It's the wee hours on an unseasonably balmy November morning.
Inside the DNA Lounge in the hip South of Market, San Francisco, neighbourhood, the festively attired crowd attending the annual Scorpio Ball is bouncing and gyrating to thick bass beats. In front of the sweaty bodies and bathed in the bright stage lights is Bassnectar — otherwise known as Lorin Ashton or, perhaps most commonly, just plain Lorin — twisting knobs, pushing buttons and moving sliders to pump out a synthetic symphony.
It's another long session on the stage for a disc jockey pushing the boundaries on computer technology and music composition. In his studio, Lorin — who tours full-time as a DJ and composes, produces and remixes music under the Bassnectar alias — works with specialised software that enables him to replicate any musical instrument, use special effects on voices and modulate and filter sounds beyond recognition.
Like more than a few DJs in the increasingly mainstream techno music scene, Lorin channels his creativity through a computer to create a mishmash of sounds. Just a few years ago, it would have been near-impossible for just one person to do what he's doing in this hot club. But improved computing power and increasingly sophisticated software lets Lorin "cut through" the technology to focus on his music, and to do it without spending tens of thousands of dollars on equipment.
If he were still alive, big band maestro Duke Ellington would no doubt be surprised to see what the young DJ can do with nothing but a computer.
Displayed on Lorin's monitor is music production software called Reason, a virtual studio that lets a composer create a software replica of the kind of hardware that's used for composing: mixers, synthesisers, samplers, drum machines, effects processors and other gear. As Lorin uses his mouse and keyboard, the "knobs" and "buttons" on his virtual gear turn and move. He hits a button and the backside of the virtual units, stacked one on top of the other in an array of "patch bays", shows interlocking coloured cable, just like the real cables that connect hardware in physical studios. He can use his mouse to connect and disconnect components.
He puts a vocal track through the system, and an oscillator shows waves representing the sound. He copies, cuts and pastes to create repeating patterns. In another window, he shortens and elongates a series of different coloured blocks on a grid to create tracks, much as a conductor instructs different sections of an orchestra to play and stop.
The software lets Lorin automate a historically manual process. "I can have 500 automations happening simultaneously if I want to," he said.
"The technology completely facilitates my creativity," Lorin said. "When I have a sound [in my head] and want to create that, I just make that sound [with the software]. I'm able to cut through all the [hassles] and the delays and streamline my creative vision."
He uses Reason like a sketch pad to make an arrangement or sequence and...
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