EDIT: I am getting an error when exporting audio in Bitwig and can't figure it out. For now, I'll link to the part of the Twitch VOD where I play the song until I can figure this out. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1173293038
I guess this is more like psychedelic trance now, but it's gone from being an intro and a drop into an entire song. It needs some work, but I will probably stop uploading versions of this song to Weekly Music and work on that offline.
Issues that need improvement:
As usual this was streamed, https://twitch.tv/emeraldarcana/
So here is the track I almost submitted last week. I re-recorded almost all parts and since I work in an improvising manner, you could say they are new material. I kept the main melody themes and developed them slightly different.
Spent most of the week working on a track that turned out totally crap (other than some of the drum sections). I didn't even bother finishing it because it just refused to come together so I bailed at the last minute and wrote something from scratch this afternoon. Not my best, but better than before.
I bought a GGD drum pack so I can have some metal sounding drums since I've just been using LABS or GarageBand drums up to this point (even though I've really grown to like the sound of the LABS drums).
Decided to rearrange a more energetic clip of this week's livestream.
High quality on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/telecharger-arpeggionism
Live stream and audio archive here: https://tlchrgr.tumblr.com/
Got the BBC One orchestra Discovery and played with it today.
One more week with just a few hours over the weekend to put a track together.
I enjoyed playing the bass groove running with many variations over the piece against a somewhat generic Ableton drum rack. I tried to keep my drums evolving with the track and recorded the unmistakable Lyra-8 drones and short melodic spurts to add some depth and action.
I entered the weekend quite uninspired but had a good time with this one.
High quality on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-493253580/the-first-journey
A super derivative track - I spent a couple of hours on Sunday. This is more an exercise than anything else. I wanted to try to make an interesting bass line that plays with a breakbeat drum beat. I sliced the breakbeat sample, isolated the kicks and programmed a bass sound against these kicks. This is an interesting technique I may try to use in the future, instead of going stupidly 4/4 with my bass beats.
Week 40! The year is flying fast.
A pause in my acoustic streak with this ultra short metal track. 47 seconds of guitar, bass, drum programming and vocals. I followed this Reaper DAW tutorial this week to learn the basics of recording, editing and mixing with Reaper, and it was based around recording of a metal track with cheap or free plugins, and this is what I came up with. Your run-of-the-mill 80's guitar riffs, nothing pretty original, but it was really fun to do, and screaming into a mic is pretty fun too. So, DAW is Reaper, guitar and bass plugins are from Audio Assault, drum plugin is AVL Drums Red Zeppelin. Well I think I will not leave my usual DAW (Harrison Mixbus) for Reaper though, it seems pretty cool, but I'm really enjoying the workflow of Mixbus better.
While I did start with drums this week, I removed them in the spirt of continuing last week's (more successful) guitar-only approach. This one was quick to track (a half hour total), but editing was difficult--I'd recorded snippets, with the thought of stringing them together in a spacious structure. In doing the actual editing...getting it to hang together as an identity was tricky. I had to balance repetition and variety, and I'm not convinced it worked. But...there's a kind of endless-aimless summer-day quality to this, as summer recedes.
Guitar: home-built Res-O-Glas, with tonal variety coming from the bridge-or-neck-or-both pickup selection. This went through the Balls Effects KWB for a bit of drive, but not the distortion of last week. Then some tracks got the Moyo passive volume, to take the attack off.
Two channels got inline auto-pan, and all of them got lesser or greater amounts of sends to a church-sized convolution reverb, and Ableton's Echo plugin. There's the now-usual Wide&Warm compression/eq preset on the stereo mix.
The title comes from there being 92 days of summer.
