Category Archives: Music

rpm 2012 update: day 5

Posted on by
Reply

It’s the end of day 5 of the RPM Challenge, and I think I’m making good progress! I may have to pick up the pace a little to finish by the deadline, but I’m still fairly confident that I’ll manage it. The strategy that’s been working for me is to brainstorm and come up with demo ideas of a weeknight after work, and then flesh out those ideas on the weekend when I have more time to work with.

So far, I have one finished track (an ambient experimental piece), one half-finished track (a lo-fi downtempo track a la Texel), and two short demos (a chiptune and a solo piano piece). I’ll try to finish the track I have in progress tomorrow, so with any luck by this time next week I’ll have three or four finished tracks, and four or five demos ready to be expanded upon.

Some random things I’ve learned so far:

  • Plugin soft-synths are super, super handy when you’re in a hurry — just drop them in a MIDI track, load up a preset, and you’re good to go, without worrying about routing signals or configuring external software or hardware.
  • Speaking of soft-synths, the TAL-NoiseMaker native VST synth is my new go-to synth. It’s a standard analog-style synth, but it sounds great and has a straightforward UI and a solid feature set.
  • Ardour 3 is still a bit crashy while working with MIDI, but it’s made some nice improvements recently, like being able to double-click to enter or leave note edit mode, and the addition of a drop-down list of synth plugins in the “new track” dialog, so you can start composing more quickly. I could switch back to Qtractor, but even with the crashes I think I’m more productive in Ardour, just because I’m more familiar with it.
  • Sound design is fun! It’s hard not to have a good time when I fire up the Blofeld and start twiddling knobs. I should do it more often!
  • In fact, I should do this whole music thing more often. I might not come up with something interesting every time I sit in front of the keyboard, but definitely won’t come up with anything if I don’t try.

rpm challenge 2012

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve long been a fan of the RPM Challenge, a NaNoWriMo-style challenge for musicians to record an album in February, and this year, I’ll be attempting the challenge myself! The rules are fairly simple: record at least 10 tracks or at least 35 minutes of original music by March 1st. I’ll be writing everything from scratch in February, too, but pre-written tracks are okay as long as you haven’t previously recorded or released them.

I actually attempted it back in 2008, but that was before I’d really started making music again, and it was a bit of a disaster — I didn’t manage to record anything. I fully expect to have more done by the end of my first day than I managed in that attempt.

What are my goals? I’d like to try a few different tracks — some downtempo stuff, some more melodic chiptune-ish stuff, and likely some droney ambient stuff — and while I expect it all to be quite rough, I hope there are some ideas in there that I can polish in to complete tracks after the challenge.

More importantly, though, I’d like to learn to be more spontaneous and to get my ideas recorded more quickly. I spend a lot of time working on each track, and if I can learn ways to reduce that workload, and hence increase my output, I’ll be very happy.

I’ll try to post some updates here throughout the month, but if you want to track my progress more closely, I’ll be posting to Twitter, too. Wish me luck!

sooperlooper rhodes remix

Posted on by
Reply

If you enjoyed yesterday’s sketch, you really should check out this great remix by ioflow. He took my original loops and rearranged them in Renoise, mixing things up to great effect with some micro-edits (the little reversed bits sound awesome) and some low-key, distorted beats. Unfortunately I forgot to save the final set of loops, so he had to make do without the melody part, but it definitely hasn’t hurt things.

I very nearly neglected to post yesterday’s sketch, since the timing was rough and the whole thing was musically very simple. Needless to say, I’m glad I did post it now — chalk this up as a win for online collaboration and Creative Commons!

sketchbook: sooperlooping the rhodes

Posted on by
3

I’m starting the new year the right way this year — with a sketch! It’s just a rough, simple, improvised jam, captured using SooperLooper, but I love the mood that the sound of the Rhodes imparts, especially as more note sustain over the top of each other and intermingle. I put the Rhodes sound through a rotary speaker emulation (Calf’s, in this case), and the melody part went my VM1 delay pedal, but it’s otherwise free of processing. It doesn’t really need much, anyway — those high notes sustaining that are left at the end are just magic.

SooperLooper is great for capturing new track ideas, especially for the kind of music I make, which is often driven by repeating patterns. In the past I’ve started with a drum beat and recorded loops on top of that, but this time I went freestyle. The nanoKONTROL is great for controlling it — I was able to add a bunch of empty loops, and map a separate fader and record button to each of them, making it easy to both record your loops and control their playback afterward. Once I had some appropriate loops I just played them all at the same time, using the faders to control their relative volumes while recording the output straight in to JACK Timemachine.

I don’t know if this sketch will go any further than this, but with some glitchy drums, some additional synth parts, and a bit more complexity (like, more than two chords), I think it could work as a track.


mp3 | vorbis | 2:51

the (musical) year ahead

Posted on by
3

Looking back on 2011, I can’t help but feel a little slack — in 2010 I released four new original tracks, but 2011 saw just two — but I think I’d be doing myself a disservice to judge my productivity based solely on numbers. Both of those tracks, move along and Texel, took a lot of work, and I’m very proud of how they both turned out. I also spent a lot of time working with pre-release and often quite buggy software, filing bugs as I ran in to problems, and while that slowed me down I’m glad I was able to do it.

So far this year, I definitely have been slack; I spent half of December in the US on a working holiday, and combined with the usual holiday season shenanigans on my return, I’ve been spending more of my downtime gaming (Jamestown and Gratuitous Space Battles have been particular favourites) rather than making music (or blogging, for that matter!). Now that things are calmer, I’m looking forward to getting some music happening.

