Members Cloacal-X Posted March 1, 2007 Members Share Posted March 1, 2007 Hey, I used to contribute to the monthly mission a while ago (as uvacom I think) and have not done so since I guess '04, maybe '05? Anyway, I thought it would be cool if I threw up a couple things for your listening pleasure and critique. The first one, entitled "Cesca" I did under the moniker "The Simple Pendulum". I guess it's sort of instrumental hip-hop...but fairly aggressive, a little spooky. It was mostly an excuse to use a lot of samples culled primarily from old 70s pornos. I also play a little guitar on this, which is a first for me. The second one I did (entitled "tenthirty") is very different. I went for a lot more technically complex stuff here, with an entirely algorithmic (but also completely deterministic - no "random" elements were used) composition. I ran out of energy before I could conjure up any sort of progression, so its final state is as a 6min+ meandering atmospheric piece. I paid a lot more attention to the soundstage in this one, keeping it very open to give more attention to each of the sparse (but rather dramatic) elements. Oh, there is also a little snippet up of what this track sounded like early in it's life. Both can be found at my myspace music site - yeah, myspace kind of trashes audio, and it's just dumb in general - but my school's ftp is down tonight. I'll try to get some proper mp3s up tomorrow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Roald Posted March 1, 2007 Members Share Posted March 1, 2007 cool. I like the "analog worm"-ish sound in Ceska..which synth did you use? I'd reduce the level on the samples a bit as they interfere a bit with the groove. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members OPEN OCEAN Posted March 1, 2007 Members Share Posted March 1, 2007 nice to try various stuff.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Cloacal-X Posted March 1, 2007 Author Members Share Posted March 1, 2007 cool. I like the "analog worm"-ish sound in Ceska..which synth did you use? I'd reduce the level on the samples a bit as they interfere a bit with the groove. If it's the bassline you're talking about, that's a freebie software called xhip. That's the only synth per se...also in the intro and first half of the track you can hear some weird phasey almost digeridoo type stuff, that's the intro to an early 80s flick starring Marilyn Chambers titled "Insatiable", but heavily {censored}ed with. About the samples - I've had some others tell me the same thing - they sound good to me but I don't have any good monitoring. However I do have some Dynaudio BM5A's on the way so hopefully that will allow me to reevaluate. As far as I'm concerned, they're sort of the focus of the track though so unless they're like jarring, I like them to be at a fairly prominent level. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members syncretism Posted March 1, 2007 Members Share Posted March 1, 2007 Cesca's hot. Name names. Vember? That Mirage thingy? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Cloacal-X Posted March 1, 2007 Author Members Share Posted March 1, 2007 In both cases I mostly used Vemberaudio Shortcircuit, a lot of chopped up breaks, and drum machine samples. That's actually the bulk of just about any track I do. Common techniques I employ are multiple parallel bandpass filters with contrary movement, a lot of loop point manipulation...I'm a big fan of crossfade and bidirectional playback modes. Of course I try a lot of different things, but those sorts of things are a big part of what I would call "my" sound. For Cesca, in addition I used some mellotron male choir samples, like I said a lot of old porno samples, stuff from what I would call the "golden age" of smut where the flicks were more like Russ Meyer/John Waters movies but with full-on balling. I think I used several samples from The Resurrection of Eve which is perhaps one of the greatest movies of the genre. Like I said, the bass is xhip, and the guitar is a cheap chinese "Switch" which is actually a one-piece injection molded deal...pretty cool in a strange way, actually not a bad guitar although I have since acquired a much better EBMM. I plugged the guitar direct into my audio interface to get a nice trashy sound, then I used that Audio Damage free fuzz and smex Buffer Override. Oh, and the drum samples were mostly Casio RZ-1. For tenthrirty, I think I used Fabfilter Twin, Kjaerhus Spectra, and maybe Surge for little bits here and there. Drums were almost all breaks IIRC. What I did for the sequencing, I made each note/line a separate looping pattern of a different length, usually several bars. That was filtered through a midi echo/arpeggiator/muter which would selectively process the MIDI events, controlled by several control message patterns. A few manual events were added here and there (like the drum fade in at the beginning, also a few manual tweaks to create a drum fill at like 3 minutes). Oh! I should mention that each element of the track is actually the *same* MIDI sequence, but manipulated differently. In other words, the underlying MIDI information for the drums is the same as for the bass, and for the melodic elements. I think with these two tracks, you can really hear two totally different methods I tried out to cope with the fact that I only really feel comfortable working with small chunks of music. With Cesca, I used the very straightforward approach of arranging loops, and I made up for that with a relatively dense arrangement and a very clear progression. It was really more of a "dance" style arrangement, you might say. On the other hand, with tenthirty I wanted to see if I could make one small piece of music into an entire track by manipulating the source material heavily enough. I feel like I had mixed results...it works in that it's not repetitive per se but I need to devise some method whereby I can sort of conduct the entire piece via controllers, or something. Plus the end result *sounds* fairly chaotic, even if the methods used to achieve it were not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Don Solaris Posted March 2, 2007 Members Share Posted March 2, 2007 Being sick of those everyday crap sounding songs on the telly / radio that all sound just the same, and specially that annoying music in commercials i see music experimenting as the only interesting area at the moment. I find Cesca track to be one of the best demos i've heard on this board (i hope my comment wont hurt other good musicians here). The only thing i would change would be drum processing technique. I think the track would be a killer with "Flood style" of drum production, some reverb over them, compression, and a different snare (a punchier one). Or you can use existing drum track and overdub it with another heavy processed one, just like Flood did in "I Feel You" at 01:03. I really like that type of music that sounds best when played at very high volumes (on large speakers). Cesca track is one of them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Cloacal-X Posted March 2, 2007 Author Members Share Posted March 2, 2007 Wow, thanks Don! I would tend to agree that the drums are the weakest element of Cesca and that they are perhaps a bit overly dry. If I do revisit this track, I will definitely keep those tips in mind. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Don Solaris Posted March 2, 2007 Members Share Posted March 2, 2007 If I do revisit this track... I would say you must. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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