Hella Gems | Original Music Blog

2009-03-13

March 13th 2009 by

Friday the 13th post! WOOOO!

Fortunately, I got this done over the last two days. I wanted something slow, spacy, and without a strong beat, and it ended up being neat. In terms of my skillset, this track has two points - to try to combine my improvisational piano skills (if interested see my LJ here which is just me playing piano with no effects) with Ableton Live, and to take a shot at recording my upright bass. I'm new at the upright bass, and I have no bow, but my tuning is okay if still needing practice.

A few tricks here - the keyboard parts are just four bar loops recorded ad-hoc and adjusted slightly for timing. Then I took the notes and played it over three tracks - an FM synth in the middle with chorus/delay on it and two NES-style synths (that I use on darn near everything) with arpeggiators, panned hard left and right, with the same timing but different note order. bass was then recorded, and then everything dropped from Ableton into Sonar for improved mixing, with a fuzz guitar overdub added (it's pretty subtle, as it's backgrounded fairly heavily). Everything except the bass is heavily reverbed (there's even a little on the bass). I also did the trick where I do a slow fade out at the end but pull up the reverb so it sounds like the mix is getting misty and distant at the end before the volume finally drops. I only do it to the synths, which accounts for how the bass goes down first and causes this shimmery quality. Neat!

2009-03-13

2 Responses to “2009-03-13”

  1. gojirra

    Amazing job! I really like this song, you have taken me to another world sir.

  2. Graham

    Paulie, this is a nice surprise. I really love the spacey synth. Also, the bass tone is really cool. For another idea, you could sample the bass, and chop samples to have a more active and rhythmic bassline that would kick ass below the synth.

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