Aphex Twin: Tha (Ableton Recreation)

Tha is the second track from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, a landmark ambient techno album released by R&S Records in 1992. Elsewhere on these pages I’ve deconstructed Xtal, but recently I transcribed this track for my Music Theory and Composition foundation students to demonstrate syncopation, and I thought I’d share it on this blog.

Coming in at 135 bpm this track is a little more techno than the downtempo breakbeat Xtal, and like the opener it’s made of remarkably few elements.

This reason it piqued my interested, both as a teacher but also a stoned teenager discovering it walking around listening to it on cassette, was though even tho. To me, Tha is a like a musical magic-eye – the more I looked listened to it, the more I git tripped up by the timing. ugh the pulse is abundantly clear (a solid four-to-the-floor kick drum) the downbeat always alluded me. Let’s have a look at the elements as the come in one-by-one.

Opening percussion

The track starts with some tuned percussive sample. Who knows what it really is but my guess would be some noise from an SH-101 or similar that’s been envelopes with a resonant filter then resampled, or as with many things from the era, it’s entirely simpler than this 🙂

As the sound fades in and there’s no clue to any obvious downbeat we hear it as this:

When the kick drum finally enters we hear the syncopation more clearly. It turns out this is off-beat, with the first stab coming in on one-and-a (the fourth sixteenth of the beat). Notice that each note is off-beat, the first is an off-beat sixteenth and the other two off-beat eighth notes. Here it is solo’d with the click track:

Kick and bass

The kick and bass play an archetypal early 90s techno pattern with the kick on each beat of the bar and the bass playing a syncopated off-beat stab.

The kick is an 808 with some top-end added. The bass is a “donk”-style FM patch made in Operator (like lots of the sounds in this article). That has Live’s Echo added. Basically everything in this is flooded in Live’s Hybrid Reverb – a tweak of the default patch with the Vintage set to “older” to mimic the Alesis ‘verbs of the day.

When we couple the intro riff (yellow) with the kick (brown) and donk (blue) we get something like this:

Bass/melody/lead

The next instrument to enter is the bass/melody/lead. Functionally this is like a melody but stretches a huge range (E2 down to F#0) so has more hallmarks of a bass-line. The bass was also made with Operator. There are all sorts of smaller details where the FM amount increases and decreases (my guess would be tweaking it live as it was tracked/sequenced) – I’ve not included this forensic level of detail.

Originally, as these assets were made for a lesson on syncopation, I created some heavily annotated notation for it. Even if you can’t read music you can follow along with the score and the audio and hear how each note or cluster of notes demonstrates so slip and slide against the regular pulse:

Pad

The only other sounds of note are an FM-like pad (also made using, you’ve guessed it: Operator) and some samples of what sounds like people talking at an afterparty or something, likely made using a portable recorder or similar (I’ve not tried to recreate these!):

Finished clip

Like Xtal and anything else from SAW 85-92 there would be a healthy dose of tape saturation (and noise) in mastering. I want to point out RDJ almost certainly did not add these things deliberately, they are more juts artefacts of his lofi setup.

Contrary to what the consensus might be among producers now, but people never used to try and make their stuff sound a lower fidelity than it was in the 80s and 90s(!) quite the opposite, they probably strived to make it sound as a good as possible, but were limited by the analog and early digital equipment.

However, if you want to get these kind of sounds I can highly recommend SketchCassette II which is really reasonably priced. The world and their dog make lofi/tape plugins, so it;s not hard to find good ones, like SketchCasette does it best to my ears!

Valhalla DSP make great reverbs that would get closer to the reverbs used in this era. Some other suggestions for a more authentic sound would be a better FM synth. I love Operator but Native Instruments FM-8 and Arturia’s DX 7 V might offer more bang for your buck.

I used a Utility to back off the gain, Live’s Compressor and Glue Compressor and a smidgen of Pro-Q 3 and Pro-L (the only non-native plug-ins). Enjoy a clip of the final thing:

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