Description : v1.0 - It's been way too long since I got on a sequencer. Oh how I miss it...
Glitchy voices from XFRSCD01, a bunch of hand clap percussion, glass bottles, and electronic percussion. It starts off slow and ends mixing into what will be a different song.on the last 32 bars.
I made this in about two hours. I haven't done any mastering, level work, or really anything other than throw it down.
Description : I took a 10 hour drive to Atlanta Georgia to visit my younger brother. My brother, a childhood friend and I went hiking up Stone Mountain in Dekalb, Georgia. This song is a celebration of our trip.
I recorded this in a few straight takes: guitar/lead vocals, vocals, backup vocals, lead guitar, piano. This is what came out.
Description : It starts off as an ambient piece with a quiet piano and drum part and then turns into a DnB drum line with spastic piano all over the place. I've started work on mastering, so other than adding a few drops to the drums, it's mostly finished now.
Drums are heavily sliced chillout and DnB loops at 75 bpm and 150 bpm respectively. I played the piano the first time through for a more natural feel, but I've mostly been placing the notes in by hand to fine tune the sound. I assembled it in FLStudio 8 using Toxic Biohazard to generate the ambient chords, FL Keys with some filters for the piano and the bassline, and whatever the default slicer is for the drumline.
Description : A few days ago, my best friend's father died of a sudden heart attack, leaving behind both parents, three siblings, an ex wife, my friend, and three other sons, all younger. My friend wasn't particularly close with his father and isn't big on visiting his family. I wasn't sure if he'd want company, but I offered to go with him in case he thought it would help make things easier for him.
We left really early in the morning; I don't know if he slept the night before, but I definitely didn't. It took nearly four hours to get to get to where the service was. One of the deceased's brothers made the funeral home keep the viewing open until we got there so my friend could see his father one last time.
Viewings are normally pretty creepy, even more so when the deceased is still young. We walked through the empty room. He continued onward, while I sat in one of the chairs. As he neared the supine body his steps slowed.
A few seconds of eternity passed, each one feeling like hours. His head shifted almost imperceptibly, his shoulders rose slightly, and his hands seemed lost. Eventually, they settled somewhere near his waist, throwing the sides of his blazer outwards, obscuring my view of the open lid. Where his father's face once was, there was only a dark field of fabric. He stood, his sleeves shifting as his mind and his hands grasped for something. Abruptly, he spun on his heels and walked briskly away from the pedestal. In the time it took us to reach the back of the room, all evidence of the encounter had vanished from his face, except a redness in his eyes.
Start to finish, we weren't in that room for even 90 seconds, but I left feeling somehow much... older.
At the reception, my friend and his family did their best to ignore the inconsiderate "help" so many people seem to try to offer the bereaved. I sat down at a piano recently vacated by a classmate of one my friend's younger brothers. Trying my best to shake off the echoes of his incredibly loud, inexpertly played inappropriate Coldplay medley, I started playing.
This is my attempt at recreating what I played.
Description : The title refers to a critique on Christianity I read in one of Dawkin's books. As our knowledge of the world increases, the things science can't yet explain (the places god is the only explanation) shrinks. This is why the Church tends to be anti-science, because it is effectively the enemy of a god of the gaps. I'm not trying to proselytize this particular viewpoint; I just thought it would be a cool name for a track [and it was on my mind when I first started writing it].
I'm using a chillout drum loop with mild slicing for the basic beat. The lull is a simple animated LP filter. I'm using a few biohazard channels (the ping sounding lead, the high pitched backing that changes sound, that intro effect), some sytrus strings (the strings, the other backing), a few FL Keys channels (the piano, detuned piano, detuned bassline), and, new to this version, a recording from my Roland EM-10.
I wrote it while on a road trip from Orlando to Denver (~30 hours in the car, and I only got to drive like five of them) and on a flight home from Denver > Houston > DC. I spent some time hiking in the mountains with the refrain stuck in my head, and most of the development came out of the echoes around my headspace. Colorado is a beautiful state.
Description : Hip hop-y piano. If anyone wants to mess with this, I'll strip the beat out (if you want) and let you fix that and/or lay down vocals/whatever. I did it in FL8 with mostly free plugins.
All loops are my own, made for this track, excepting the rhythm, which comes from Deadmau5's sample CD (I think) and has been chopped up a bit.
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v1.4
More balancing, more playing with the new parts, and a nice open source sample to fit in at the end.
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v1.3
Added a timpani sample that plays during the slow parts. Stretched it once and reversed it another time, then worked that in too. The builds should now have a nice full sound.
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v1.2
Changed from hip hop to RnB. Added more oomph to the drums. More production throughout. Filled in some of the silences with a bit more bass piano. Added a bit to the builds so they boom into the song.
