{"id":147,"date":"2005-09-13T00:00:31","date_gmt":"2005-09-12T22:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/?p=147"},"modified":"2005-09-13T00:00:31","modified_gmt":"2005-09-12T22:00:31","slug":"acryl-mixit-40-entry-on-em411com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/2005\/09\/13\/acryl-mixit-40-entry-on-em411com\/","title":{"rendered":"Acryl – Mixit 40 entry on em411.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

While surfing the web to find electronic music producing related
\nwebsites, I stumbled upon em411.com<\/a>, which is an extremely cool
\nwebsite for producers. The websites hosts a web forum, as well as user
\npages with their releases. Every month, a mixit contest takes
\nplace. Using only a given number of samples, every contestant has to
\nproduce a track, which will be reviewed by the other contestants
\nafterwards. During the contest, samples for the next competition can
\nbe uploaded. I love challenges, and when I found the webpage last week
\nI though “wow, I must submit a track for the mixit 40<\/a>“. I downloaded
\nthe sample package, and loaded them into Ableton Live, which is my
\nmain music program at the moment (actually the only one I own, I
\ndidn’t get around to try much of the free software lying around).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The nice thing about mixits and contest is that they put
\nconstraints on the material that you have to begin with. I find it
\nmuch easier to work withing such constraints. Actually, I now play
\naround with sounds like a few hours, and then tell myself “ok, no more
\nsounds”. Then I play around with some loops and melodies, and then I
\ntell myself “no more melodies”. After that, I’ll start to modify the
\nbeats and melodies, trying to introduce tension, using know break
\nschemes for examples, or just fooling around with plugins like
\nSupatrigga and LiveCut. I also try to use a few ideas I get by reading
\nbooks about classical music. In acryl for example, I found the two
\nmain melodies by playing around on my keyboard. One I liked
\nparticularly, and modified it a bit by using the different pieces of
\nthe melodies at different times, and then by copy pasting and shifting
\npieces of the melody on top of another. Here you can see the different
\nmotives deriving from the same musical idea. The melody is then played
\nby two synths so that one answers the other, which gives the track a
\nbit more dynamism.<\/p>\n

At the time (actually, last friday), I was listening to Incunabula
\nby Autechre, and to the Autechre Peel Session number one. Their tracks
\nconsisted mainly of a simple, beautiful melody, played by a very
\ncrystalline sounding synth, and I was totally into that sound. I
\nbrowsed the samples to find one from which I could extract a nice
\nsounding synth, and used the weird noise sample from which I also
\nextracted the bass. I loaded the wave sample into the
\nSimpler instrument of Ableton Live, which is a sample based synth
\nfeaturing additional features like a filter, an LFO, ADSR envelopes
\nfor amp, filter and pitch. I played around a bit, and finally created
\ntwo synths which different only in the speed of their LFO, which was
\napplied to the LP filter. On one synth, I prepended a MIDI transpose
\neffect to get a lower sounding synthesizer.<\/p>\n

I also needed a mean sounding bass, but didn’t find a very useful
\nsample. I extracted some kind of distorted mushy sounding bass from a
\nnoisy sample “hazy-in-sept-845”, but didn’t get it to loop cleanly in
\nSimpler. As a result, I used the bass sound to play short notes. I
\nplayed two very simple bass lines, actually the bass is almost a part
\nof the beat.<\/p>\n

There was a nice beat loop in the samples of the mixit, as well as
\na single kick and a single snare, and a second drum loop. I used the
\nkick and the snare, as well as a hat from the second drum loop to
\nbuild a battery kit using the Impulse sampled based drum machine of
\nAbleton Live. I also modified the snare sound by stretching it to
\ngenerate a kind of softer, longer snarey sound. I used the battery kit
\nto build up a simple beat, which is kind of breaky, and also a simple
\nfour on the floor house beat. I used the other drum loop as is, and
\nplayed it through supatrigga with some moderate repeat and reverse
\nprobabilities. Actually, I played with a lot of glitchy effects on the
\ndrumloops, but finally threw away all the different variations I
\ngenerated and decided to stick to a simple groove.<\/p>\n

In the sample pack, there was a kind of weird aerial melody, which
\nI immediately noticed and thought “hey, I have to use that”. It
\nactually was the main part of the song in the beginning, but in the
\nfinal version, it only gets introduced at the end. I’m not very happy
\nwith it also, because it doesn’t really fit well into the harmonic
\nsetup of the first part, but it sound kind of weird, which is fine by
\nme \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

I used a harmonic note from a sample to generate a kind of
\nhigh-pitched beep sounds by importing it into an impulse tracker. I
\nthen added some effects (grain delay and ping delay), and hammered on
\nmy keyboard with quantisation set to 1\/16. This generated a kind of
\nrhythmic note cloud, which I planned to modify dynamically by playing
\nwith the wetness of the grain delay. I finally resorted to not use any
\ndynamic effect in the track (that is, no automation or so), so the
\nhigh-pitched note cloud is just used to add some rhythm to melody
\nparts.<\/p>\n

Finally, I warped a kind of “ssshhhhhhh” noise and used it is a
\nkind of cymbal sound to introduce new parts of the song.<\/p>\n

I spent most of my time arranging the different segments I had. I
\ntried to not repeat the errors I had made with The Web, and targeted a
\nmuch shorter song with a lot more variations. Also, I decided to use
\nfade-in and fade-out effects by adding automation to track volumes as
\na way to introduce new parts. You can see this especially at the end
\nof the track. Another thing I tried to do was to inerrupt the beat in
\norder to build up tension, you can see this at 3:00. However, the end
\nof the track I am not completely satisfied with. I think the four on
\nthe floor rhythm is too harsh, and the end melody doesn’t harmonically
\nfit very well with the first part. It also is a lot more boring \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

I learned a few things building this track: “less is more”, I think
\nI ended up throwing 80% of my ideas and loops and melodies away. I
\ndon’t have to use every setting or even every loop I thought was good
\nin a single song. Actually, this song, without any big fancy effect is
\nmy favourite so far. Structure is very important, and studying
\ncounterpoint and classical music, as well as analyzing other
\nelectronic music tracks really is helping. I’ll try to blog about a
\nfew tracks I have analyzed. The funny thing is that after a few weeks
\nproducing music, my perception of music has completely changed, but
\nnot necessarily in a bad way. When I hear music now, I always focus on
\nhow the track is built, what sounds are used. Sometimes I understand
\nwhat the artist is doing (or at least I think so), sometimes I don’t,
\nbut in both cases I still really enjoy the music, maybe even more than
\nbefore. Anyway, enjoy the track. I think it’s the electronica
\nequivalent of simple pop tune, not complicated, plain, but somehow
\nbeautiful \ud83d\ude42 You can find the mp3 here<\/a>,
\nand the ableton live set here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While surfing the web to find electronic music producing related websites, I stumbled upon em411.com, which is an extremely cool website for producers. The websites hosts a web forum, as well as user pages with their releases. Every month, a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-musikstaub"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bl0rg.net\/netzstaub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}