in another attempt to figure out nicer song structures i made this weird mr. oizo style beat that mostly consists of samples of rage against the machine's self-titled album. not quite done with it (very weird mix), but i feel like this sketch is good enough to share.
(late submit, made this last week but got busy travelling)
* NOTE: If you listened to this song and it was high and squeaky, then you listened to a worng version, uploaded at TWICE the samplerate. Please have a listen. You could expect a slow 6 megabytes ambient drone, full of low end. Thanks and sorry for the wrong upload.
I finally had a moment to restore my reel to reel recorder to a full operational condition, and then I thought the old tapes I received from the previous owner could be put to good use taping some synth loops.
Testing the unit, I accidentaly played one of those loops at half speed, and discovered the goods of actual analogic pitch shifting... you know, some artifacts, annoying high frequencies becoming more audible, and hiss :)
So, I believe what it makes it interesting is: you DON'T get exactly what you recorded, out of one of those tapes.
I dumped the track into my also recently discovered Ardour for Linux and give it some FX treatment. It was nice to finalize a track COMPLETELY under Linux.
I know it's a pretty basic piece, but I had a great time setting up everything.
Hope to have more time to listen to your submissions. Have a great week, guys :)
just waiting for my artist to lay some sick vox to this
Gravity Well
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Into the wormhole. Hold on tight.
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I had some nice sounds that reminded me of space. I have also been watching a lot of Star Trek from the 90s. A few things though that I didn't spend enough time on was getting the melody sound right (too much echoing bleeding into the call-response tracks) and trying to fix a few conflicting sections where there's too much going on and muddiness. Maybe I can work on this next week.
The track is mostly hardware but has a lot of software effects.
Leads are from Nord Rack 2x, pads Alesis A6 Andromeda, the arp from Oberheim Xpander. Drums are MASCHINE, the ominous pad is Massive, the noises are from Stutter Edit. Lots of other SFX and mixing in software.
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Technique log:
Sun, Jan 29. 15:05 - 18:05. What's the composition technique this week? More secondary dominant chords and varying basslines.
I thought the song last week had some interesting tonal qualities to it, but it took a long time to create so I'd like to practice my speed this week.
Verse:
Em Bm C D
Em Gm Dm Am Em Gm Bm B/D (tension section)
Bassline melodics:
Em Dm Am B
The secondary dominant chords are in the counter section, though the whole track overall is pretty simple.
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Total time: 3h
I had a show this weekend, and spent much of the week preparing for it (new Max/MSP patch, testing with instruments), but late in the week, I wanted to hear something like this drum beat, and whipped that up with some keyboards. I tracked bass and guitar on Saturday, and spent a few hours on Sunday to arrange and mix. There's a drum rack of dry trap kit (high-pass Auto-Filter on the kick; low-pass Auto-filter with drive on the whole kit), one of a hand drum I have, and hand claps (with low-pass Auto-Filter with drive to make it a little less clean). There's Ableton's Electric instrument (MkI2 Crunchy) through band-pass Auto-Filter with modulation, Simpler (Grand Piano preset) with the same Auto-Filter treatment, and Collision (Street Bells) for some variety. (I almost put vibes there, but low street bells sounded better.)
Bass is the Epiphone P-J (on P), with a little convolution reverb. Guitar: '67 Kalamazoo into Vox Wah, and the same guitar through the Reuss RF-01 Repeater Fuzz into the Vox Wah. I tracked more parts than I used.
The tricky thing with this one was getting the parts not to conflict; everything worked better the sparser it was. There's some simple delay in addition to the convolution reverb, and Full-Chain Master on the master channel.
The title comes from it being week 4, and is a bit of a reference to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.
I thought of the title early in the week but never got around to sit down and write lyrics because I can't stand sitting around for too long to think. It hurts my brain, so I just repeated "pizza" over and over. I'll eventually come up with some lyrics.
Used the Santana SE and a condenser mic (Studio Projects C1) for vocals this time around.
Surdu here reporting from the Naperville Whole Foods.
Here's a bunch of nonsense we threw together that sounds like music. Its got a kick on 1 and a snare on 3 so I'm sure you'll figure out the things in between.
There's a sample of Chra's "Dark Zone" that I made a siren or something out of. See you next week!
a celebration of one of the president's favorite travel pastimes. going to do a little more work on it and release as a single. moog mother 32 and some soft synths.
This week's track continues themes of brighter, uplifting downtempo stuff from my other three submissions. Arrangement-wise, I'd like to develop it further, but the track stands alone as-is. I'll probably release a ton of the tracks I make through this streak later this year, so I'll revisit the fuller arrangement then.
Hope you enjoy!
Blauagh, this is garbage. Don't listen.
At least I made it through the first month though! I'll call that a mild success.
Don't look back, Ado.
When you see them go, well, you know.
Don't look back, Ado.
Yet she feels a pull; longing
for what lay behind and burning.
And despite the sinners, and their sins within,
it was her home.
So she turns to see,
and she turns to salt--
from salt to dust,
and gone.
A crystalline design,
a dreamer's pain.
four cities gone
in flame.
Up in flame.
Don't look back, Ado.
Some bumper music. Mix is a little hot.
strait phone recording, acoustic guitar & run-out groove as a click track
kastle connected via DOEPFER Dark Energy II - realtime recording, no processing
ps: my personal challenge to participate weekly here is not to produce tracks - its about discovering new sounds and themes and working possibilities and set ups for example traveling and touring - keep it light weight and simple ....
This week I have decided to create ambient track.
Again, I limited myself with using only piano. With it I have created rhythm, melodies, pads and much more.
Enjoy.
This week I've tried my hand at some Nujabes style instrumental hip-hop production. Completely new territory for me and was an absolute ton of fun.
The main piano sample is this piece by Nikolai Kapustin. There were a bunch of other orchestral samples, but I don't really see the point in listing those off too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8UDy-8CBfc
UPDATE: I put slight variations on the volume of the hh hits and switched the hh sample (per multiple recommendations, as well as used a side chain compressor from the kick to the bass and the snare to the main backing melody. I'm relatively new to using side chain effects, so I hope I'm using this correctly. Can anyone notice a difference in the mix from the original? Feel free to leave advice on this.
This week I really wanted to push myself further out of my usual element and decided to shoot for a jazzy drum n bass type song. I found I had a lot of fun producing this track and will most likely try my hand at more drum n bass production in the future. That being said, I would appreciate any feedback from heads with experience on drum n bass production. If you have any pointers or things you think I might try different on my next DnB track, please feel free to let me know. I'm pretty happy overall with how this song turned out. There's a couple little things I'd tweak before I'd consider officially releasing it.
For this song I used the following:
- DM1 - The Drum Machine
- Logic Pro (various VSTs)
- Alto Saxophone
As with my previous entries in weekly music, I've sprinkled spoken word samples throughout the track. Can you guess which film this week's samples are from?
Inspired and based on videos I found on youtube, I made a dance track and a video for it:
Cutup organic textures backed by processed west african rhythms