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v1.1
Added effects and some simple levels to the mixer track. Gonna have to keep balancing it though.
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v1.0
I fleshed it out a bit to the 3:30ish mark; the length helps. I haven't done much to fill it yet, but it has rhythm through the piece, plays with a theme, and it's not four on the floor trance, so I'm pretty happy with it.
Next update I'll record a bunch more takes on the piano and pick the ones that don't get hit with as much hardware delay. It's really hard for me to compensate consistently for a ~20-50ms delay while still sounding the way I want..
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v0.1
Delay on a rompler piano, two FL keys pianos with slightly different sounds, and a sliced hip hop beat cut down to half tempo. Maybe the start of something?
Description : I linked my mom this song and she said I should name the track after her. Formerly [untitled].
Oboes are fascinating. I wrote this piece around an oboe loop I made when I was bored.
The oboes are a soundfont with about 200 staccato notes and a sytrus synth. The trumpet is from a similar soundfont bank, all short staccato bursts. Beats are a sliced orchestral dum kit I arranged by hand and an orchestral kit from PC51d soundfont. The strings are two sytrus voices and DSK Stringz. The plunky pads are sytrus ambient pads. The piano is a DSK Akoustik Keyz. The tenor sax is another DSK voice.
Most of the parts were played on a MIDI keyboard while recording the input. Minor tweaking and cleaning up, scaling note levels and such, but it's mostly natural playing. I used no loops I didn't create for the track (other than a drum loop I sliced into individual hits and used as a kit).
The track has no reached the "done-ish" phase (it has an ending, a rarity for my tracks). Any recommendations on what needs tweaking would be appreciated.
Description : I go back to Florida in a week. A song for the girl waiting for me there.
Two minutes, one take, written on the fly, recorded from a phone, cleaned up as much as I could. Added a number of storms and rain samples from the freesound project. GNU license on this one.
Description : My roommate asked me the difference between bass and base. "Well... one's a fish..." The title came from there.
It starts off a bit slow, and the drums aren't amazing, but it's worth waiting for both arp-ish key passages; they're fun.
This is two Sytrus voices, two keys channels, no real effects to speak of (I went back in and threw a compressor on it to stop it from peaking, but that's about it). I wrote it about 6 months ago over the course of two or three days. As with most of my stuff, it's all written out by hand in the piano roll. No loops [I didn't make] used.
Description : I'm in the process of getting an aerospace engineering degree (hope I graduate...). One of the terms we use in fluids to describe still air (or any other fluid) is "quiescent." I wrote this nearly a year ago after going on a hot air balloon ride (see profile picture). Since the balloon moves with the air currents, in the reference frame of the rider, you're in completely still air. It's wild.
I wrote it in FL8. I wrote the drum part myself with some of the samples it came with. FL Keys for the piano, a 3xOsc with a formula controlled phaser for the lead, and a Sytrus voice for the bass. It's a very calm piece I just remembered about while looking for another one of my older tracks.
Description : I saw a thread on the forums about making a "10 minute song" where you do EVERYTHING, from write to master, within 10 minutes.
Two times through on a Roland EM10, playing with the drum machine/One-Touch and a flute voice to make a simple little piece of elevator music from a game set in the 50s or something. I put a mild chorus onto the flute, but otherwise haven't changed anything.
Description : Epic a capella music. Up to ten layers at a time, twenty one loops/sessions. Recorded with a simple headset/boom mic, so the quality is a bit low fi. There's a reverb channel on the whole thing that will probably be toned down a bit.
All vocal loops are my own. I'll throw them up in the a capella section on this site at some point.
The rhythm section is now done by my younger brother. I drove up to visit him a week or two ago and hung out for a few hours. In the time, we talked about life, cars, music, and got caught up on the last few months. I was excited to show him my (quite novice) attempts at beat boxing. When I played the track, I was really happy with the vocals, but the terrible rhythm section was detracting from the track.
... so I turned it off, set up a quick click track, handed the headset to my brother, and said "go." It took a few tries and a bit of explaining, but eventually we recorded about ten minutes of him laying down a beat that blew my mind.
I took three that I really liked the sound of and put them through some reverb and minor levels adjustment, rearranged them to cover the length of the song and fit the builds, but otherwise left them alone. I think it's a lot better now.
Description : Captured audio of a random jam with my buddy a few days after Christmas via my phone. I did what I could to pull the peaky piano down a bit, but it's still kind of rough.
This was pretty much entirely unplanned, so you'll have to forgive the abrupt tempo changes and "hmm, what am I going to play here?" parts where I just smack the keys until I find something. We'd been playing on this groove for a minute or two and I thought it sounded good, so I pulled out my phone, hit the video recorder, tossed it somewhere, and forgot about it for a few minutes.
