23 in '13 #12: Gnomewalk

Song #12: Gnomewalk

And I bet you thought that this blog was just going to start collecting tumbleweeds and cobwebs. Ha, I say. Ha! Let's just say that it's a bit challenging when one has an assortment of tasks to complete, coupled with chicken pox. June/July has been a bit of a wash, but I managed to get this one done before things flew off the rails for a bit.

(For those paying attention, you may be wondering about the whole "number 12" thing: first, I'm counting Lessons Learned as 23 in '13 #10, because I put about as much work into it. Second, I also wrote a pop song for a friend's birthday which I'm counting as #11. However, owing to the fact that the song has somewhat personal/puzzling lyrics, and was written and recorded in a crazy short time period - I think it was maybe four hours from idea to emailing it off to where it needed to go - I'm not going to post it here. Thus, #12!)

This piece was actually written for the same birthday, but it's a bit more general purpose. At least, as general purpose as orchestral birthday music can be. The track came about from thinking about words to describe said friend ("whimsical intensity" came to mind), as well as a previous Halloween costume of a garden gome. Thus, Gnomewalk was born. Like the song I'm not posting, this one was also written in a very short time period, about two hours. It's a good thing I got it done as quickly as I did...the next day I got that case of chicken pox.....

EDIT: I'm not positive my Flash player is working on any of my posts. No better reason to dump Flash and go with an HTML5 player, I guess. I'll take me a while to update all the older posts. Until then, the song title in each posts is a direct link to the MP3.

Revisiting an older composition with some new hardware

Lessons Learned

A bit of a break from 23 in '13 for a chance to revisit something I wrote a few years ago. When I initially composed it, it's safe to say that it pushed my computer to its limits: the only way I was able to convince Logic to play it was by bouncing two thirds of the software instruments to disk and purging the samples. Then, editing became annoying because in order to edit, I'd need to reload the samples, and hope the whole system didn't choke. Suffice it to say, it wasn't entirely fun. and I ended up leaving the piece less finished than I would have liked.

Fast forward to now. I just upgraded my system*, and immediately thought about finally tweaking Lessons Learned...and also to see how easily my new system could handle it (which it does without even breathing hard. Six times the RAM and four times the cores helps immensely.). I didn't want to change the overall composition, mainly just the kind of cleaning that is difficult to do when most of the composition is pre-rendered: adjusting notes, fixing rhythms, changing some chord voicings, that sort of thing. Also, I was finally able to add more instrument voicings, the sort of thing that was a pain to do with limited RAM.

As far as the piece itself, it's a bit of a story told in several parts. For fun, here's what I call each section:

1. Home
2. Run!
3. Captured
4. It Just Got Worse
5. The Rescue

*for anyone interested: Mac Mini, 2.3 GHz i7, 16 gigs of RAM, dual 20" monitors, scads of external storage. Life is good.

23 in '13 #9: Overture

Song #9: Overture

It's a good thing that I was running ahead of schedule on 23 in '13, as the past month has made things a bit more difficult to work on projects like that. But, we're back to it!
Part of this last month was spent catching up on some of the Big Movies of the past year or so, notably some of the Marvel action movies (Iron man, Avengers, et al). And anytime I I watch a movie like that, i find it very hard to not thinking in terms of BIG MOVIE SCORES. They're just so much fun. So, we're veering away from Orchestralectro for the time being, and working back in pure orchestral again.

The genesis for this project was when I was driving on an errand. I had a basic string rhythm in my head, and started to hum a melody over it. I liked it...quite a bit. I actually parked the car for a bit so I could plunk the melody into an app so I could be sure to remember it for later. Good thing I did, because I definitely forgot in until I listened to it later.

I'm calling this one "Overture" because it veers around from different feelings and emotions in a relatively small space. The different sections in it could be developed into pieces in their own right (which I just might do). Time to get back on schedule for #10!

23 in '13 Song #8: A Case for Homicide

Song #8: A Case for Homicide

All samples are Public Domain.

I decided that I should finally get caught up with posting my 23 in '13 songs....no, song #9 isn't done yet.

