An Unexpected Album

[Andrew Robinson]

Thanks Romain, and everyone else who suffered their way through it.

Everything on the album was done in Reason, saved as 16-bar loops,
then arranged / cut-up / faded in and out in Logic. The guitar-like
sounds are Reason's virtual analogue synth, the wavestation-like and
choir sounds are Reason's Thor virtual modular synth, and the Drums
are Rex loops from either Reason's standard library, or a Reason
refill called 160dB Drum&Bass Interface, all fed through stacks of
Reason's distortion/compression/eq/unison units. Most of the 'life' in
the sounds comes from routing tempo synced LFOs to several
destination.

My working process was to spend an hour making abut 30 loops, saving
them with random nonsense names, then I opened up Logic and tried to
build a track from the first 6 loops, taking them in alphabetical
order. I them moved on to the next 6 for track 2, and so on. I reused
Logic's mixer and effects settings from "Diversion",  which gave me 26
channels to muck about with. I'd used a lot of AU effects on that
track, so if a loop was sounding wrong, I just switched it between
channels until it sounded right.

When I ran out of loops (after track six), I had some dinner, then
changed from 120 bpm to 180bpm and repeated the process for tracks 7
to 10. I sneaked in some samples from the first batch too! 1 kick and
2 cymbal hits from Diversion sneaked in to cover up bad joins, but
apart from that nothing at all was premade, bar the drum loops from
libraries.

I've thrown together some artwork so it looks like I've put a bit of
effort when I send it off, if anyone wants to snatch it it's here:

http://www.lxnen.com/variousartist/inlay.jpg
http://www.lxnen.com/variousartist/tray.jpg
http://www.lxnen.com/variousartist/itunesartwork.jpg

While the album isn't great (it's barely even listenable in places!) I
really enjoyed making it, I think I'll be doing this again sometime
soon... maybe I should do a few album demos then pick the best tracks
and work them up properly? I feel a myspace page coming on...

- Andy_R

>  All in all for one night album trip it s really cool made !
>  Did you create (recorded) your own samples in some of your songs ..?
>  or is it only synths ?
>  Cheers...
>  Romain Gros