New Music from Andy_R

[Andrew Robinson]

Thanks for all the kind words folks!

Romain Gros  wrote:
> what did you use for the drums?
and Andy Tarpinian  wrote:
> What are the vocaly sounds from?

and  Gert van Santen wrote:
> What gear did you use? I'd  say there's an Electribe involved (the gliding
sequence).

well, don't tell Jammer, but it's actually 100% Reason 3

I know a lot of people don't like Reason, because it's easy to make rather
formulaic stuff with and it's not that hot at analogue emulation, but I've
found that if you play to it's strengths not it's weaknesses, it can do a
lot of really good things. The main trick is to abuse the rack, in a studio
you'd feel bad about having 8 samplers doing nothing but feeding their lfo
outputs into 1 drum machine to give some background percussion sounds a
little looser pitching, but in Reason it's fine. When you get into the habit
of throwing compressors around like there's no tomorrow, and cascading
distortion boxes on subtle (or not so subtle settings) almost everywhere,
then good things happen.

The Drums started as a bit of an experiment, they are mostly loops from a
drum & bass library but with most of the notes muted, as well as being
slowed down, automated pitch randomisation, filters and lots of processing.
I've found that layering breaks with different feels then muting everything
except kick and snare from one, then muting everything else in another can
get some really interesting results. There are also some bits from a couple
of reason's drum machines in there, one with shuffle turned on, and one
without, and almost everything has gone through Reason's Scream distortion
boxes, had lfos patched in along the way to get more movement, etc. While
I've kept the layered feels, I don't think there is much in there that is
recognisable from the original loops, there's barely anything that is within
an octave shift of where it started.

The vocals are a bit of a cheat, the first one you hear is an unmodified
sample from a guy who makes lots of free refills for Reason, Dorumalaia. All
I did was find it and add reverb. I did feel a bit bad about this, but it
fitted too well not to use. You can grab thousnads of Dorumalaia's samples
in wav or refill format at
http://www1.dorumalaia2.com/freerefillswavsamples.htm ... the second vocal
sound is just a choir sample pitched up a bit and reverb/delayed.

The gliding sequence is one of the very few times I've used Reason's
supposedly analogue softsynth. I love Reason's monophonic 32-step sequencer,
which provides the glides, and incidentally is the way I came up with all
the non-drum sequences in the track. I initially had a rhodes sample playing
this line, but realised that I could get a lot more stablility and
tweakability from the softsynth. It's got 2 oscilators playing a
xylophone-like waveform, which I pitched 7 notes apart, and I fed an lfo
into the oscilator balance to crossfade between them, and I added a bit of
FM to tie them together a bit and stop them sounding like 2 different
things. It's exactly the sort of sound that resaon's digital synth Malstrom
is supposed to be good at, but I've never got on with that, and I've now
pretty much given up on it.

The other thing that's bad about reason apart from the analogue emulation is
the main sequencer. I just don't get along with it, so I assembled the track
in Logic, having filled up 2 mixers worth of 4 bar loops on Reason with
lines that sounded good together if you muted 3/4 of them. I then saved each
loop as an audio file, and dropped them all into Logic, made an arrangement,
went back to Reason to make reverb tails as audio files where needed.

>From there it's the usual mixer tweaks in Logic, sprinkle liberally with
audiounits (you may recognise supertrigga doing reverse/slowdowns on the
percussion near the end) and then keep tweaking the arrangement until you
die of frustration or just think 'sod it, it's done now' :-)

That's my working process on this one - however the man from UPS delivered
Reason 4.0 yesterday, and I'm about to load it up and see if the new
Sequencer is to my liking, and what I can do with the new Thor modular
synth... and then of course there's Logic 8...

- Andy_R
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.music-bar.org/private.cgi/shelter-music-bar.org/attachments/20071003/448b8c4e/attachment.htm