My friend is on the vocals and an acoustic guitar, I'm on a 1980's "Miracle" synth.
Description : This is my first time playing with sidechaining. I'm using a pretty basic sidechained compressor of a drum line (bass, bass/hat, snare) to a few synths. It definitely has a very interesting sound, which I would previously have assumed was just gating to match the drums (which, honestly, it pretty much is).
I've uploaded two loops of this backing sans-drums; if you want them, check my loops page.
This track is incomplete right now, but more updates will come.
Flute is from the depths of my free sample library and harmonica is Slap's. I'm thinking of playing with some light glitch beats, since the peaking of the main channels is starting to sound like a broken synth.
I really have no idea which way I'm going to take this song.
Description : Still working on it... did a few quick passes writing out the instrumentation so I could try changing up the voices. Some of the original ones are still in there and some of the ones I added might yet go away. There might be some clipping, since I haven't gotten around to going through with a fine toothed comb looking for where I have to adjust things, but... eh, it's good enough for right now.
As of right now, the melody is unchanged. I might layer something on top of it when I'm fresh. If I do, it'll probably end up as some high keys. I'll have to figure out where there's any room in the song for anything else.
Description : I just saw djsalkizar's Christmas song (it's awesome, check it out) and I remembered an old Carol of the Bells I'd done four or five years ago. It's very simple, but it's fun. It's just three or four arpeggiators and an LFO, if I remember right.
Description : The girlfriend wanted me to write more calm music, since she really enjoys listening to my stuff that doesn't involve me trying to write trance. I took one of the Sytrus voices I used in an old song of mine called Farm Sunset (should actually be on this site now, I think) and wrote a song around it. As with most of my older stuff, drums are written by me with samples, Sytrus for most of the voices, and an FL Keys for the piano.
On a different note, I need a new VST for my piano. I have an old Roland EM-10, but I haven't figured out how to yank it's "One Touch" sampled grand out of it and into my computer. It only has a MIDI out (it's really old), so I'm probably screwed to just recording with it.
Description : How I felt a few nights after joining Gold's gym with my recently-back-from-Iraq-and-now-bigger-than-I-am marine brother.
Most of this song just sort of happened without much planning. The main backing is based off of six loops I made and uploaded here. I've since changed them around a lot and added some animation to their filters, but the basic sound is still pretty similar. They briefly take the lead, but they've been supplanted by FL Keys, Sytrus strings, and two more Toxic voices. I've started using the FL Love Filter a lot more, and I'm happy with the sounds it helps me achieve. It's a lot less hassle to set up a LFO highpass with it than trying to manually add one and animate it.
The drums are sliced/pitch changed/rearranged loops. I've added a few more samples to round out the sound, but I'm still not satisfied with my drops. Toms always sound so good when other people use them, but I haven't really gotten the hang of them.
Description : A short jam on my Hapi drum with mild phasing and a low pass at 10k about 20% left and 35% wet.
Recorded in one take with Audacity, using the vanilla settings and plugins. I was stress testing my computer after replacing the cooling, so I had a bunch of other programs running while this was being recorded.
Description : I was looking through some of my old music and found an old post-breakup song from almost two years ago. This was from before I discovered drum loops, so the rhythm is pretty terrible. If I recall, it's FL6 and Sytrus/FL Keys for everything with absolutely no mastering.
Description : My girlfriend and I [had a huge fight] so I wanted to write something moody.
I used Toxic Biohazard and FL Keys for the voices along with some sliced drum loops and a few snare samples. I'm using the Love Filter from FL8 to generate the pulsing sound (it's basically alternating between a low pass and high pass filter).
Description : This is an old piece of mine that layers strings on top of more strings on top of more strings. I think I did it with FL6 using sytrus for the string voices, FL's keys for the piano, and a 303 for the drums.
It builds slowly, but it's worth listening through to the end, I think. I'm toying with the idea of going back to this and cleaning it up. The drums feel like they need some work.
Description : I was bored and started messing with some ambient filters. Some slow drum loops, a few toxic biohazard and sytrus voices, and voila. It might make it into a real song at some point.
Description : I got a hapi drum two weeks ago and can't stop playing it. Unfortunately, it's a not easy to mic...
Laid down a quick drum loop and piano that slams on random notes from the pygmy scale, then just jammed for awhile. Things aren't slammed on beat; I did a lazy align, but it really just needs to be recorded again.
Description : Toxic Biohazard, some drums, and an autochorded guitar synth.
This will be the build section of a song once I finish the beginning/end.
