Aphex Twin: Xtal (Ableton Recreation)

Aphex Twin is the moniker of Richard D. James, a Cornwall native whose output spans three decades, releasing on such labels as Apollo (R&S’s ambient sister label), his own imprint, Replhex and of course British indie Warp. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Aphex Twin’s music is up there with Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers and other pioneers of electronic music. He is by far one of the most influential electronic artists of the last thirty years, and despite not having the commercial acclaim of the aforementioned artists, his place in the pantheon of legends is not up for discussion.

Those familiar with his more recent output might know him for scattier, frenetic hyper edited acid techno and 200bpm jungle but it’s actually his ambient output I want to take a quick look at, in particular the lead track from his Selected Ambient Works 85-92, Xtal. As with a lot of his music, he ascribes are barely legible consonant riddles name to it, so whilst I don’t know how it’s pronounced, most agree on ‘tal’ or possibly ‘crystal‘.

SAW 85-92 is claimed to have been digitised from home cassette tape, and whilst I am a big fan of this medium (out of nostalgia, not choice), it’s given so much midrange crunch to the mix, it was tricky to accurately discern certain sounds.

The tempo of Xtal is 114 bpm. I’m working in Ableton Live but any DAW would be fine for this. The production is alarming simple, and mostly sample based, with only one synthesised sound I can count. The track count is also quite low, with two tracks of drums, a bass line, two chord parts and the main vocal sample.

Drums

The track starts with some 808-like hi-hats. The drums are likely from a Roland R-8 sampler – this had its own rudimentary sounds inbuilt but in addition you could expand it with cards from other drum machines, such as the aforementioned 808. It would be perfectly acceptable to use Live’s own 808 Core Kit but I found some R-8 samples for free and added them to Drum Rack.

There’s quite a lot of saturation on all of the sounds in this, that could have come from the sampler itself, any desk that sat in-between the sampler and of course the tape itself. I’ve added some compression and Dynamic Tube to the kick, as well as compression and saturation to Drum Rack’s output. To further emulate the low-fidelity sampler I’ve used Live’s Redux with a 22.5 kHz sample rate and 16 bit depth. I’ve copied this Redux to other tracks later on too.

Lastly the overall mix is quite washy. I’ve used two reverbs but the one that can be heard of the R-8 drums is Live’s own Reverb on the Eco setting with just under two seconds of decay. Despite cutting the top end in the Input Processing and Diffusion network I still found the need for a Channel EQ afterwards to help dull the high end.

At various points there’s a sampled breakbeat that plays on top of the drum machine. For the longest time I thought it was the Sweet Pea break, but the general consensus is it’s the much more famous Apache break.

I’ve loaded my copy (lifted from an Urban Shakedown sample pack) into Live’s Sampler, using the Slice mode. My favourite way of working with breakbeats is using the Gate mode (instead of Trigger) and setting the playback to Thru. I’ve tuned the sample down a semitone and added some compression and Redux.

Sample

The vocal from Xtal is sampled a bit of library music written by Steve Jefferies, Mary Carewe and Donald Greig called ‘Atmospheric – Vocal’ from an album called Evil at Play released in 1986. I spoke to Steve about it:

As far as I remember, we recorded that in our flat in Balham. Mary who sang on it is my partner and we’re still together 40 years later! It’s highly likely we recorded it on a Portastudio. The other co-writer on the original was Don Greig, Don is a classical singer and mainly does medieval music, singing with the Tallis scholars etc… He provided the low ‘drone’ on the track which gives it a great atmosphere I think. I know for a fact Mary’s voice went through a Roland Chorus/Echo 301. The synths/keyboards could only have been my Prophet 5. I also had a Fender Rhodes at the time but can’t remember what I played on the track, it sounds a bit like the Rhodes to me, I had various pedals like the MXR 90. If you listen close to the timbre of the Chappells original you can hear the synth/keyboard which is on Xtal…it would have been a bit tricky for him to have sampled the voice without the backing, technology hadn’t quite reached modern day standards!

Steve Jefferies

I’ve again loaded it into Live’s Simpler using Slice mode and manually cropped the segments myself, I also transposed it down two semitones. The timing is quite odd but it works great against the rest of the track. There’s quite a bit of noise in my version of the track so I’ve used so EQ around 3 kHz to tame it, some Redux, compression and reverb.

Synth and Chords

The main progression is loosely based around Gm7, Eb maj7 and Bb5/F chord, which alternates to C5 on the second repeat. In the piano demo below I’ve extended the notes to fill the chords out a bit more. This isn’t how the MIDI in Xtal works but we’ll get to that later.

As for the sound of the first chord progression I have to give huge credit to SynaMax. My first attempt at this used FM8 for the main sound and I could never quite get it right. Turned out it was a sample after all!

I cropped the section of the sample I needed and added to a Simpler instrument using Classic mode. I had to spend time shaping the attack and release to get the short MIDI notes tailing off just right. The lushness comes from Valhalla Shimmer, a fantastic cheap reverb at emulating the late 80s/early 90s Alesis style reverb patches.

The second progression can be heard from 1.49 and is a simple three chord loop, Bb, a cluster chord a bit like a Bbsus2/4 and then Bb in second inversion. For this I used FM8 by Native Instruments, but it could probably be approximated with Operator or most FM synths.

Bass

The booming bass that enters with the breakbeat drums, and is a resampled 808 bass drum. Firstly I tried the main one I’d used from the drum machine, but I needed a bit more bottom end, so I added one made from an SH-101 from the Urban Shakedown sample pack. It was mono and a low bit depth and sample rate, which also added some nice artefacts.

Mixing

I’ve already mentioned how much tape saturation and warble is on this mix. Live doesn’t have a dedicated tape emulation plug-in, but there are many on the market. In-fact Live’s new Echo plug-in can simulate some of the noise and warbling qualities, but it was too inflexible.

On the master channel I’ve added some EQ to boost the bottom and top of the mix and some of Live’s Compressor and Glue Compressor.

However this wasn’t enough degradation, so I added an Audio Effects Rack designed by Dutch producer Legowelt called SMACKOS TAPE STATION, which is free on his website (head over to the software tab on the left).

This uses combinations of Live’s native effects such as filters, vinyl simulators, compressors, flangers, frequency shifters and more to emulate the sound of tape, with some handy tweak-able macros.

Listen to a clip from it below and you can download the Ableton project here.

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