\nexercises”, actually producing stereotypical music in a certain style
\nin order to grasp the style’s basic patterns. It’s music I call “mahlen nach zahlen”, just following certain basic
\nideas, not trying to do something interesting or something new, just
\nsomething that sounds ok. In these weeks, I finished one
\ntrack, a pretty boring, overly long dub track, called “The Web” as it
\nuses samples from a lecture by Fravia about search techniques. You can
\ndownload the mp3
\nhere<\/a> and listen to it while reading the article. You can
\nalso download the live set with all the samples (hope there is no
\ncopyrighted stuff in there) here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
The structure of the “The Web” is quite simple. It consists of an
\nintro composed of a weird sound effect, a first verse, a break, a
\nsecond verse, a third verse, and an outro. Each verse consists of a
\nsyncopated beat, a very simple melody, two chords played on offbeats
\nby a sampled guitar, a bass line, pads playing single notes and vocal
\nsamples by fravia. Underlying the whole track are sound effects,
\nwhirling around in the background, and becoming more present at the
\nend of the verses and during the break. You can see the overall structure of the track in
\nthis image.<\/p>\n
![\"Alt](\"http:\/\/bl0rg.net\/~manuel\/the-web\/the-web-structure.png\")
<\/div>\nThe weird sound effect at the beginning of the track was produced by The vocal samples by fravia have been cut out of the lecture he held I actually spent most of the time working on the drums and the While programming the drums, I would let a basic loop I programmed The melody I found by jamming on my keyboard after finding an “OK” Getting the bass line was a very similar process. I cliked a few The pads were the simplest part, they just underline the melody by I also added some “subtle” melodic impulses using strange Finally, I reused sound samples produced by playing around with What actually scares me in retrospect is how much work was I just noticed I kept a few of the early versions of the track, the I wonder if there is a blog somewhere which analyzes electronic music in the same way that classical music gets analyzed. Taking the track apart, naming the effects used, analyzing the structure, the way the tension is built up, questioning … Continue reading
\nfeeding some sound (I don’t remember what, but I think some kind of
\ndrum beat) into a VST plugin called “Crazy
\nIvan”<\/a>. The plugin produces very harsh sounding bubbling, depending
\non its settings. I don’t understand the settings at all, so I just
\nclicked repeatdly on the “randomize” button, and recorded the output
\nonto a separate track in Live. I then looked at the produced sounds,
\nchose this nice sounding sample and added a lot of delay on top of it
\nby sending the output of the effect track to the first return channel,
\nwhich has a pingpong delay effect in its effect list.<\/p>\n![\"Alt](\"http:\/\/bl0rg.net\/~manuel\/the-web\/the-web-return-a.png\")
<\/div>\n
\nat the 21c3 congress in Berlin in December. The ogg file of the
\nlecture can be found here<\/a>.
\nI cut out the samples using audacity<\/a>, edited them to
\nremove the weird stop-and-go speech flow of fravia, and imported
\ninto live. I then pitch shifted them 2 halfsteps down to give them a
\ngrooviger feeling, equalized them a bit so they wouldn’t sound to
\nbassy, and compressed them in order to make them louder. I then sent
\nthem to the return track B, which features another pingpong delay with
\nslightly different settings than return track A.<\/p>\n![\"Alt](\"http:\/\/bl0rg.net\/~manuel\/the-web\/the-web-return-b.png\")
\n![\"Alt](\"http:\/\/bl0rg.net\/~manuel\/the-web\/fravia-effects.png\")
\n<\/div>\n
\nbass. I started with a simple bass line, added some basic drums, and
\nstarted tweaking the sound. On second thought, I think this is an
\napproach that doesn’t work really well for me. I think I’m better off
\nlaying the melodic structure of my music out, and then adding beats
\nand bass. Anyway, I used an impulse preset of live as a starting point
\nfor the drums, and started stacking effects and tweaking and doing
\nuntil I got a sound I liked. The effect queue actually is quite
\nscary. I also added a separate sample for the crash cymbal, but it
\nended sounding “out of tune”, and ended using it like two times in the
\nwhole track. I added the saturator to make the drums a bit
\ncrunchy. The auto filter adds some kind of automatic panning and
\nfiltering on the high-hats and the top of the snare spectrum so that
\nthe drums don’t sound too static. The ping-pong delay is actually
\npretty nice, as it adds complexity to the beat. Finally, a bit of
\nreverb to add some room. The drum tracks is sent to the return track A
