In the life of the home recordist, there are many temptations. They come to us via emails, websites, magazine ads and reviews. All selling gear. Software synths, sound libraries, hardware synths, control surfaces, better preamps, outboard effects, the list goes on.
All of these things are super cool and I'm sure they are great. But here's my New Year's Resolution. Learn to use the things I have better.
To that end, I have three recommendations. In no particular order:
there are a bunch of really useful videos by SFLogicNinja that will help you get the most out of Logic. These are freely available on youtube.
another bunch of really useful videos for users of Ableton Live from The Covert Operators. These videos are not free (subscription service 5 Euros/month) but they are really awesome in that the techniques they show actually inspire creativity. I've been a subscriber for 4 months and I am very happy.
music lessons; stop talking about how you don't play an instrument well or how you're lacking in music theory and fix it! For my part, I'm gonna finally take guitar lessons. Watch out world!
Of course having said all that, I'd really like it if Santa brought Kore 2 + Komplete for me :-)
On December 13th, I took part in something special. The community at alonetone set us a challenge. To produce an album in a day. The rules were simple, with no prior planning, make 24 minutes of recorded music in 24 hours. Sleep optional.
For me this would be particularly difficult as I had myriad other things to be doing all of which were beginning to sound like excuses...
I started at 10am and by lunch I had my first track. I started with some electric piano and a couple of chords. Then I started looking for some drum sounds which I ran through various beat repeaters/slicers. Then in a fit of tradition, I added a synth bass. Not really being happy with it, I took a sample from a talk by Suzanne Jeffrey entitled "What Makes You Working Class". Time did not permit me to really listen to the talk, I was just looking for a texture... Having found it, I reversed it and put it through Live's Beat Repeat effect... The result had the perfect devilish incantation quality... A bit of arranging and and an un-reverse at the very end. Hmm, drums sound like crap. Perfect! That's the title, "Would You Think Less Of Me... [if I told you I can't program drums to save my life]"
Then the interruptions began. Take one kid here, take another kid there, do some shopping. Before I knew it, 5 hours were gone and it's dinner time. I was screwed but I pressed on.
Still hung up on the electric piano sound and pressed for time, I played around with some chords that have been bouncing around my head since I was a teenager... Then I grabbed some drum clips I had kicking around to get a groove going. Then I changed the chords a bit, created a bit of melodic part over top. Surfing around for samples, I found some vocal samples on a Computer Music DVD (an excellent UK magazine that comes with a DVD full of samples and other goodies). I sprinkled then in here and there. Arranged, effected, automated, and generally rushed until I was "done". I named the track after one of the samples, "Baby".
To this point, I had resisted using my new favourite toy, Elysium. But it was 8pm. The pressure was sapping my MoJo. So I broke it out and created a pattern that I fed into a guitar-ish sound. I recorded it into a long loop. I had record quantization on because it doesn't have any MIDI sync ability. But I failed to press stop at the right time so as the loop recording came around out of sync I got this weird syncopation which actually sounded cool... Now I fleshed that out with some synth pads, some more choppy synth pads, some drums. Nice! But was missing something on the low end. So I found an arp-y bass synth sound. Yeah baby yeah. One I get a good groove going, it's always fun to spend a little bit of time wanking/jamming over top with a lead synth sound. That wankery gave birth to the lead melody... The only thing left to do was to arrange it into something resembling a song (a major weakness for me). Still not satisfied, I slowly brought in an autofilter towards the end of the Elysium part of the track which forms the ending... I had no idea what to call it and no time to dwell on it so "La La La I Can't Hear You" is what I settled on. Maybe I was talking to the voices telling me that this whole exercise was nuts.
I was now at 16 minutes and it was 11pm. I had to be done that night. I had to be up early... I was done. And I said so. Somebody in the chat room that we had set up for participants told me to just jam for 8+ minutes before giving up. That was the pep-talk I needed.
So in response to the happy vibe that was La La La, I decided to go dirge-y... Seem to fit the time of the night and the desperation of the situation (can't believe I just wrote that). Not much to say here. Just lay down a couple of chord progressions using a dark pad sound; solo-ed on top. Sprinkled drums in. Sprinkled effects. Generally made noise. The soloing got a little plaintive so I glommed onto the title "Sorrow". Dramatic, perhaps but it was 1am and I was done!
This was a great experience for me. For many reasons that I'm fully able to express. You'll understand when you try something similar. To be sure, I'm not totally happy with my results. I am totally stoked at the process. I look forward to the next one. Developing as an artist is no different from developing as an athlete. It's a journey and in our low attention span, quick to judge world that's easy to forget.
Finally, it is very important to acknowledge that I was not alone. There were others and their astonishing work is here. In particular thanks to sudara and sandbags who convinced me to give it a shot.
Got speaker stands (for my studio monitors) last week as a bit of a carrot to force me to clean up my office. I knew that they'd improve things but I had no idea how much. Well, I'm happy to report... HOLY CRAP!
Unbelievable. My advice to all of you that haven't done do already, get your monitors off your desk! Your ears will thank you.
Yesterday, I started playing with a super cool new MIDI note generator called Elysium. A few hours after getting it installed I posted my first track made with it, Glockenfunmachine. Sudara over at alonetone asked me for a screenshot, I obliged which led to more questions around how I did it. Seemed like a good topic.
First I played with Elysium and built layer one and trying out various sounds. I'm still learning here and have no plan but eventually a cyclical pattern emerges. So I move on to create a simpler pattern on layer two (sending the MIDI to channel 2), again auditioning sounds and other playing around. Lastly I create a third layer that just alternates 2 notes on a pad sound.
I leave Elysium playing and here there's a some screwing around in Live, trying sounds, trying effects racks, twiddling knobs.
Eventually I recorded that for about 30 bars into clips in session view. (Rather than worry about syncing Elysium and Live, I just set the record quantize to 1/8th notes and hit play on Elysium at the right time).
Now I've got all the midi data now, so I'm done with Elysium.
Next I figured out an appropriate loop point in each of my 3 clips, reducing them to 24 bars. Now I press play and let it run.
There's a lot more screwing around at this stage, trying sounds, try effects racks, twiddling knobs. Developing a sense of what's gonna work.
Part of what I'm thinking about is how to start the piece. I like to build so I copied the clips so I had something like this:
3 Scene 1 2 3 Scene 2 1 2 3 Scene 3
Then hit the master record, clicked the Scene 1 launch; waited 4 bars, scene two launch, 4 bars, scene 3. Now play with knobs (which gets recorded as automation). After some time goes by, stop.
Switch to arrange view and tweak automation to clean up some rough edges, add more than I had hands to do live, etc.
Then I think about how to end it. I figured I'd just go with an abrupt ending. I had to do a little extra to catch the delay tails.
Now export to aiff.
Once exported, pull it into itunes, setup all the info, find a photo, etc. Then convert to mp3 and aac and start uploading.
Obviously there's a bunch of knob tweaking, preset selection, etc here that I've glossed over. Surely nobody is interested in that.
So I leave you with the important stuff. The music...
Sounds. A musicians, we shape and direct them but they also have suggest where they want to go, who they'll play nicely with. Electronic musicians with sound design skills make their own. The rest of us rely on them to provide us with useful presets...
To now, I've resisted paying money for sound banks, sample libraries and the like (aside from those included in DAWs) cause I'm cheap and I'm proud. But having previously got free stuff from Puremagnetik, when I saw their Big 08 collection announced I was overcome with a sense of what-the-heck.
Big 08 is a 3GB collection of samples, clips, instrument and effects presets for Ableton Live. The only thing that I don't particularly care is the old Atari video game sounds (I'm old enough to remember the original and I'm not very nostalgic). But basically, from my minimal experience, I gotta say this collection is Awesome.
Still much to explore but I have made two tracks based on the included sounds to give you a taste.
I have long been interested in the work of what academics call the minimalists (Steve Reich, Phillip Glass being the two obvious examples). I never fully understood how it was that they could compose such brilliantly complex pieces. Also never truly understood why it was called minimalism.
All that changed one day when I stumbled across this video. That started me on a series of pieces. The latest of which starts as a simple canon.
A simple 4 bar melody in C minor across 4 different keyboard-y sounds. That MIDI data is simultaneously feed to other tracks with other sounds that I bring in, adjust and arpeggiate.
In the late eighties our band, Two Infant Children, recorded our works on an 8-track 1/4" deck (Fostex Model 80). For years, I wondered what those old recordings sounded like. Now I have a chance to find out. My band-mate Ralph managed to dig the Fostex gear and a few reels of tape out of a closet it's all been living in for the last 20 years.
I'm transferring the tapes to an old G3 running ProTools (the 8 tracks going into a Digi001). From there it'll go a faster machine running Logic where the archeology will really begin.
Of course, while doing the initial transfer, I couldn't help but have a listen...
My first impression was that perhaps memories should stay memories...
