remix)

In preparation for our Any Questions? - Don't Ask Tour in 1992, we reprogrammed and resequenced all of the songs from our Ensoniq ESQ-1 hardware based sequencing system to our new Atari 1040STe and Steinberg/Jones Cubase computer based sequencing system.

This process took a lot of time but it had some advantages.  We took the opportunity while revisiting these older songs to replace some of the sounds and samples from our older equipment with some of the newer gear (E-MU Pro/Cussion, Yamaha TG33, and Ensoniq EPS) we had acquired.  It also provided us the flexibility to more easily sync our accompanying multimedia horror show videos to the computer based sequencing system using SMPTE timecode for use in our live performances.

One of the songs that was reprogrammed and resequenced was a track titled Smashing Babies from our Illegitimate Release 1990 release.  This ended up being more of a remix of the original song rather than a straight forward conversion and we decided to record it on our Tascam 308/38 8-Track 1/2" Analog Tape Recording System.  For this remix, we added an extended intro to the song and replaced the Korg DDD-5 drum machine parts with E-MU Pro/Cussion sounds.  We also chose to replace mC2p4's backing vocal "baby screams" from the original 1990 recording with a Baby Herman (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) sample on our Ensoniq EPS sampler.

This remix remained unreleased until now.  I hope you enjoy it!

Ttam Troll · Any Questions? - Smashing Babies (Remix)

Any Questions? - The Outer Limits

New Year, new tunes!  Here's a song idea titled The Outer Limits done "inside the box" using all soft synths.  The real genesis for this came about as a way to test out Steinberg Cubase Pro 14 which I just installed on a "new" Apple MacBook Pro that I configured.

I used Native Instruments Battery 4 to create the drum groove and percussive sound effects, along with Arturia V Collection X for the synth sounds.  SEM V2 is used for the main synth bass with additional synth bass from the Mini V3 during the "chorus" part of the song idea.  DX7 V provides the glacial strings sounds.

Ttam Troll · Any Questions? - The Outer Limits

P.S. For those that don't know, “inside the box” is a term that refers to the process of using only a computer and software (the box) rather than external hardware (synthesizers, mixers, etc). In the past, using external hardware was the only option, but today, it is now possible to create professional music completely “inside the box”.