Variations on the previous theme, in which the Princess discovers mutually recursive magic mirrors. Another invoking the Holy Trinity/Triforce of (toad, princess, triforce). We leave the rest of the tale up to your imaginations.
Besides that I am behind on all musical projects. I did participate in a livecoding workshop at Resonance Ghent, but have yet to digitize and edit our sound jams. I have been working with Matlab and Weka a lot, and this is what a weka sounds like.
This is the first draft for a space balladishy sounding song, I haven't decided on lyrics yet for it, my intention is to add lyrics and clean it up, spice it up and sweeten it up. I had a lot of technical problems trying to record it so I may end up going in a different direction next time I go to work on it, but here's what I made. To record this I used cubase, my not so music friendly Del laptop, a pod line 6 fx thingy, my old casio PT-30 (for drum and bass) and a casio MT-240 (for lead, I put this through the pod).
This beat was made on Reason. It starts out with a Miles Davis sample. I added some bass and drums, then a high pitch-bent synth. There is a breakdown which involves some echo drums noises. Then I added another gritty synth and some steal drum noises. Some of the horn samples still need to be tweaked a little to get the timing right. enjoy
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!
We've been talking about doing more collaboration on Hella Gems, so I decided to proceed unilaterally. There was part of Kelly G's "Another for the Video Game" song (aka "action") that I immediately thought could become a cool epic Dirty South rap beat if I slowed it down and added stuff. Â So I did, and this is it. Â
This is the first song I've used Ableton for, and I spent a lot of time experimenting with effects. Â I did some sidechain compression for the sample and used a sidechained gate to create the booming bass on the kick. Â I also played around a lot with midi effects, which is how I created the high sine synths. Â I actually didn't play anything for those - I put in one continuing note which I ran through a chord making effect, then ran that through an arpeggiator, which I tweaked during the song using an automation track. Â I also used the resonator effect on the sample, which is most prominent at the end. Â I hope you all enjoy. Â Shout out to Kelly.
Note: This song relies heavily on low boomy bass to define the chord progression. It probably will not sound good on laptop speakers. Ideally, you should play it while cruising in car with a sick system. Like this space scraper:
