I said I’d have this track done by the end of the week, and here it is! If anyone wants to have a listen and give me some feedback, that’d be great. It’s a synthpop-kinda thing, a little reminiscent in my mind to early 90s video game soundtracks. I don’t have a name for it yet, so I’m calling it a sketch, but it’s definitely a finished track (though I reserve the right to revisit it later).

20090514: 3 minutes 55 seconds

Here’s some generic electronic stuff — it’s listenable enough but it’s hardly exciting. I had fun making it though, because it was recorded live in a single take. The other week I watched Moog, a documentary about the humble engineer that changed the face of music, and his remarks about music becoming an increasingly solo, recorded affair got me thinking about the idea of performing, rather than producing, music.

This, then, is a combination of some pre-programmed loops and some live performance, choreographed live using seq24, a simple sequencer that’s designed for live use, much like a hardware sequencer or drum machine.

20090504: 4 minutes 3 seconds

When I’m listening to music these days I often think about how the sounds in it are produced, especially electronic sounds, but one had me totally baffled — the cold distorted chime-kinda-thing at the start of Covenant’s Winter Comes. I’ve been trying to reproduce it for a while now, but I think I cracked it tonight. Because it’s almost a clang-like sound I was thought it would be a job for FM or the ring modulator, but as it turns out, it’s carefully filtered noise. Noise has no real pitch, but by cranking the filter resonance to self-oscillation and then having the filter track the keyboard, you can use sculpt noise in to distorted, but pitched, sounds.

20090422: 9 seconds

Yet another crack at my Sixtyniner cover tonight. I tweaked a few things, but the big change is the drums — they’re still not quite right (the kick in particular isn’t quite right), but they’re a lot better than they were, and I used the “Decimator” plug-in to give them bit of an old-school sampler feel by dropping the sample rate to 32Khz/12-bit.

20090411: 1 minute 54 seconds

Good Friday is such an odd, quiet day, so I spent some time expanding on yesterday’s sketch — now it’s basically a cover of the first two minutes of Sixtyniner. A few of the background details are missing, and the drums aren’t quite right, but the rest of it sounds pretty close to the original to me.

I haven’t done many covers in the past, but they’re an interesting exercise — reverse-engineering a track like this is a great way to practice my synth skills, and by learning how other people make music, I can discover tricks and techniques that might help my own music in the future.

20090410: 1 minute 54 seconds

My March daily sketchbook may be complete, but I plan to keep noodling around in my little studio when the mood strikes me, and if I come up with anything neat, I’ll post it here. This time it’s a copy of a synth sound from the Boards of Canada track Sixtyniner, and I think I got pretty close to it; not bad for a digital synth making a very analogue-style sound.

20090409: 23 seconds

Well, I made it to the end of the month, and I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out — I came up with some neat sounds, and some ideas that could probably be expanded in to proper pieces with some time. I also learned a lot:

• Ardour used to be a total mystery, but I now have a pretty good grip on it, and on a bunch of LADSPA effects plug-ins
• The Blofeld is super-deep, but I know my way around it much better now, especially when it comes to creating (or re-creating) specific sounds
• My keyboard skills are a bit rusty, but they’ve definitely improved with practice, and they’ll improve more if I stick with it
• My singing could be better, but if it was buried in a track I’m sure it’d be okay
• I don’t need anything more than what I have to make interesting music

That last one’s an important one — it’s very easy to put up artificial barriers, saying “I can’t do X without Y”, but I have heaps of stuff to work. All I need are ideas, and the time to put them in to practice, and with any luck I’ll be able to find both.

My final sketch is a squelchy electronic kinda thing, with an interesting bass sound playing an arpeggio with a clock-synced delay effect. The sound itself is something from the Blofeld’s wavetables, with an envelope used to modulate the wavetable entry, and some FM from a sawtooth wave to dirty it up a bit.

Sketch 25: 1 minute 12 seconds

Another little classical piano kinda thing today, just arpeggiating my way through some chords. I like the progression, though, going down the scale from Am to E and coming back again, but with different variations along the way.

Sketch 24: 28 seconds

Today’s sketch is a bit of a rework of yesterday’s, tweaking the compressor settings on the vocals to even them up a bit more, and using volume automation to drop out a few of the loudest pops (those loud P and B sounds). I also re-did the extra piano part in the chorus at the end, since I wasn’t happy with yesterday’s. I could probably spend a whole day just tweaking the vocals to clean up the rough edges, but I’m happy enough with the results given the time I’ve spent so far.

Sketch 23: 1 minute 47 seconds