RPM'09 Album - "Headmelt" by LX Nen

[Andrew Robinson]

2009/3/3 Romain Gros <xtechcode at gmail.com>:
> All your bass
> I don t like so much the beginning ( sound beat) but i would like
> to  know which synth you used ( one with pan delay  ) , when the big
> beat comes in the 3/4 of the song it s really nice ...

I agree - the idea of this one was to throw every 1980s cliche into
one track and see if it made sense. It's sort of the 'dub mix' on the
back of a fictional 12" single. The drums you don't like are DMX
samples, plus TR-727 samples - both machines so cheesy that they
haven't bee heard much since 1st Jan 1990! There's also 808 cowbells
and the Fairlight orch5 sample - If I'd though of it at the time, I'd
have thrown some syntoms in there too!

The sound you do like is a sample of a Tampura from the Reason factory
soundbank, fed through unison, delay, phaser, compressor and reverb
modules.

> 2: make me think of Matrix music .( melancholic sphere)

> B Castle
> Really relax with a heavy beat  (it s perfect for me to go to
> work ; ) , I love the bass you used ( make me think a bit of david
> bowie music "outside " period), Do you used the chaossilator at the
> end and change the pitch in ableton or logic?

I'm very happy with this one, even though it's not my usual style. The
end was done by holding the last note (from reason's analogue synth)
for a minute, this has a heavy delayed vibrato on it which you don't
hear much in the song, as it cuts off before it reaches 100% normally.
When I came up with the long ending, I planned that it would be the
last track on the album, as I hadn't done the arrangement on 'bast'
then. The idea was to smoothly bend the last note down, inspired by
the ending of Schnauss's 'Stars' but I got as far as using a stepped
descent generated by the 'curve' of a reason Matrix Seqencer and
decided that I liked it enough and time was running out.

> 4 Hic
> 5 Icemelt
> 6 TMD
> 7 U happy
> 8 Glisten
> 9 P R T M

> Bast
> I like the experimentation  of the sounds ( did you sample
> yourself the sound banks for the experiment part ?)

Sadly no, it's all heavily manipulated reason sounds. I don't have a
microphone of any decent quality here to do my own recordings.

> then when it goes to the relax part around 3 min ( it s a genius
> evolution !! I love it !).

I'm really happy with this bit too.

> ...and finish with old computer games sounds .

My second try at making a long ending, this time I looped the track
for a minute with all plats playing, then used that as a sample in
reason. I was going to try a 'radio' style fade out, with high and low
pass filters coming in and then an overlay of radio static, but in the
late night rush (this was the last track I arranged) I couldn't
quickly get the 2 filters to stop overlapping and cutting the whole
lot out, so I swapped the low-pass one for a scream distortion unit,
which gradually reduces the sampling frequency, and simply faded the
result out in logic.

> Hic
>  this song is quite Hip hop/techno for me ... the techno is quite
> energetic :),
> Did you use a real guitar  or is it samples ?...
> I really like the end of this song from 3.50. its genial ... waou ...

This is the track I had most trouble with, the version on Headmelt is
20 bpm slower than the first try, which was all techno and not
guitarry at all. I think I'll go back to this and make whole song like
the end, which came about by accident, I dropped the audio for the
bassline onto the lead channel and it sounded good! The 'guitar'
sounds are reason analogue synths through Logic's guitar amp plug in.

> U happy
>  it seems  tribal at the beginning :) and goes to a kind of acid
> electronic techno without BOOM BOOM BOOM but with a tribal beat ...
> cool !  this song should be perfect in a coffeshop in Amsterdam ;)
> just before the end of the song, it seems chaotic(4.20 till 4.42)it
> gives me the idea you get shortcut in your cables settings lol  but it
> doesn t disturb me . it s really well done

Thanks, I'm in two minds about this track myself, I think I've somehow
made a very good job of creating a type of song I don't like, if that
makes sense! It should definitely be shorter, that's for sure.

>  9 : I like the fat drum sounds and the keys in the background...
> ( compare to the other song  we can hear that you start to get a bit
> stuck with harmony-structure-creation ... )

You've hit the nail on the head here, this was arranged on the last
day, as a low point when I was convinced that I would fail to get the
album done in time. The structure is non-existant, it's just a mush of
drums cut up by feeding them through 2 instanced of supa trigga, then
a little manual editing of the results. Originally I made about 8
minutes of this. promising myself I'd trim it (or better yet remove it
entirely) if I did hit the minimum length for the RPM challenge.
Eventually, with Bast turning out to be 12 minutes instead of the 4 or
5 I expected, I  only cut this one down a bit to make the whole thing
an hour long, which sounded like a good idea at 4am, but I think it
was a mistake in retrospect.

Thanks for all the comments, it's been really useful for me to get
another pair of ears onto this!

Regards,

- Andrew