Been very busy with work so I'd forgotten to upload this work in progress that I started...

An outtake from this week's Tuesday jam. Very quick and rushed because I spent a lot of time rebuilding my studio setup after replacing my main audio interface.

High definition on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/20210420-feat-lagoon-city

Full audiovisual livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKxorhbir0k&t=2927s

Having been a bit on the run this week, today I only had a recording of a bit of a synth melodic pattern with some interesting delays. Thus I thought to make a more atmospheric track and added bass and guitar on top, making the rhythm a bit more free flowing than with drums and synth pads. It's in C minor.

I tried to start from a bass line but was in a rut and played around with Tape Orchestra, a new group of instruments in Spitfire Audio LABS, where I came up with the chord structure of the song and the mix of crinkled tape strings + woods. This set the mood for this piece.

I added the drums (also LABS) and recorded the bass guitar. Then came the synth arpeggio (Arturia Microfreak). Finally, I wrote the lyrics in a single sitting and fought the whole week-end with the vocals (woohoo, finally got to use the vocoder feature from the Microfreak).

The song misses movement, changes and tension but ends up being much better than I expected entering the week-end with just a few bits and little hope I would have a complete song.

Lossless on Soundclound: https://soundcloud.com/user-493253580/night-travel

This was again a difficult track to finish. It started as an experiment on emulating a dotted 8th delay on a simple motif, and then many ideas came and this strangely joyful track assembled itself. I once again thought some voice samples would fit the track so I added that in the intro and the break. As the week progressed I was satisfied with the composition but not the sounds that made the track bland and cheesier than it actually is, so I pretty much changed all instruments except the bass.
The voice samples come from a fantastic interview of Eddie Van Halen in the "What it means to be American" series by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and Zócalo Public Square.
All composed and mixed with the Polyend Tracker.

A western inspired horror soundtrack!

The song started as this dark melody about exploring a cave and going into the lair of a giant spider. But it kinda pivoted in this western inspired horror like trailer soundtrack. I guess playing red dead redemption too much lately has had an impact.

A stormy night, the sound of hooves in the distance, figures slowly emerging, weird shapes, the number growing and the tension increasing. This is the image i had in my mind.

Some experiments for this track - I used quite a lot of inverted keyboards here. Some are for risers but one of the section has an inverted harpsichord where I wrote the melody, then inverted the melody and then inverted the resulting audio to go back to the original melody but with this inverted effect on it. There are also dissonant violins in the high range to create that weird tension towards the end. And of course samples of gallops and horses, courtesy of Splice.

I started this one on my other computer (my old 2013 iMac, but, for various reasons, the old iMac actually performs better than the new Mac Mini I got) and it has templates/sounds that are a little out of date. I streamed that one, and interestingly enough I didn't get audio dropouts at all while streaming but as soon as I bring it over to my new 2018-era Mac Mini it starts to sputter and desync and it's a terrible mess and there's only like 6 tracks or so.

Also it's VGM Con and I'm helping out so I can't really do much with it the song weekend. I'm going to just ditch it and move on with the next project.

I did however learn from the chat participants watching about how they like to bus wet reverb or wet echo differently from dry and compress only the wet signal. I normally don't do that.

This week I was trying to get more acquainted with Ableton Live 10, messing about with drum racks and the like, and inadvertently made this. It isn't really a track as such, more a jam. The project was not organised properly, too many effects in the drum rack for instance, not spread across tracks so they were not easily mixed, but that's because it wasn't meant to be. Similarly mastering this was a nightmare as it was difficult to alter frequencies elsewhere.

Anyway, it's a bit of work, I'd rather do something than nothing, plus I am a lot more comfortable using drum racks in Live. So there you go.

A very loungey/dubby kind of thing. By my usual standards this would be late (for various weekend reasons), but I'm taking advantage of this year's scheduling. This one started with sparse drums--initially I was thinking hip-hop, but with the dub echo, extremely mellow electric piano, and pedal steel...it went in a different direction.

Drums: Ableton 64 Pad Dub Techno kit, with Max Humanizer
Keys: PureMagnetik electric piano, Berlin Mark Two, with some auto-pan
Bass: 80s Epiphone Embassy II with flatwounds and EMG selects, p-pickup only, EQ-8 for low-end rolloff.
No-name 70s kit-built 10-string pedal steel with Moyo volume pedal, with Glue compressor and auto-pan

Sends: two Echo channels, one convolution reverb (with high-pass filter in front) for air on drums and bass, and Valhalla Supermassive

Full-chain multi-band compression (flat) on the stereo mix.

Title comes from the largest graceful graph on 14 nodes having 68 edges.