It’s been about six weeks since I posted my little SooperLooper jam, and here it is in its final form, or at least what became of it. This was a difficult one to pull together — I initially just polished my sketch version of it, but that didn’t give me the results I was after, so I ended up ditching that effort and re-arranging it from scratch, finally getting an inspiration for the central progression and ending last week. Once I had that idea, it didn’t take long on the weekend to flesh it out.
This is another Seq24/Hydrogen/Ardour recording, with Blofeld synths, though I also created my own drum sounds (mostly on the Blofeld again) for this one. I also used PHASEX as the synth for the lead arpeggio — it’s a simple patch, but I really liked how it sounded, so it stayed in the final version.
EDIT: Turns out that the download links were broken! I’ve fixed them now, so if you had trouble downloading, please try again now.
SooperLooper is proving to be a lot of fun! Last weekend I fired it up and did some impromptu jamming, following this basic formula:
Slap together a basic four-bar drum pattern in Hydrogen
Export that pattern as a loop and import it in to SooperLooper as loop 1
Play a bunch of random crap over the top, and if it sounds okay, grab a loop of it
Lather, rinse, repeat
I saved those sessions, and had a quick stab at turning one of them in to a proper track, which I call “sl3″, by importing the loops in to Ardour and moving/coping them in to an arrangement. I also threw in some effects for good measure: EQ, a couple of delays (can’t help myself with those!), and an insert out to Rakarrack to add some guts to my fairly limp bass loop. I’m sure I could make it more interesting by re-recording a few parts — replacing the drum loop with a properly programmed part with a bit of variety, for instance — but hey, for an hour-and-a-half’s work, I think it sounds okay!
The Tunestorm02 reveal was today, so I can now post my submission for it: a breezy little tune that, for want of a better title, I called “frozen summer”. In accordance with the rules, it’s made entirely from sounds sampled around my house — there’s our doorbell, a blown beer bottle, and a stretched out balloon that I strummed to get a bass sound, along with percussive sounds from hitting various things (mainly my coffee machine).
Software-wise, I used Specimen for the melodic samples, Hydrogen for the drum samples, and seq24 for sequencing, before recording and mixing in Ardour. I’ve also uploaded my Hydrogen kit in case anyone’s curious.
Two tracks in as many months? Madness! This is another ambient track, but without the drone — it has more of an early Aphex Twin vibe, but with some glitchy drums. I sequenced this in seq24, a pattern-based sequencer designed for live use, and in fact this was originally a “live” take, which I’ve edited and added to. Apart from that, it’s the usual suspects — Blofeld on the synth sounds and some drums, Hydrogen on the rest of the drums, recorded/mixed in Ardour.
Here’s one for the Depeche Mode fans — a cover of Enjoy the Silence, which is fairly faithful to the original. Since buying my fancy-pants mic last year I hadn’t actually sung anything (even though I have done a crapload of podcast recording), so this is me correcting that, and also having some fun with synths and sequencing. I did a lot of this on the laptop, so there are more Linux soft synths in there, but I still pulled out the Blofeld for the bass and the “beeeeow” sound in the chorus. Let me know what you think of the results!
It seems a bit odd to post a new track called “daybreak” in the middle of a sun-blanketing thunderstorm, but here we are! This is the slowly evolving ambient soundscape from my last sketch, but polished up in to a finished track. It’s not actually vastly different to the sketch (it still runs the same full length), but I’ve smoothed over some rough edges, and added a tiny sprinkling of extra interest; not too much, though, since I didn’t want to spoil that zen-like mood.
It’s obviously very different to the beat-driven video-game-esque tracks I’ve posted so far, but hopefully it’ll find some fans!
The guys over at the Open Source Musician Podcast recently ran a little challenge, called “Tunestorm01″, which called for people to record a track built upon a bass part playing a descending major scale — here’s my entry. Some people did some very clever musical work around that bassline in their entries, but I took the cheat’s way out and went abstract.
Here’s that new track I was working on — it’s another synthy thing which turned out, not-entirely-deliberately, like something from an old-school arcade game soundtrack. Lots of Blofeld, and a bit of distortion. It came together more quickly than my last track, and I’m pretty happy with the results, especially since I didn’t feel the need to spend hours and hours tweaking EQs and compressor curves to get it to sound alright to my ears. Enjoy!
My new track is officially done! I’ve named it atlantis, after the Shuttle that’s currently on its way back from the final Hubble servicing mission. I’ve polished it quite a bit over the last week, and I’m now pretty happy with the results.
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