Now for something a little different.
Inspired by a commission for a video game project I received the other day, I decided to go for a real campy type of sound this week. In fact, I wanted to post the tune I’d written for the game, but I’ve decided to hold off until the game goes to market. Instead, I wrote another tune based very much on the same feel and sound as the original tune. The premise of the game is quite silly, and I thought that a goofy samba-with-drum-machine type of vibe, a la Burt Kaemfert or Herb Alpert, would fit the bill. This tune is not quite as light-hearted, but you’ll see what I’m talking about when I post it in the next couple of weeks. Check back regularly. As you can see, the tune is not completely finished, but I really didn’t want to drag it out any longer than it already was. A special mention today for the Datsounds Obxd, a freeware AU/VST Oberheim OBX emulator plugin, used to double the Rhodes melody throughout the piece. Plugin instruments used in this piece include:
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I have a completely legitimate excuse for being a full week behind schedule on the posting of this week’s song…..namely, that my harddrive crashed.
I’d started on this one about two weeks ago and even had a mix ready last Tuesday, but I was planning on tweaking it during our two-day snow-in. Then, it happened. Fortunately I was able to move all of the important stuff off of the drive before it totally went kaput, but it still put me behind by a couple of days. Not a lot of notes here on this one. The main little riffs came to me as I was playing tag with my son at the park (and I’m very thankful for the voice memo app on my iPhone). I was feeling a set of odd-metered set rock riffs, which I just strung together here. I’m still trying to figure out how to program a convincing drum track with the Abbey Road library. I’ve been using the Rough Rider compressor plugin from Audio Damage (another freebie, of course) to thicken the drums up a bit, as well as NI’s Superchargercompressor. There’s still a lot of work to be done on the mix, but overall I’m enjoying the groove to this one! I already have a tune or two in the hopper for this week, and should have something posted in the next couple of days. Feel free to drop me a line with your thoughts or suggestions! Thanks, and enjoy! Other plugins used:
Having a day off last week on account of the snowpocalypse that completely shut down the entire state of Georgia, I had the opportunity to write another song of the week. I took to the interwebs to look for some ideas and inspiration, and ran across some pretty cool videos over at The Keyboardist Blog, and also found some really cool free plugins.
The first one was an iPad app called Yellofier VW, by none other than Boris Blank, which I ran across on Synthtopia. Yellofier is a loop creation program, that allows you to sample any sound directly from your iPad, and then very quickly and easily turn those samples into playable loops sounds. It gives you the ability to edit the samples, and play them back in a drum-pad-style sequencer matrix. I didn’t really use it for actually arranging anything, though it give you enough space to arrange an entire song. The introduction percussion track was created by sampling a fork on a counter and crumpling up a piece of plaster. Hunting around a bit more, I found another interesting synth by Futucraft called Kariatune. A very flexible synth with tons of cool and very playable presets, Kariatune sounds like it’s geared towards dance and electronica artists. It has a great effects section (a delay with HPF and BPF), a phaser, and a spread function for stereo field effect. This synth can be heard as a “delay synth” in the beginning of the song at about 0:05. Another freebie that made it’s way into this tune is Automat by Alphakanal. At first I had some difficulty in getting it installed correctly, as there’s no manual indicating where to put the support files, which contains some .WAV file samples. But once I did, I was very impressed with it’s big sound. It’s being used for the massive saw synth pad stabs and chords, and doubling the bass in many passages, mimicking a Prophet 5 or CS-80. Another interesting synth is the free Piano One by Sound Magic. Admittedly the application of this piano in this mix doesn’t allow you to hear the nuance of this synth. It does have some strange properties, like a weird off-pitch squeak whenever you release the notes in the higher registers, but you can’t really hear it in this piece. Just the same, it was free, and sounded good enough to use. Below is a list of some of the other instruments used in the song:
I started this tune off sometime Friday, thinking of doing a Weather Channel jazz type of thing. In sticking to that idea, I ended up layering several drums and percussion instruments, in an attempt to evoke an urban kind of feel. This is an informal homage to my love of Pat Metheny Group’s “We Live Here” record from 1995, which has no doubt introduced 5-day forecasts to countless millions.
A few notes on this tune: the drum tracks are coming primarily out of IK Multimedia’s Sonik Synth and Arturia Spark (the 808 sample set). The bass is double tracked, with a Logic upright bass and AAS Lounge Lizard. Acoustic piano is another Sonik Synth offering, while the Rhodes is the NI Scarbee. Some other plugins:
Okay, so I feel a bit like I’m cheating this week. I don’t feel too bad about it, since I don’t have the time to flesh out a new piece to keep up with my own weekly deadline. But this week’s tune is not new at all. I’m dusting off some old stuff from the closet here. Of course, no one has ever heard it before anyway, so nobody’s any wiser, right?
In fact, I wrote and recorded this 13 years ago. This is a very bad recording, since I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I think it’s a pretty good song, so I thought I’d finally share it. Some background: this tune was recorded on a Teac 2340 1/4″ tape machine (4-track), and I never really got around to naming (hence the name “Experiment”). I used that machine to record a lot of demos, and only recently got rid of it. At the time, I had a computer, but I don’t think it even had a soundcard. I was pretty far off from getting into digital recording at that point, so it sounds even more amateur than everything else I’ve posted! The composition is highly inspired by Dave Stewart-related Canterbury progressive rock bands from the 70’s (i.e. National Health, Hatfield and the North, etc.). I’d thought that I would flesh it out more, but there was something satisfying about writing a song under two minutes, but had a ton of crazy meter changes and parts. This is a tune that I could have seen playing with Volaré back in the day. Having said that, there are no software synths on this song. It’s all hardware! Instrumentation:
Here’s my recent rundown of my home studio rig. Enjoy!
Interesting interview from 1984. He plays some pretty cool old synths, the Yamaha CS-80 in particular!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WODrViue4s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnRH_JqFk1I
I’m a little early for this one, since I just posted something two days ago. But I couldn’t help myself.
While I was in the middle of tweaking the last bits of my submission for January 6, I had this guitar riff idea pop in my mind. An hour later, I had this pretty much done. You could call this an attempt at wanting to be a guitar player (all keyboard players suffer from this. If they say otherwise, they are in denial). And instead of dialing in a guitar sample or some kind of synth emulator, I thought it a good idea to layer a bunch of the Arturia synths to get a big, fat wall of synth-rock. The intro features two tracks of the ARP 2600 V, panned hard left and hard right, with one slightly out of tune. A third track of the 2600 comes in on bar 3, an open-fifth type of bass synth. Overall, I was shooting for a Jeff Beck meets Led Zeppelin kind of a vibe. Some other synths featured are:
This tune has been in the works for over two years. I can’t even really remember exactly when I started it. I think it started with a piano improvisation, and just went from there.
At any rate, the main themes of the piece were developed separately. The first theme is made up of the first two minutes of the piece. The second, starts at 2:05, and continues to develop at around 2:40 into a passage that I wrote about a year ago. This particular passage is comprised a very busy, yet fluid, melody that had the working title “Nine Years”, named in honor of my son who had turned nine at about the time that I wrote it. Though I wrote the two melodies independent of one another, they both had the same 6/8 meter. In scouring my harddrive for ideas one day, it dawned on me that the two parts might work well together on account of the meter. The title “Nine Years and Going” seemed appropriate, since it almost seemed like a song that just kept going! |
Pat Strawser
Musings about keyboards, synthesizers, and music in general. Archives
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