Thursday, March 21, 2013

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.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

23 in '13 Song #4: The Witch

Song #4: The Witch

Been a bit preoccupied with things the past few weeks (explanation forthcoming), and just realized today that I never posted up song #4 for 23 in '13. Ta-dah!

A bit of background as to where this one came from: I've long been a fan of sample-laden music like Skinny Puppy, but have never given much of a shot at making any myself. Well, a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a deal on a mid-90s E-Mu Esi32 sampler, along with a dozen disks of sounds. It was, to use the parlance, an offer I couldn't refuse. Yes, it's easier to use samplers in software now, but I've always been one to like obsolete electronics more than I should. (My wife is very patient). And hey....new sounds!

So, I spent the last couple of weeks reading manuals (yes, plural...more on that later), and integrating a hardware sampler into my studio. I've been enjoying myself immensely, partly just trying to dig through the avalanche of new sounds to use.

So, I dug into the discs, and found that one of the synth sounds was of a Prophet patch, very similar to one used in an early Skinny Puppy song. And thus, this song developed from there. Amusingly enough, most of the movie samples aren't being played by the sampler (more on that later), but were sound files I happened to have from the Blair Witch project. The unearthly howl in there was from the E-mu, and was just a clip of random Blair Witch screaming, reversed and time stretched. (Yeah, that's where the hyper-creative song title came from).

I'm discovering another benefit of my push towards external gear: my desktop is a bit long in the tooth, and every instrument that goes external is one less load on my processor. Plus, having to think through the workflow limitations of the sampler is a fun restriction to work around.

More to come! Song #5 is already done...