\nfor some more delay, and to return track C which has a supa-trigga
\nVST. Supa-trigga is a very nice plugin adding repetition, slowing
\ndown, reversing, etc… Here it is used “in the background”, that is,
\nthe drum track itself is loud, and in the background you can hear
\nrandom modifications of the beat. The disadvantage of this however is
\nthat the track never sounds the same. Another problem I have with
\nsupatrigga is that I didn’t program it myself, and don’t really
\nunderstand what is going on. I think I’ll write a similar plugin
\nmyself in the future, and play around with it. In a track I’m
\nproducing at the moment, I use supatrigga on the drum track, and
\nrecord its output. I play with the settings, and then look at the
\noutput, and keep the “nice” variations that I’ll then include as
\n“static” audio samples in the mix. You can only do this when are
\nfinished with tweaking the drum sound though.<\/p>\n![\"Alt](\"http:\/\/bl0rg.net\/~manuel\/the-web\/the-web-drum-effects.png\")
\n![\"Alt](\"http:\/\/bl0rg.net\/~manuel\/the-web\/supa-trigga.png\")
\n<\/div>\n
\nby clicking on the payroll play, and use the keyboards to add single
\nsnare drum or bass kicks with high velocity, which give a strong
\nimpulse to the beat. I would also program some breaks by hands on top
\nof an basic loop, and then arrange all the loops I had (like 12) in the
\narrangement view, and consolidate them into a long 32 bars drum
\ntrack. This way, the drum track is pretty varying, although you don’t
\nhear it really unless you give it a bit of attention.<\/p>\n
\nsound in the live presets. I first had a single loop of the melody,
\nbut finally played the whole verse on the keyboard in order to have
\nvarying velocities and a more human field. I did this for the second
\nand third verse too. Finally, I let the track played and fiddled some
\nknobs on various effects of the melody instrument. These effects were
\nthe feedback and the frequency of the phaser on the first verse, and
\nalso turning on the bouncy delay I downloaded on the smartelectronix
\nwebsite<\/a>. The third verse uses a different instrument for the
\nmelody, where I played with different settings of the simpler filters
\nand lfo.<\/p>\n
\nnotes on the payroll using the keyboard, used that as a starting point
\nto add the drums, and wound up replaying everything on the
\nkeyboard. While replaying, I found some new ideas for variations of
\nthe bass line I used for other verses. The most difficult part however
\nwas to twiddle with the sound settings so that the bass wouldn’t sound
\nlike “flat MIDI sound”. I achieved this by carefully tuning the
\nimpulse filter, adding a bit of reverb on the lower part of the
\nspectrum, and eroding the sound a bit so that the bass would sound
\nlike being played on some cheapy bass amplifier.<\/p>\n![\"Alt](\"http:\/\/bl0rg.net\/~manuel\/the-web\/the-web-bass-effects.png\")
<\/div>\n
\nplaying single notes. I modified the velocity amount controlling the
\nLFO a bit, so that lower velocities would produce more of a bubbling
\nsound, which then gets amplified by the delay. At the ends of the
\nverses, the velocity of the pad notes gets lower and lower, and
\neverything starts to fade away in big bubbling, reinforced by the
\nsound effects becoming louder and louder.<\/p>\n
\ninstruments, one producing a kind of burp, and the other a synthesized
\nhuman voice singing “doo”. I played these by hand on the keyboard, and
\nreuse the same loops on the first and third verse.<\/p>\n
\nCrazy Ivan as sound effects, looping them after having warped them to
\nmatch the rhythm of the track. I added a filter to the effect track,
\nand sent the output to the pingpong return track A. Using the filter,
\nwhich I controlled with the mouse on the two dimensional field
\npresented by Live, I could make the whirling swirling sound which is
\nquite typical of a lot of dub tracks.<\/p>\n
\nnecessary to produce this quite dull sounding dub track. I also notice
\nthat I have not managed to built some interesting tension in the
\ntrack, it just seems to start on one level and stay there for
\na very long time. If I had to do it again, I would make the track much
\nshorter, make the melody a lot more interesting (I quite like the easy
\nlistening kind of melody on the third verse), and build up tension by
\nbuilding “weird” breaks, using strange animal samples for examples,
\ndifferent drum sounds sometimes, and removing a lot more instruments
\nbefore kicking in again. I guess that’s what you learn through
\nexperience \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
\nfirst one consisting of just the basic loop I found “interesting”. first version
\n(12.08.2005)<\/a>, 14.08.2005<\/a>, 16.08.2005<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"