Day 268: Along these lines

I don't really have a lot of experience with people involved with heavy drug use, so the lyrics to this track are completely baseless.  Just some words I made up basically.

Lyrics:
We all know you're a liar, 
We all know you're a fiend, 
We all know you're a piece of shit junkie.

We all know you'd kill us for your next fix, 
We all know you don't give a shit about any of this.

Lick the floor to see if you can get high.  
Lick the walls and sell your blood SO YOU CAN get high.

Restitution is a joke now, 
We all want death for you. 

It was nice knowing you.

Day 244: Explicit

Parental Advisory: Very Explicit Lyrics.

Day 239: Mixed Roles

Today's piece is another that is a Disquiet Junto assignment.  These three simple tasks are deceptive:

You will make the beat with an oscillator.

You will make the background sound bed with a drum machine.

You will make the melody with a field recording.

Yes, I can do all those things.  

Where I threw myself a loop was my field recording.  It's not very "melodic".  I ended up making it into an instrument, then processing that instrument with milliseconds-long delay.  By playing with the delay you can create pitch - basically it's just an oscillator, only less precise.  

The actual oscillator I used for the beat was VERY basic.  The primary beat is a stair step wave pattern on 1,2,3,and 4, then in my "B" section I threw in a hemiola square wave to create more tension.  Rather than use the oscillator to create any tones I chose to just use the "clicks" of a very slow oscillator as a metronome of sorts.

  Finally, the sound bed created by a drum machine.  I have umpteen-thousand different kinds of drum machine (patches) and could have easily "cheated" and made this part simple.  To be fair I used a 606 drum machine and turned it into an ambient pad.  Washing it out with the right amount of reverb and other effects I came to what I felt was an appropriate sounding pad.  The key here was to focus on the only things with decent tone - the toms.

In the "C" section of the piece I turn the roles on their heads and allow everything to fall into it's right place for just a moment.  The oscillator creates a tone, the drums play rhythm, the field recording is noise.  Oddly, it doesn't really feel right to me.  The new roles they have been assigned are their proper roles... if there is such a thing.

More on this 85th Disquiet Junto project, in which a song is made with three simple parts (oscillator, drum machine, field recording), at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/08/15/disquiet0085-3parts/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Day 235: Spaced Out

As someone famous never said "I like my music like I like my women:  LONG, SLOW, AND AMBIENT."

As I continue my daily experiments with the Malstrom synthesizer unit I'm coming to appreciate it a little more.  Working with it takes a little more "effort" than Thor or Subtractor.  If you put some thought behind your decisions then the machine yields some stupendous sounds.  With Thor and Subtractor I frequently twiddle knobs and play with random routing to see how it comes out.  Malstrom requires a little more finesse.

This piece has a strong Brian Eno influence to it, although it didn't start out that way.  The synth stab you hear at the beginning was the start, which, to me, is very un-Eno-like.  It evolved into this kind of noisy ambient piece you hear here over a few days work.

Day 234: Getting Up There

An ambient work that's just begging to be in a film.  Now to find the film....

Justify

I can't stop making music. As hard as I may try it just won't ever happen. Time continues to move forward and I continue to make music and it continues to sit on my hard drive. I've got a small pile of it now. Some garbage, some gems, some things that need to be turned inside to find out what they're worth. What ever the state said music is in it needs to breathe. It needs to leave the house and get into peoples ears, hearts, minds, and souls.

Long ago I stopped worrying about trying to make money by creating music. Instead, now, I just want to share. Money doesn't drive me to do this. If it did I'd have given up music my second year of college and changed majors. The act of creation is a reward in itself. Anyone who ever painted a picture, created a sculpture, or penned a sonnet can tell you that. There is an indefinable pleasure derived from "When I came here there was nothing. Now I have built a wall. Soon there will be more walls and later there will be a house." It feels like I've built a lot of houses, but no one ever moved in. Maybe if I swing the doors wide enough people will come to live here and call it a home for a little while.

I'll stop with the over-indulgent metaphors and move on to something more solid. In addition to using this blog as an outlet to put my music out into the world I'll also be using it as a simultaneous teaching & learning tool. Over the last year I've become addicted to two pieces of software: Propellerhead's Reason 4.0 & Record. They are, quite simply, hands down, the best music creation programs I've ever used. (Here's a list of others I've used at one time or another: Pro tools, Jeskola Buzz, FL Studio, Sonar, Nuendo, Garageband, Ableton, Sibelius, Finale, Logic, Cubase.) I can already hear a 1,000 people offended by the fact that I'd put any recording software above the Holiest of Holies a.k.a.: Digidesign's Pro tools. I've used Pro tools on many occasions and if you have umpteen third party plug-ins it is GREAT. If you don't it's pretty dull. That aside, I've never opened up a new Pro Tools session and excitedly thought "I wonder what I will create!" It does not inspire. It's a tool, and a pretty vanilla one at that. Reason & Record have the opposite effect on me. Every time I open either program I'm struck by the depth and breadth of what can be created. After getting some knowledge under my belt, especially about Reason 4.0, each session became an exploration into a world of sound that holds infinite surprises.

Later on down the road I'll most likely go on and on about how I love both programs oh-so-much so I'll spare you the gushing til later. Right now, I'll get on to the rest of what this is about. You know that I love Reason & Record and anyone who has used them can testify to the fact that they can be intimidating at times. Reason in particular has a reputation for scaring folks away. When I first saw Reason 2.0 years ago I opened a demo, messed with it for 10 minutes, and said "Not for me" then didn't give it a second thought. I'll quickly say that it's not for everyone, especially if someone who's a bit of a n00b is considering delving into the strange and oft-confusing world of synth-modeling, hyper-sampling, and sequencing dots & loops. But if you are willing to learn, there are ample rewards waiting for you. That's where I hope this blog will help.

In addition to presenting works in various states of completion I'll be walking readers through how I created sounds, sometimes why I did what I did, and will also give away presets I use and/or create for various machines in Reason/Record. That way, if you like a sound, you will also have it at your fingertips. That's not even mentioning a free download of a new track every time there's a new post.

Lastly, for myself, this will give me an opportunity to explore the volumes of sounds that are free downloads for registered Reason users. I have no idea how many individual patches I actually have, but at some point during this project I'll begin cataloging and tracking them as I go.

I've rambled for awhile now, so rather than go into how to create anything I'll end this first post with a link to a free track that was created exclusively using Reason 4.0. It's a brief track, but was my first experiment while learning from this book so it seems appropriate as a first work to share. I hope you enjoy. Here's the link again.