Something that I've been really enjoying in the last few songs is digging into archive.org for my sample material, particularly in their film noir collection. I've always been a fan of the style, but the past few weeks has definitely been re-sparking my interest. As such, that's where the inspiration for this entry came from...the kinds of imagery from a gritty Noir film, combined with the orchestral/synth styles I've been using. Fun fact: the muted trumpet theme isn't a sample, having come from....my trumpet.

23 in '13 Song #7: Pulse

Song #7: Pulse

And the Orchestralectro train keeps rolling. Seriously, I'm having a lot of fun with this genre. Today's offering  is a lot "clubbier" than anything I've done before (read: OONCE OONCE OONCE). As such, I took it as a good opportunity to try out sidechain compression on the synth pads using the kick to give it a bit of punch (as well as make the synth lines pump a bit.)

I'm beginning to think that I'm going to be behind one song in posting all year. Not that that's a bad thing. (Yes, song #8 is pretty much done...I'm a few weeks ahead of schedule. Woo-hoo!)

23 in '13 #6: The Spider's Parlor

Song #6: The Spider's Parlor

23 in '13 Song #5: Mental Incisions

Song #5: Mental Incisions

Apparently, I've been a little too immersed in the writing cave for the past few weeks, as I've gotten rather far behind in posting up my 23 in '13 songs. Really, not a bad problem to have, but I like to give the appearance of still being alive and stuff. In other words, song #6 is done, and I'm just getting around to posting song #5.

This entry is continuing along in the same vein that The Witch started in, heavily electronic. The E-Mu sampler came with an absolute wealth of sounds that are proving to be incredibly inspiring. The twist this week is that I've coupled the normal industrial/electronic sounds with an orchestral backing. My discovery in writing noisy music is that I need to approach is from an orchestral standpoint and make it gritty, rather than the other way around.

The voice samples are being taken care of by my other new piece of hardware, an Akai S3000XL. It's the other reason I've mostly vanished from Twitter and blogging, and I've had some rather thick manuals to plow through! Fortunately, both the E-Mu and the Akai are rather straightforward once you get used to them, so they're quite an integrated part of my workflow by this point.

I've long bemoaned the fact that the sample-laden songs of the 80s really aren't feasible to be made anymore, due to the licensing considerations (and song #4 is no exception to this...I doubt I'd be able to get a commercial release of it, due to the multiple samples in it). But this week was a sudden realization: the samples that I like aren't about where they're from, it's how they sound. As such, I headed over to archive.org, and started plowing through old Public Domain video. Clips in this track are all PD, and use audio from Detour, The Gorilla, and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Oh, and I also used a cordless drill. For the sound, not on my rack.

More to come. Maybe I'll get around to posting song #6 before song #7 is done.

Nah.

23 in '13 Song #4: The Witch

Song #4: The Witch

23 in '13 song #3 - Without a Trace (no vocal)

Song #3: Without a Trace



 If you're interesting in the rather drawn-out story of why I'm writing symphonic metal, you can check out the post below this one. Or, you can skip to the chase and check out song #3 for 23 in '13. This is the bed music right now, as I didn't come close to the sound I wanted by myself. I'm currently working on getting a vocalist for it. Or...if you want to give it a shot, drop me a line.

From whence inspiration shall arise?

Or, how I refilled my "music hump". I've long known of a certain trend in my music: if I'm running short on ideas, it means that I'm not listening to enough music in general. Like how authors tend to be voracious readers, I always have music on. However, the problem comes in when I'm working on tweaking a mix, at which point I'll start listening to my own music incessantly. It ends up being like any thermodynamically closed system: devoid of an outside energy source, the creativity dries up and peters out. When that happens, I've got a method I use to get things going again, that I call "filling my music hump" (yes, odd camel association. It works for me). In iTunes, I've made a smart playlist that will autofill itself with about two gigs of music that I haven't heard in the past six months or so (excluding things like audiobooks and stand-up comedy). I then listen to that on random. Drives my wife crazy (she calls it my "whiplash mix", as it's entirely possible to go from The Andrews Sisters to Chuck Mangione to Yes to Skinny Puppy), but it gets me thinking about *all* music*. And that gets me back to my current project. It was in that "filling the music hump" mode that I popped in one of my wife's Within Temptation CDs. You know how it is when something grabs you by the shirt and makes you pay attention? Yeah, this was one of those moments, one of those, "THIS IS AWESOME. I MUST WRITE SOMETHING LIKE THIS." So, I have a new track that's symphonic metal, something of a departure for me (although I'll admit it's a bit heavier on the symphonic, light on the metal). I'm working on getting someone to sing it for me, because really: I have no business singing this genre. I'll post the bed track later on.

23 in '13 Song #2" Only An Idea

Song #2: Only An Idea

Forging ahead from Song One last time, I decided that another "limitation" project would be good. For some reason, the part of my brain that does songwriting things hasn't quite clicked back on yet, so finding song structures has been a little challenging. I've found that limiting myself to a certain toolset can help focus my creative process, so I went with it again this time. So, I decided that I would compose the entire song using my new Roland XV-5080. (I actually came into possession of this magic box last spring...thanks, Gene! Then life happened, and I had no energy for learning new gear. Yeah, yeah, there I go, ragging on last year again. Demons, out!)

Anyway, anyone with a passing knowledge of this wonderful instrument should already be saying, "composing a song using that one synth is not a limitation". This is true: the sound options with just the built-in patches is huge, nevermind the tweaking possibilities. For me, it was more an exercise in getting used to outboard MIDI equipment, and how it integrates into my workflow. Things learned: there are two MIDI-in jacks on the back because the MIDI spec only allows for 16 voices per channel, and the XV-5080 has 32 voices. Configuring the XV and Logic to address all 32 voices took me a night of poking at buttons. It says something about modern musicmaking that sometimes, a night's good accomplishment can be technical, as well as musical.

Which leads me to song #2. The feel of it developed out of a patch that I stumbled across while playing with the XV sound editor, a very CS-80 sort of patch. The composition very quickly became a game of how much I could layer as the song went on. It didn't end up getting that silly; I only ended up with 17 tracks of external MIDI, and two tracks of vocals.

A few notes about the vocals. For whatever reason, as I was composing the music, I heard the vocal style I wanted...but damned if I knew what I wanted the song to say. I wrote the lyrics for sound as much as words. I ended up with nature and music imagery, which I think fits the swirling stuff going on pretty well.

The background vocals was another experiment: it was my first time recording using a Digitech Vocalist for "automatic harmony". The cool thing about this piece of kit is that the chord changes on it can be triggered via MIDI, rather than having to poke at it manually...so I got it programmed (via its own track in Logic) and then was able to retreat into the closet for recording. It went OK, but I think I could tweak its settings a bit more to work with my voice...nevermind that I just wasn't in good voice tonight. (Getting my MIDI network fully operational was my other learning experience this week...what a tangled web we weave when first we network our MIDI!)

Overall, I'm pleased with how this song turned out. I gotta say, I'm a little surprised that I've written two electronic pieces so far, as it's not a genre I've ever worked in much. Such is the fun of a songwriting project...you never know exactly what's going to pop out from week to week, but you just go with it.

I wonder what Sir Mix-A-Lot thinks of all this...

When a story like the Coulton/Glee fiasco hits, I can't be content to just listen to one, then the other. Nope, time time to fire up Logic and poke around in some waveforms.

I had thought to use Coulton's karaoke track for Baby Got back, inverse the phase, and mix it back against the Glee version. However, there were a few problems with that CSI-worthy goal:

1) I was limited to MP3 files. The compression makes waveform subtraction nigh-impossible.
2) The Glee version was sonically different, if not musically.
3) I didn't have anyone around to say "enhance".

I tried to get my older daughter to do #3, and she wasn't interested. Anyway, not one to give up easily, I decided the next best thing is to do a hard left/right pan of the tracks for comparison. The songs are "sonically" different, so getting a sample-accurate lineup wasn't going to happen. I tried to choose some landmarks, and then used my ears to see how things sounded. I used a touch of EQ on the Coulton track to make them sound a bit more similar. After all, it's the similarity in instrumentation we're interested in, not the mastering.

So, without further ado:

Both vocal version (Glee: L, Coulton:R)
Baby Got Back - Both Vocals


And, since most of my interest is in the similarity of the composition, here's a version with the Glee version on the left, and the karaoke version of Coulton's version on the right:
Baby Got Back - Glee Vocal vs Instrumental

First off, I think it's interesting to note the differences between the tracks. It sounds like the Glee version has quite a bit of scooped EQ applied to it, probably in an effort to minimize the banjo. Between the EQ and the compression, a direct waveform comparison was doomed to failure (nevermind the MP3 compression)...but it was after that point that the similarities became apparent.

