Missed last week as I was having a nice long weekend away, and this week has been hectic,.
I didn't have time to put the percussion I wanted on this, maybe later.
Anyway, After a lot of VCVrack recently I am going back to my main love: Renoise.
Back for another year, starting off with some spooky ambient made with VCVRack. I love the software but haven't figured out good ways to get well-mastered output from it, so you get some mad frequencies now and again. Still, I'm quite happy with this one.
Hectic week so rather rushed this, and I really would have liked to start this sooner as it has some nice sounds in it, plus I love tricky drums which you can do really well in a tracker. Could have left this until next week but nah, discipline!
This song started as an attempt to see what I could do with the bass from the OP-XY and the Overdrive preset on the ZOIA. I really liked the sound, and came up with the bass loop pretty quickly.
I then spent the week messing around with melody, and laid down a few of my favorite little riffs. The arrangement came together pretty quickly after that, and then I spent the last few days tweaking the mix and trying to get the best sound out of this song as possible.
Overall I'm super happy with the result, and feel like this might be the clearest 'track' that I've put together so far.
snippet from my radio show outro - last night - w guestappearance by Mel Logan from COS
program: https://o94.at/programm/sendung/id/2387220 (soon on mixcloud)
promoting my new album wondereel on fals.ch
https://f4lsch.bandcamp.com/album/wondereel
Quite a lot of activity this week, so this track is what felt achievable with the energy available. This one uses $60 Univox hollowbody in Bb F tuning, so it lends itself to fingerpicking and barred strumming. As I've been doing lately, I've tended toward phrasing with a rest or natural fade at the end. It's a bit sparse in places, and in two of them...it was a bit too sparse, so I added a some duplication of notes in the editing, copying one snippet and delaying it by a sixteenth note or two.
The world's a mess, particularly my country, and writing this doesn't directly fix any of those problems, but I hear a kind of hopefulness in this music, despite our surroundings. Let's find hope where we can, enough to keep ourselves going, so we can make things better.
No inline effects, but there's the usual convolution reverb and a bit of compression/eq on the stereo mix.
The title comes from the river in Ireland that in some places runs alongside the R579.
I purchased a new audio interface this week, which allowed me to add multiple instruments to my recordings. Because of this, I started the drums on the Syntakt, then routed sync into the OP-XY for the synth sounds.
The song came together pretty quickly after I had the drums laid out. I added some of the background sound layers and then worked on the melody. Once I found the first riff the rest of the melody came into being relatively easily as well.
This is not exactly the track I wanted to do. I heard a song that mixed good rock, electronic, and shamisen and wanted to capture that. But I struggled with it overall so this ended up being a half baked shamisen/synthwave track. A track is a track, that still counts!
Happy new year 2025 and thank you OneZero for creating the streak this year again.
The OP-XY has become the backbone of my method, and my favorite toy is currently en route to teenage.engineering for an RMA. One of the buttons was finicky and I couldn't stand it anymore, but that means I'm without it for the week.
I started this song awhile ago on the OP-1, before I had the OP-XY. I finished it today for my weekly upload, because I had mostly run out of time. I like this song, but still struggle with the OP-1 workflow.
Last week, I was hearing the music channeled by the PureSalem Mendiola in standard tuning, and hearing it again this week. This past Friday was also the 50th anniversary of Keith Jarrett's famous concert in Köln, so I started this one with an Am7 > G motion, to see where that would take me. As it turned out, it took me somewhere melodic, through gentle expressions of several emotions. I could easily have made this longer...but thought to keep it under four minutes.
Three channels of PureSalem Mendiola with five-year-old strings, direct into the UA Volt. Some large-hall convolution reverb, and the usual multiband compression/eq on the stereo main.
The title comes from minor planet 578 Happelia, a tiny thing with (possibly) a tiny moon.
missed weekly music :3
walk in the woods frozen snow
rec with iphone
I made this one evening as the snow was falling outside of my window. The song started as just chord exploration, but expanded to some sound design. I found a delay preset on the ZOIA called Snowfall, and I started trying to make twinkly snowflake sounds. I arrived at this.
I added some slow drums and continued tweaking the sounds, eventually linking 3 separate sounds together, all being run through the ZOIA's delay and the OP-XY's reverb.
As far as 'songs' go, this one isn't my best, but I'm happy with the feeling it elicites, and I am happy to upload it as my first song for this streak.
Stylistically this is in keeping with the recent all-guitar pieces. I'd started with the thought of something sparser, but in the actual playing, things got a bit busier. Time for a change soon, I think.
Three tracks of microtonal Tele Deluxe parts caster fretted with just intonation intervals, going through the Reuss Effects Understate to give it a bit of sparkle.