The plan is still to work on some more tracks in the same lo-fi downtempo vein as Texel and push out an EP of tracks that’ll hopefully sound like they belong together. Realistically, that might take all year, but if the tools continue to improve at their current rate, there’s a good chance I’ll be done sooner. Either way, I plan to stick with it!

a great article on using multiple audio devices with JACK

Posted on by
1

I’ve been meaning to write a tutorial describing how to use multiple audio devices with JACK, using the “alsa_in” and “alsa_out” tools, but as it turns out, I don’t have to now! Linux Home Recording is a new-ish blog that already has a number of great articles about various Linux recording topics, and the most recent post there is all about using alsa_in and alsa_out.

It pays special attention to one of the most common cases — using a USB microphone — so it’s well worth a read.

melted crayon art: a music video for “texel”

Posted on by
5

The internet says that you can do awesome things with crayons, glue, a canvas, and a heat gun, and my wife did exactly that on the weekend, with very colourful results. I figured the dripping wax might look cool on film (or on an SD card, rather), so I grabbed the camera, and as it turned out, it looked awesome:

The music is my most recent track, Texel, which seemed like a good match for the video. It was all shot with a hand-held Canon 550D and a 50mm f/1.8 lens, hence the shakiness — it took some time to go through all of the video and find the usable bits, where the camera was both steady and in focus.

I used Kdenlive to edit it all together, and I’m glad to say that it was much more solid than it was during my last video editing project. In particular, it automatically cropped the extra lines out of the 550D’s 1920×1088 files, so I didn’t need to transcode anything. I didn’t apply much processing this time, which may have helped — there’s just a few simple transitions and some colour correction work.

Kdenlive’s ability to use proxy clips — small, low-resolution copies of your original high-res clips that are used during editing — helped keep the preview playback smooth while editing. The original clips are used while rendering the video, though, so the proxy clips don’t affect the final output quality.

new track: texel

Posted on by
5

After a few last-minute tweaks, I’m finally ready to release my new track. The plan is for this to be the first track of an EP that will be available for download from Bandcamp, but I’m sure that won’t happen for several months, so I wanted to post the track here early to give everyone a chance to hear it. It’s a downbeat, ambient techno-kinda thing I call “Texel”:


mp3 | ogg | flac | 3 minutes 16 seconds

I talked a little about the production in an earlier post, but I have included some further details after the jump.
Continue reading →

wednesday reading list

Posted on by
1

I’ve mentioned Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio a couple of times now — it’s a great read, and I’m learning a lot from it, but mixing is just a part of making great music. Finding inspiration, getting ideas down, and then developing those ideas in to complete tracks are the real challenges, but there’s some great advice online for doing just that.

It was an article on Create Digital Music that reminded me about those challenges today — it contains seven “tips for creative success”, and they’re all right on the money. They talk about making use of what you have rather than focusing on what you think you need, and the importance of spending time on the music and having fun rather than sweating over tiny bits of finesse that no-one will notice anyway.

Some of the most enlightening posts I’ve ever read about making music come from general fuzz, a producer of some excellent (and free!) downtempo electronica; his “lessons” posts are a fantastic read. Some of his points relate specifically to music, and electronic music in particular, but many of them relate just as well to any other creative pursuit.

He covers a lot of ground: the value of finding your audience rather than relying solely on friends and family for feedback, of waiting before releasing new work rather than pushing it straight out, of actually finishing something, even if it’s not “perfect”, and of not getting disheartened by the fact that no-one will care about your work quite as much as you do.

I think that last point is particularly important. It’s great to make things that others enjoy, and to take joy from that, but if you’re not creating for yourself first, enjoying the process as much as the result, then you’ll ultimately end up frustrated.

new music update

Posted on by
11

A few months ago I posted that I was working on new music using Ardour 3, and I’m glad to say that my new track is now all but finished. Working with Ardour 3 was a bit nervewracking at times, as you’d expect when testing alpha software — there were several times, in fact, when I couldn’t even open the project’s session due to one bug or another. It all held together somehow, though, and after many bug reports and fixes, I definitely feel like it’s helped

The new track is a bit of a downbeat, ambient-ish thing, with some lo-fi sounds mixed in with some glitchy elements. I definitely put Ardour’s MIDI features to the test: there are MIDI tracks running out to my Blofeld and to Hydrogen, along with LV2 synths (Calf Monosynth and Linuxsampler), along with automation of CC parameters on the Blofeld and automation of plugin paramaters on Calf Monosynth. I’ve done quite a bit of effects automation as well, particularly with the bitcrushing Decimator plugin.

There’s even a VST plugin in there now; I had been beta-testing Loomer Cumulus, using it as a standalone synth, but with Ardour’s new VST support I now have it running within Ardour directly. Cumulus is somewhere between a synth and an effect: it lets you load a sample, and then trigger its playback using granular synthesis with varying paramaters, altering the starting point, pitch, and playback rate, among other things. You can define up to eight sets of those parameters, and then trigger those via MIDI keys. It can turn all sorts of sounds in to eerie textures, but it can just as easily take a drum loop and turn it in to a wonderfully glitchy mess, which is exactly what I used it for.

I’m pretty sure the track is done, but I don’t want to release it just yet. I plan to sit on it for a few days at least, while I read more of my copy of Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio, but I like the idea of putting together at least an EP with a couple of other tracks and releasing them all at once. That might not be practical if it takes me four months to finish each track, though, so I may post the individual tracks here when they’re ready, and then do an official Bandcamp release once they’re all done.