1) The melody is the same.
2) The vocal embellishments are almost identical.
3) The rhythm track is identical (there isn't a drum beat out of sync, and the bass sounds like it's panned center).
4) Over the 3+ minute duration of the track, there is zero tempo drift: the beats stay synced up the whole time.
5) While the banjo and...mandolin?...are minimized on the Glee track, they are still apparent and identical to the karaoke track.

I wasn't able to hear the "quack", but others have said that it's in there. And then there's the presence of the whole "Johnny C" line which was unique to Colton's version, which also shows up in the Glee version (and really, I think you can stop listing after that point...but anyway.)

</Time to settle back into my opulent, non-existent law library, and pontificate about ramifications of law with the backing of my non-existant law degree>

Colton's version, although a cover, is protected by copyright, and he also went through proper channels to get the compulsory license required for a cover version. What's more, really the only thing that is identical to the version being covered is the lyrics. The instrumentation and feel are all Coulton's...and considering the original is rap, the melody is his as well. So really, it wouldn't matter if Fox got permission from Mix-A-Lot, as they would have needed permission from Coulton for his arrangement of the song.

In the end, I get the feeling that someone knew that Coulton released his music under a Creative Commons license...and completely misunderstood what that means.

I'm not exactly sure how this is going to resolve (as it's not positive that the song will even air, but it appears to be legitimate), but the next week is going to be very interesting.

23 in '13 Song #1: Logic-al

Song #1: Logic-al



The last time I did a multi-week song project, I seemed to be all about putting rules on myself: no covers, no working on old pieces, one song per week, and more. This time around, I'm going to be a lot looser, and just go with it, so long as I make sure to end up with 23 songs at the end. Three songs in a week? Sure! Only one song in a month? Maybe. No stress, and no restrictions, except ones I put on myself to spark creativity.

Which is where this first song comes in. Users of Logic Pro are probably familiar with the "sampler" templates you can choose when creating a new project. It's always struck me that the sampler of instruments is rather...eclectic. Piano, e-piano, jazz organ, electric bass...drum kit...string ensemble...analog lead synth...African drum set...three rave-ish synths, analog synth bass, two 909-ish drum kits. Sort of like beatniks meet b-boys, or something. Anyway, it struck me that it would be an amusing exercise to try and make something using every instrument in that template, and nothing else.

I started out on the first night just making a groove. Things held together and didn't sound too obnoxious, so the next night was chopping up the various loops I had made, and turning it into a bit more of a song...something with a bit more varied structure. I considered briefly adding vocals, but I decided to stay with the Logic Template Only theme (thus the title), and I ended up being pretty pleased with the analog synth melody I improvised.

Overall, I'd say mission successful. I allowed myself to tweak the EQ of each channel in order to make things mix together, but other than that, this is the stock template. Didn't even end up adding a mastering plugin.

I figure that after having been so long since I've done proper songwriting (have I mentioned that last year really bit for creativity? I did? Well, I'm saying it again.), I'll ease into it. I'm looking forward to writing lyrics again.

The "23 in '13" Challenge

Ah, writing lulls. We all get them, and sometimes, it takes a hammer to break through them. A structured, regularly scheduled hammer. What am I talking about? I stumbled across the "23 in '13" Challenge on the Sci-Fi Songs blog, and it struck a big fat 9th chord with me (that's the Mother of All Funk Chords, in case you're wondering). My production of new pieces was way down in the past year, and i was manly working on previously written pieces. There were circumstances in 2012 that led to that, but still...it sort of sucked.

The 23 in '13 made me think back to a few years ago, when I was doing a project I called "Songs from the Dumpster". Simply said, I was writing one song or piece a week and posting it (the Blog is dead, but the songs are still up). It did amazing things for my creativity and output, and I wrote some songs that I still like to this day (and some of those songs are ones that I spent part of last year fixing up and making better). Yeah, some of them are rough. Way rough. But they were DONE, and that did wonders.