In Ableton, there's the convolution reverb and a bit of compression/eq.
The title comes from the River Yarrow, which tracks alongside the A581 for a while.
Edit: updated the file to fix a couple too-obvious edits.
This track is called Dust and sweeps away the remnants of the old year, making room for something new.
morse
This is more of a technical challenge this week than a musical one, although I'm happy with the result. I wanted to try to get the OP-XY to make Pigments soft synth and my M8 make sounds via MIDI, and I accomplished that goal. I also built the drums in the Syntakt and used it's song mode this time to give some variance to the drum beat throughout the song. The OP-XY is outputting MIDI into Pigments via USB-C and via the MIDI out to the M8. What's fun there is that I can effectively 'double up' the channels, meaning one sequence in the OP-XY can play both instruments.
I started with the 'bent strings' preset in Pigments, just playing around with melody until I found something cool. Then I added the drums and bass. Finally I added the M8 to the mix to have more sonic diversity. I was going to add some guitar via the ZOIA to the mix on this one, but couldn't get a recording I was satisfied with.
With my OP-XY still out for RMA, I struggled to come up with something this week. I finally sat down with my Syntakt and decided to try to come up with something I liked. I was moderately successful, here. I have a hard time getting the Syntakt to make the sounds that I want it to. In other words, I spend a lot of time just fiddling with knobs and stuff, rather than making the beat better. I tried to include some sounds from the M8, but ended up scrapping that side of the song.
This isn't my best, but it's a submission, and that's more than I had this morning!
In a couple of short late-night sessions, I came up with a few themes that had a bit of a resonance. I was interested in doing something with varying levels, but abandoned most of that, with the exception of a pedal tone audible in a few places. (Maybe next week's will follow through with this.)
This one's three tracks of PureSalem Mendiola straight into the UA Volt, with some convolution reverb and the usual compression/eq on the stereo mix.
The title comes from a small town at the northern end of PA Route 580.
I was out of the country for most of the week and had to try to find something this Sunday. Some arps, a chord progression, a loop, and here you go. Hey, I actually don't dislike it but it would really need more time and polish to go beyond. This feels more like a teaser trailer track. :)
Basic riddim from the dubroom studio tutorial. Thought I could get more of it or make a dub last week. Ran out of steam.
4 tracks of Digitone's factory patches with minor tweaks. No external effects. Recoded live via overbridge. Added some gain in Audacity.
Happy new year! This one is similar to the last few years of guitar-only pieces I can put together in a few sessions, though there's a bit of a departure: I'd wanted to build a guitar with a neck fretted for just intonation, so I could experiment with precise intervals and precise difference tones. This piece started with the fingerpicking pattern you hear first, which foregrounds some of those difference tones, rather than sticking with consonance. Timing is a bit loose; I'd wanted to play with a little more elastic quality.
This ended up being a bit tricky to edit: initially, it was about six, seven minutes, though I reduced all of the sections to half, and took out a few. While I liked the suspension of time there, it maybe got a bit too meander-y at this slow tempo.
For this piece, I'm also reintroducing a pedal--in this case, the Reuss Effects Understate, which is a clean boost. The parts panned center and left get this, while the bridge pickup (panned right) does not. Otherwise, everything's straight into the UA Volt, which has a pretty good overdriven sound you can hear on some peaks.
There's some convolution reverb send, and the usual light compression/eq on the stereo channel.
The title comes from the somewhat arduous process of finding places with 575 feet of elevation above sea level. I ended up throwing in the towel and going with Presque Isle's Gull Point, which does have some patches surveyed at 575.
one of the first sketches I did in koala a while ago. kind of happy with the jaunty feel of it but not sure if it can be taken much further so happy to leave it as a rough beat idea.
I tried something a bit different this week. The youtube rabbit hole took me to watch the corridor fight sequence in the movie Old Boy. This inspired me to try out scoring that scene. So I used the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwIIDzrVVdc , removed all the audio and then added music, beat and sound effects.
This was fun! The hardest part was setting a consistent beat that would work with the scene, as of course it that scene was not shot to a click. I am quite happy with the result as it was a fun experiment.
I suggest starting the video above at the same time as the track if you are curious to see what the result looks like.
Or how to milk a 4 chord progression in so many ways.
Maybe the soundtrack to a super accelerated movie of how silicon life started on another planet.
I wasn't able to come up with anything really new this week, so I took an old song and remastered it. The M8 now has instrument based EQ, so I went through each instrument and tweaked things to my liking. I then recorded it into Bitwig, where I added a bit of compression and a small amount of EQ to the entire song.
This is one of the best songs I've ever made on the M8, and was the result of lots of lunch-time editing last year. The success of this song prompted me to devote more time to music and ultimately to take part in this streak.
