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Amma
keyboards |
Rex
bass |
Nellie
vocals |
Zippy
guitar |
Styx
drums |
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"It's about DEVOTION. One abandons the self and dedicates onesself to the perfect beauty of the cosmos as it is revealed in the practice of art."
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"It's about BELONGING. You find the center, and you follow it and stay there, and when you feel the belonging, that's when you know it's right."
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"It's all about EMPOWERMENT. The search for self expression that gives us all the power to be truly ourselves."
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"It's about PATTERNS, man. Fluctuating and forming and reforming, and you move with them and be with it, and you're cool."
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"It's all about CRAFTSMANSHIP. You do your best, and when it doesn't suck, you have something to feel proud of."
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About Nellie & the Drummers
by Minotaur (Guest Vocalist and Part-Time Bartender)
 "Welcome to Cybertown and Slaughterhouse MUD, where your dreams are virtual reality." That's the pitch.
Yeah, they're weird, huh? "Chromalloy Brandi." It's the latest model, and they all have to have it now. Next week it'll be something else.
Oh yeah ... Nellie, right.
It all started with a CD-ROM movie called "The Tumble Box." Well, first it was going to be a computer-rendered comic, but it got out of hand and soon the author was creating animations for it, then music. There's this nightclub in Cyberspace, see? and they have a public space where people can dance and stuff, and private "rooms" where people can have the nightclub's custom software generate a private environment for their romantic enjoyment. Like you can be the King and Queen of Egypt, or be on another planet.
So the story goes, me and Roxanne were carrying on a hot text-only relationship over the Net for some time, but we've never met in person, and we finally get the hardware together to both jack in and do the next best thing – some people would say it's better -- get together in Cyberspace. And we do. That's the framework. The story is about the fantasies we have together, and what we learn about ourselves.
 So the Slaughterhouse MUD was created for this CD-ROM adventure, "The Tumble Box," and they had to have a band with a hit song. So Nellie & The Drummers was created, and they took on a life of their own. The rest is future history.
No one knows whether Nellie is one person or several, or whether the band is a real band, or just her operating all the members. Or maybe an AI. That's the way it is in Cyberspace.
Same way nobody knows if "The Tumble Box" will ever get made now, but because of it, there's Nellie.
IF YOU'RE SERIOUSLY INTERESTED
(slightly more informative version):
The collaboration that created Nellie and the Drummers began in May 1998 with Reed Waller's work on "The Tumble Box" and an online conversation about virtuality between Reed and reclusive singer/composer Nell Delano (the "real" Nellie), who had a few songs finished for it and was interested in exploring the possibilties of a digital personality. Is it possible to create a satisfying pop band entirely from digitally created material? Can the personality of a singer be reproduced in simulation using only computer technology? Can a computer simulation or "avatar" become a real celebrity, a la Max Headroom or Idoru? Techniques and limitations were discussed and an album was begun, characters were designed and built. The demo version of the first album was completed in November 1998. Then this website was built by Reed, with the collaboration of then-anonymous Nell, in February of 1999.
"Live at the Slaughterhouse" - 1999
All tracks were composed and demo'ed by Nell on DAT, then transcribed to MIDI on a Macintosh G3/233 desktop by Nell and arranger/artist Reed Waller, using MidiGraphy 1.4.0 software sequencer with QuickTime Musical Instruments, and VocalWriter 1.0 speech-enabled software synthesizer, and mixed with SoundEdit 16v2. All music is hand-drawn, no MIDI keyboard input was used. Voices are VocalWriter or Macintosh Text-to-Speech hand programmed by ear; no real voices were sampled or used as input. Virtual Nellie and her fellow characters are produced and animated using Strata StudioPro 2.5.3, Metacreations Poser4 and Ray Dream Studio 5.0.2. Authorship of website material varies, see bylines. Email all inquiries to the address below.
 "Champagne" - 2002
The second album, Champagne, finished in late 2002, was the product of a major hardware and software upgrade. Again, the album contains all original songs by Nell Delano. Nell's tracks were transcribed with the same software, but on a 1GH Macintosh G4. VocalWriter was still used to play-to-disk Nellie's vocal tracks, but the MIDI instruments were output to audio files one at a time using Quicktime 6 and a variety of selected wave-table soundfonts, and saved as audio tracks, then imported into MOTU Digital Perfomer 3.1, where they were post-produced as audio and bounced to stereo finals. Nellie's vocal tracks were programmed with an eye to greater nuance and a more human interpretive feel. Nellie "herself" as she appears in the booklet illustrations, was re-modeled in higher resolution using DAZ's "Victoria 2" as a base, and worked on in Poser 5, then rendered in Poser and Lightwave 7.5.
By Reed Waller, December 6, 2003
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