An Unexpected Album

[Tony Hardie-Bick]

Fascinating workflow.

Andrew Robinson wrote:
> 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.