Some people need a schedule to get things done. I'll admit to being one of those people. A set "done time" date forces a song to be completed, no matter what, and removes the "death by revision" process. There's a quote about songs...that they're not finished, they're abandoned. It can be hard to get past the "oh, just one more thing" feeling...and in the process, never actually do anything.

Which brings me to the 23 in '13 challenge. It's a schedule to complete 23 new pieces (one every two weeks) in 2012. Two weeks is a decent amount of time...it allows for some wiggle room, but keeps the creative gears working. It's also not as tight of a schedule as one a week. That project got a bit harried for me...and there were a few Saturdays where I was muttering to myself all day, because I was stuck for lyrics.

So, I'm a little late (ack! already one track behind!), but I'm up for the "23 in 13 challenge. Are you?

Old MacDonald had a DAW

...EIE-IO!

*cough*

OK, now that I have that out of my system, I'll tell you a bit about my first impressions of the Akai EIE audio interface. This is the basic model, not the Pro (and as such, is limited to recording at 44.1. For the demos and scratch tracks I record, this is not heartbreaking). It's a 4-in, 4-out interface, phantom power, VU meters, MIDI in and out, 4 audio inserts (for external effects units), and a built-in 3 port USB hub. Usual street price seems to be around $200, but I found it on sale at Guitar Center for $145. It's a well-spec'ed interface at this price point, so it seemed to be worth taking the jump. One impatient week later, it arrived on my doorstep.

On getting it out of the box, all I can say is that it's dressed to impress. The EIE has all metal construction, in a pleasing color scheme. And what can I say, I'm a sucker for VU meters. Also, it's heavy....you'll have to work a bit to yank it off the desk with a guitar cord, and rubber feet underneath give it some grip on your desk. The knobs are positive feeling, and the switches are pure retro (going along with the overall look). I'll admit it: I'm a designer, and the overall look (and cheesy joke in the name) is what got me to look at this interface in the first place. It looks great, like a piece of vintage equipment crossed with a science experiment...

There's a bit of negative to go along with the overall design. While the silver text on red background looks nice in good lighting, it's nigh-impossible to read in dim lighting. This will become less of a problem as I learn the controls, but it makes for a lot of squinting in low light conditions initially. The EIE Pro is black text on silver, which seems to imply that legible low-light text is a professional feature.

Setup was a straightforward affair. It's class-compliant in OSX, so no drivers ware needed (or even provided, although it comes with a disc with Cubase LE and ASIO drivers for Windows). The VU meters are lit with LEDs with a pleasing bright light (and flash red when clipping). It immediately showed up in Audio MIDi setup, so I set up the cabling to go from the EIE to my Roland XV-5080. Plugged in audio cables and did a test, and we're in business. OK, time to get the XV patch editor talking to the new interface...

...and thus began a period of about 40 minutes of serious hair-pulling. For some reason, the XV editor wasn't showing the ports of the EIE in the MIDI setup dialog. Many, many tests, retests, adding and removing of hardware later, and the answer was found: the EIE doesn't have a name for its MIDI ports...it's blank (and doesn't seem to have a way to name them). The XV editor was showing blank lines in my port choice list. Those weren't spaces, those were the ports from the EIE.

Once I selected those blank spaces, I was able to synchronize, and was off to the races.

The controls take a little getting used to. The master level control on the front only controls outputs 1 and 2 (3 and 4 are always at full volume). Not a problem once you get past cabling, though. What can be a bit confusing is the monitor knob. Turn it full counterclockwise, and it's a zero-latency monitor of the inout to the interface. Full clockwise, and it's sound coming from the computer. This will take some playing with, as it's possible to make certain tracks disappear from the mix, only to notice the knob is wrong (external MIDI tracks took a bit of figuring out). Keeping the monitor knob at 12 o'clock seems to be the best method, for now.

I loaded up an old project to try out sound quality. Previously, I had been using a 512 sample buffer with built-in sound, and was able to reduce that to 256 with no clicks and pops (2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM, a little long in the tooth.) A faster system should have no problem with lower latencies.

Beyond that, though, it's gone as well as I've hoped. The inputs have plenty of gain, sound decent, and have smooth action on the knobs. I'd like it if the combi-jacks were a little more solid feeling on plugging in a 1/4" plug, but that's subjective. 

Time to dig in and find out what this box can really do!