Three-fer Tuesday
The short-n-sweet version is that I have three new songs to post.
The longer version means backing up a few weeks to pick up the story from early March.
See, my music-making gear is starting to wear out. Last November, the woofer in one of my KRK RP5 monitors stopped working. I set it aside and planned to send it in for repairs when the new year kicked into gear. I still haven’t done that. Also, both my desktop computer and laptop computer are getting old and cranky. Both are at least five years old and beginning to show signs of imminent demise. I’ve been stressed out about that for several months, wondering which one I’d have to replace first.
Meanwhile, I’ve been keeping an eye on the price of netbook computers. I was seduced by the small side of the Force and began to imagine how nice it would be to have such a portable computer. A convergence occurred at the end of February. I recently had a birthday, then I finished FAWM with flying colors, and I also noticed that netbooks dropped to three hundred bucks. Hey! Good deal! I could buy a netbook for far less than it would cost to replace either laptop or desktop computer, and in that way I would at least have something to rely on while I saved up to replace either one.
I settled on the Acer Aspire One netbook, and since the price was so low I added the larger, six cell battery pack. Lemme tell ya, I’m so very pleased with my little netbook. I’ve never been able to afford the latest and greatest in terms of computer hardware. When I first began making computer music several years ago, I was using an old Compaq Presario laptop and I managed to adjust to that well enough. The netbook represents a big leap forward in portable computing power and I’ve found that the software I’m using works well enough to keep up. I was so pleased with how well it works for me I then bought a Korg nanoKEY controller. It’s small and portable and, best of all, sports velocity-sensitive keys. It’s no high-tech controller by any means, but I found one at a “warehouse repackaged” discount price and it seemed a no-brainer.
What this all means is that I’ve been busy the last month playing around on the netbook to see how well it works for making music. The first full track from the netbook is Another Hill to Climb, and then just a few days ago I did the ambient Lizard Universe in Disarray. In between, I spent some time back at the desktop computer and came up with Winter’s Farewell to Spring.
Which is to say, that I think I’m over the post-FAWM slump and back in the routine of writing music on a regular basis.
Another Hill to Climb
Written completely on the Acer Aspire One netbook, using only the Korg M1 Le softsynth which came with the Korg nanoKEY. I recorded the MIDI performance for each voice, then rendered the track to a stem and moved the M1 Le plugin to a new channel for each additional voice, since the plugin would only allow one single active instance per project. The first track or two were quantized by hand, but the later tracks were played expressively and left unquantized. The more I listen to this song, the more I think it fits in with the “Without Shores, Without Boundaries” project I began during FAWM 2006.
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Winter’s Farewell to Spring
Begun on the 4th of April, but not completed until the 6th. Inspired primarily by listening to a few very old tracks by Electric Light Orchestra and wondering what it would sound like writing a track with a driving chord structure. Once the MIDI data for the first voice was quantized by hand, a few more were added to beef up the sound. The lead line was then played expressively over the top of the chords, with only minimal edits to the MIDI data, mostly to remove notes I didn’t like. The intro and outro plucked instrument were added last, and the outro manipulations were the final bit of work. I wanted to see if I could create the effect of a sound splitting down the middle and drifting to opposite sides of the stereo field, while also sounding as if its pieces were moving farther and farther away.
I had to render the MIDI data to a stem track and mute the original, because when I added a copy of the channel, the entire program crashed. Once I had two copies of the entire track, I cut everything but the outro from the second instance. At first, I tried time-shifting it, but that only made the notes muddier and obscured the melody too much. I automated a slow pan on each track, the original going left and the dupe going right. Then, I added a medium hall reverb to the original, and a large hall reverb to the dupe. I slowly dropped the dry signal and slowly raised the wet signal on each track, but at different rates and with slightly different profiles. Then, to try and emphasize that far-away sound, I added an EQ plugin to both track, dropped the gain on the highest band, then slowly reduced the frequency to 750 Hz. My thinking on that was believing that high frequencies disappear as objects move farther away.
This effect is something I’ve been wanting to try for some time, and this is the first time I’ve put it to use. Up to now it’s just been a theoretical idea, and it may yet take some revision to impliment properly.
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Lizard Universe in Disarray
Ambient piece built completely on the Aspire One netbook, using one track of the Korg M1 Le plugin with the preset called, “Universe” installed. The other track is a VST plugin from Krakli called, “Lizard.” I’ve never before been able to coax pleasing sounds from it, but this time I got lucky. I took the Lizard track, rendered a copy as a stem track then mucked about with two or three copies of that track. Two are reversed and then off-set one from the other. I liked the way it all kinda falls into sweet disarray as the song progresses, which all goes toward explaining the source of the title. The track reminds me a little of work I heard as part of Luke Jerram’s Sky Orchestra project.
This is probably the “loudest” ambient track I’ve ever done. In order to get the fade-in and fade-out the way I wanted, I rendered the track and ran it through the master channel one more time, and so it got a double dose of compression in the process. It’s a good idea for me to pursue that idea further, but with a little more finesse. Time to return to Bobby Owsinski’s The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook and see if it makes more sense now that I’ve recorded more songs.
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