Just some thing, seeing how far I can get with this new laptop
so far so good, even made a tagging program for myself to speed it up a bit
It's not much, but the birds are still here, also something I wanted to test in the process; just copy/pasted over from a different file really
Title doesn't mean much, just took the generated title from the bird project and made it something else
This month has been exhausting and my day job didn't leave a lot of energy for music making. On top of that, my desk is a mess and I struggle to find space for my gear. Right now, everything is in boxes or bags. I take out what I need and make space for the machines on my desk. At least I have the Zoom Livetrack L-12 always around to record whatever is on.
This year starts with a dark ambient piece that prominently features the Stylophone CPM DS-2 that I waited for so long and I'm having a lot of enjoyment out of it. I plugged the Roland S-1 through the Chase Bliss Lossy that I received in the Mystery Box recently to add some texture. And speaking of texture, the Sonicware Liven TextureLab is adding some with a sample of a jingle of the Tokyo subway that I recorded a year ago.
In the end, we get something a bit ominous with some childish tones. That melange gives some Silent Hill vibes in a way. There is not a lot of composition behind and it may sound a bit forced but that's all I could get out for the moment.
I'm listening to some Massive Attack these days and I hope I can come up with a trip-hop beat this year. Maybe next month?
Thanks for listening and for any feedback!
This started off as my Week 51 submission for Weeklybeats 2024 - Back then I already had the plan to make this remix here out of it in the end. I have worked on it ever since I made the Daylight track, most of it in January though.
Not 100% if I'll stop here or if I will tune the remix a bit more, but I am quite happy with it. You can see by the filename that it's already the fifth iteration of the remix :D
If it's January, it must be time for Darkwave again!
This track grew out of reorganizing my studio and playing with hardware again. Track is sequenced in Logic, then recorded to audio tracks for more mixing. Samples are mangled with Logic's Remix FX plug. Took me a while to get the mix right - it was nice having the extra time for tweaking!
Samples are from Jail Bait (1954, public domain).
Hardware used: Wasp, K2, Jt4000 Micro, 2600, TD3, RD6, and AmbientØ (plus guitar)
Here it is, my submission for February. Doesn't it sound like waves rising, splashing, crashing and fading?
It's a lot faster than my last track, as I'm trying to get closer to the genre I like.
As usual, everything you hear was me playing the Digitone and Digitakt live into a DAW, no overbridge and no editing except some gain adjustment on the Master - I hope I got it right this time! Performing this cleanly is still an adventure, though, and every take sounds different. I don't know, I just want to "audition" a small change that I made and then I get carried away and perform the whole thing! This means that of all the time I spent on this track, I probably spent half of it just performing and that was super fun.
Then again, there's a lot of things I don't like about this track and I'll probably do a lot of things differently next time. But I feel much more prepared since now I have tons of samples and sounds that I can hopefully reuse in the future.
Almost all sounds were created using my Digitone. In fact, there are only two samples in this track that I did not create myself! Can you tell which ones?
After getting the Artnoise re.corder, it was only logical that I do something with it for this month! My initial experiments very much sounded like a pipe band, so I decided to lean into that for St Patrick's day. I tossed some crowd ambience onto it and had the band fade out at the end like they're marching away. Because it's the old joke - why do pipe bands march? To get away from the noise!
My work today was playing around with the breath response curves and seeing how to best get it to respond. I can choose the channel it sends breath on, so I mapped that to expression and let Logic take care of relative volume. Overall, not bad! There's a bunch of other expressions that can be sent relative to position and roll - makes me think that a recorder-based Theremin is reasonable :)
Made this on the bus ride to a research center to investigate various neurodivergencies.
That's not important, what's important is that this was made in Gadget, for the first time in a long time. Maybe not an amazing song, but it's still pleasant.
Gear Used:
OP-XY
ZOIA 10k
I wrote the bones of this song one night shortly after getting my op-xy, and it immediately gave me detective vibes. I spent some time this week fleshing it out, and added some delay and reverb using my new ZOIA fx pedal, which added some nice space to it. Yes, I could have just used the delay and reverb that the op-xy provides, but I wanted to test the zoia with something fairly simple, and to be honest, it sounds way better than what the op-xy provides, mostly because there are so many more configurable options.
I learned about this challenge last-minute and didn't want to let January pass without submitting anything :) This is one of my first jams that I recorded with the Digitone. It's a bit boring, but I tried to do it without any extra samples - every sound you hear was generated inside the Digitone and only three of them were later sampled on the Digitakt since I ran out of trigs and tracks. For what it's worth, I had fun exploring the different sounds and I'm glad that I saved the project. I'll definitely try and refine this some other time, add some other elements etc.
cheers
The biggest victory here is that this is entirely eurorack, minus the interview snippets. The track is missing some crucial things… like a clap or snare, hahaha… because I don’t have eurorack modules for that at this point.
Still, hyped on how close this sounds to something I’d make in a DAW
Heeeeey!!! Look who's back!!!
It's not your favorite, I'm sorry. But hey, it's not your least favorite either, is it? Well, I sure hope not...
Anyways, after doing 52 unbroken weeks I decided to take a bit of a break from the constant music making, so I didn't do much for the first few weeks of 2025. So much so that, when the end of Jan came around, I noticed I had nothing to show for!
I had sat down to make music a couple of times, but I barely got anywhere beyond little loops with little structure to them. It was surprisingly difficult to get myself to just complete something!
But today, I finally sat down with a purpose and made this little thing in about 2h. And I'm really glad I did!!! Is it my favorite piece of music? Absolutely not. But do I think it's hot garbage that deserves to be burnt and forgotten and its family cursed for eternity? Also no! Somewhere in the middle there.
Not even sure what to classify this as. Chiptune-adjascent weird stuff, I think. Maybe not even that.
Anyways, I hope y'all enjoy the weirdness! Looking forward to listening to y'all's stuff <3
Peace, folks!!!
Usually, being in the flow is considered as a positive state but I noticed that you could also be in the flow when you fall into a routine. You let yourself going with the flow without trying to diverge from it, whether you like it or not.
Well, this month, I tried to keep afloat and ride the river of everyday life. I attended a jam and went to a live concert with friends performing. It helped me to stay out of the routine.
However, I didn't have much time to doodle and compose on a regular basis. I still could record something and that's what this challenge is about, right?
So here it is, an ambient track with the Deluge and the CPM DS-2 (Stylophone) recorded on the Zoom L-12. It's a bit more constructed than last month, which is not that hard, but I hope that the layout of the music is not too apparent.
Maybe next month I'll bring even more structure by adding a more distinct rhythm and, why not, some drums.
Thanks for listening and for your feedback!
A song that was made by Raioh for our episode of the Chasing the Beats podcast as a little extra treat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O4zb7VfIIw
We love the sound of a howling wolf in music, and this is an approach to that in Korg Gadget
Could've put an actual howling wolf in there in post, but this is all Gadget and didn't want to go beyond that
So, Spider and Dev made this, basically, and it was for a game jam game, that you can play right:
https://deslrv.itch.io/bad-draw
here
It's the theme song, made entirely in LMMS, but extended from a loop to a more complete song
"..my mind... to your mind..."
Late to the party. Made this energetic track with an emphasis on sound design in a couple days aiming to make something polished and commercial sounding. I'm quite pleased with the result!
I dropped out of Weeklybeats suddenly even though I was going strong. But I am back at it. I hope to get a streak going and not lose it this time.
Thanks for listening!
Again another month where the creative energy was flowing towards something else than MonthlyBeats.
I mostly made music for a paid commission that dragged for much longer than usual for no real good reason. This focused my attention somewhere else and I didn't have much left for myself.
Thankfully, I participate to a synth table every month where we jam together with (new) friends. From that jam, I kept most of the phrases I created, and I made this month's track with them. It definitely has that sound I have when I jam (cf. that Floating Spell single I released on Bandcamp 6 years ago).
I'm still hopeful that I'll get back in a better habit soon. Maybe I should try a weekly routine, just to get more disciplined at music practice.
Anyway, I hope you still get to enjoy it (or at least some part of it). It feels very naive but at the same time, it's very honest. It's very much me.
