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

This is one of my shortest tracks, and that was a deliberate departure for me — in the past I feel like I’ve often stretched things out to get to a certain length, and let them get a bit too repetitive in the process, so I deliberately avoided that here. In hindsight, there’s a lot going on in there, so perhaps it could’ve done with being a bit longer, but it definitely shouldn’t be boring at the very least!

In terms of sounds, the pads and bass are from the Blofeld, but everything else is software — Calf Monosynth for the sixteenth-note bleeps in the background, Linuxsampler for the Rhodes, and Hydrogen for the drums. The Rhodes is the excellent jRhodes3 soundfont, which I converted to SFZ format using sfZed, and the kick and snare come from the Microhammer Gnomehammer collection of wintry sounds.

The vocal sounds were a bit of fun. I recorded myself singing a note in to my mic, chopped out a small section that had a nice, stable pitch, and then time-stretched that to produce a longer vocal sound that sounds a little strange and ethereal. Each of the little vocal flourishes was created from that by pitch-shifting it to create the different pitches, and then performing a bunch of micro-edits for the glitchy, stuttery bits.

Effects-wise, I’ve already discussed Loomer Cumulus — it’s responsible for the messed-up drum break in the middle, and a few drum hits in the latter half of the track. I’ve also used the Decimator plugin a bit: the Cumulus drums, vocal sounds, and sixteenth-note bleeps all have automated Decimator plugins. The warbly, lo-fi delay on the Rhodes is courtesy of my Behringer VM1 analog delay pedal.

http://pneuman.bandcamp.com/album/sketchbook-vol-1

It’s a free download, and you can grab it in whatever format you like, all tagged up and ready to go! Even though it’s a bit of an odd mix of tracks, it feels great to have an album’s worth of tracks to my name. With any luck, my next album’s worth will be a little more thematically consistent.

You can download or stream it below, or at Bandcamp. Some production notes are under the cut.

It may not be electronic in sound, but it’s still electronic in production; the piano (Pianoteq), drums (LinuxSampler, with the Analogue Drums RockStock kit), and bass (a Soundfont I found online) were sequenced in Qtractor and then recorded in to Ardour 3, alongside the vocals. Mixing in Ardour used a lot of Calf plugins (the Compressor, Filter, and the new multi-band EQ), along with IR for reverb, using a nice Bricasti M7 IR file, and a Rakarrack insert on the bass part to apply an Ampeg SVT 810 cabinet impulse from Red Wire.

I also dabbled with the Zita-AT1 auto-tuner. I don’t have a problem with pitch correction in general, but I don’t tend to like the overly-perfect results that people often get from it, so I was very careful to avoid that. I disabled its automatic pitch detection and instead controlled its corrector with a MIDI track, drawing in corrective notes just where I thought they were absolutely needed. I don’t think it sounds auto-tuned at all as a result — it just sounds a little better than it did without the correction.

The biggest challenge (apart from the lyrics!) was to create instrument parts that sound as real as I could manage, and then get them sitting together in a natural-sounding mix. I think I’ve done a decent enough job — the piano is fine, and while the drums and bass aren’t as natural as they could be, I think the illusion as a whole works well enough.

This was whipped up on Sunday night mostly in Qtractor, with Hydrogen for the drums, and my Blofeld for all the other sounds. I’d normally record everything in to Ardour and mix it there, but I stayed in Qtractor for this one, and it did a fine job; I had no trouble replicating my usual trick of running the drums on to separate tracks so that I can apply individual effects to each, for instance. The result is a bit trite, but it’s fun, it loops pretty smoothly, and I think it suits the game well.

You could use other sounds, too, but I chose not to — I loaded a chunk of the original sound in to a sampler (Specimen), ran it through some distortion effects, then through PHASEX, where I tweaked away on the filter in real-time using my Korg nanoKONTROL, and finally through some spatial effects. The result was some throbbing, unsettling ambient art-wankery that I call “pulse”.

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.

• 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!

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.

mp3 / vorbis / flac: 4 minutes 26 seconds