See you in April.
Here's my tune for Month #3 - I was told it sounds a bit like riding your bike into the sunset. And I agree - maybe it was a hot day and a bunch of raindrops are starting to come down, so you have to rush and make it home before the rain gets too strong lol
As usual, all synths come from the Digitone and everything else was sampled and arranged on the Digitakt. Only a few mix adjustments were done in a DAW. This month was all about bringing my guitar into this setup and finding a workflow with it, I hope you like it!
This is not the usual stuff as it was in 2024, but it's kinda similar. A façade of what it pretends to be.
This is a weird, upbeat tune that's a throwback to a ubiquitous sci-fi sound. It kind of reminds me of an Earthbound battle theme, hence the title. I didn't start out with any such notion, the focus was on Theremin silliness.
For this month, I'm submitting a track that I made for the Elektronauts DnB Battle challenge, where it ranked 2nd place. This time, I barely had two weeks to make a track and submit it. After submitting it to the other challenge, I made a few tiny changes before posting it here, but in a very limited fashion since I'm traveling and I only have a laptop with me.
The challenge was about flipping samples from soap operas or cheap TV shows. I spent quite some time looking for a suitable soap, until I found a very nice show called "Saath Nibhaana Saathiya". This show is a goldmine for sampling! There's tons of nice music and dialogue to choose from, even some singing. While I didn't have time to incorporate all the samples that I originally planned on using, I still think I managed to create some nice sounds using samples from the show. Almost all melodic voices were made from samples from the series. The vocal stabs were discovered by accident, I forgot to reset a trigger key and it gave me a very interesting vibe, so I decided to use it.
Looking back, I'm a bit surprised because the series does not take itself very seriously and I think it's a rather happy and positive series. While I initially tried to capture that, the track came out more moody and mysterious than I anticipated. Another thing I noticed is that I'm getting much faster and that motivates me a lot. Let's see what I can do for next month!
As usual, this was all performed on my Digitone and Digitakt 2. I'll appreciate any feedback, thanks for dropping by.
I've always liked that this challenge makes me reflect a bit on the past month, in addition to forcing me push the render button. After submitting the last challenge, there was the next: This time, it's about getting inspiration from gospel songs. Throughout the entire month, I was searching for inspiration, listening to new songs and thinking about it wherever I went.
This time, I found it super hard to find the right song and I created drafts with two other songs before finding the one that I actually liked. This song is a gospel classic and it's called "It all belongs to you" and the most widely known version is by Deitrick Haddon.
I still have a few things to do before submitting this so I'm uploading a draft here to make it just in time (May 31st) and then I'll add another link to the final version once it's done.
Please feel free to leave some feedback, it's all appreciated.
UPDATE: i realized i can replace the file when editing. The version from yesterday really doesn't do it justice, so I replaced it with the version that i submitted. I hope you enjoy it! For sure, I had a lot of fun doing this.
As usual, all sounds you hear in this track come from the sample or from the Digitakt and Digitone. Mixing was done in Bitwig, I'm actually starting to enjoy that part.
it turns out that i can only submit one file per month - that's a bit of a bummer, since now my submissions are shifted by a month and I lost the streak because of it. Nonetheless, I think I'm still on track for my "one tune per month" goal. Hear for yourself! :) this is a bright sounding jam, recorded straight from my DN+DT.
Some banging Tech-Trance this month
Since I plan on finding a label for this, I am not gonna upload it here this time, but link to it on Soundcloud instead:
https://soundcloud.com/nik-novo/nik-novo-crisis-in-amsterdam
I have been working on it for the most part of March and I think production wise this is the best track I have ever done. I genuinely like how it sounds and how all the details I added make the track feel. As for now, I am done with this track and have no plans on making further changes.
The name "Crisis in Amsterdam" is a reference to the track starting on C major and later on incorporating A# minor.
My first track with Ableton Live. I have been a FL User for years and I am finally making the transition.
I am happy with the drop but I feel like, that the build up could be a bit longer. I might do a longer version of this track.
Grateful for feedback !
Best regards
Thomas
