Alien Moon

[gert van santen]

K9 Kai Niggemann schreef:
> Helo Gert, 
>
> care to elaborate a bit on the making of this piece? who played what instruments? On what substances? Was Alan Parsons involved in any way?
>
> I really enjoy listening to it!
>   

Thanks Kai (and Michael, who e-mailed me privately), for the nice words.

OK, this is what I did.

Although I didn't have much time in recent weeks to make music (for RPM, 
or at all), I was able to think about what I would like to do - if there 
would be some time. As you might have read, I've been listening to 
spacerock, jazzrock and fusion again lately, and I thought it might be 
cool to make one of those kind of tracks myself.
Another thought was, that I didn't want to go all electronic (again) 
since I'm working on that for Wave World (yeah, I know, it's way too 
long ago since our last album, but there just is no time...)

I decided to go for a track with acoustic drums, Chapman stick, electric 
guitar as the basic ingredients, and then some synths for filling up.

Using Ableton Live 8.1.1, I started with the jazz pack of the XLN 
Addictive Drums. I Used a jazz midi-file as a start, and then changed it 
completely.
Then I played the first bass part with the Stick (plus some phasing, 
delay, etc.). For the record, since I only had 1 day to finish this, I 
used the Chapman Stick from Spectrasonics Trilian, which is awesome.

I also used one of the beautiful pad sounds from Albino.

Then I started developing the track. I didn't want to much of an 
intro-verse-chorus structure, so I just did what felt right.
In the meantime I added guitar parts with some strat samples and 
Amplitube (all played on a keyboard with quite a bit of controller stuff 
for vibrato and pitch bend, to make it the same as I would have played a 
real guitar). I also used the Albino guitar synth sound to double some 
of the guitar solos (yeah, I tried to Methenyfy the sound :-)

Since I'm a sucker for symmetry, I made an intro with some space sounds 
with loads of reverb and let it come back at the end.

I decided to start the song with the ride cymbals, then toms and then 
rest of the drums, since it's sort of not done (well, I do know a Yes 
song that starts with cymbals only - on "Tales from Topographic Oceans" 
btw).

Then it was Sunday night, and I mastered with multiband compressor, EQ 
and Limiter.

There are at least 25 things I would have changed if I had had more time.
For example the extreme reverb on the stick. I had to make a compromise, 
though, since I could only use one instance (memory problem, although I 
have 4 GB of RAM!).
I would also have made better solos, used other sounds, made the drums 
better, would have done better (drum) breaks, and I probably would have 
shortened it a bit or at least made bigger differences between certain 
"copy-paste" parts.

Anyhow, I'm quite happy with it, and I would love to make a complete 
album with this kind of stuff. I'd definitely need more time per track, 
though ;-)

Have fun,

Gert
www.gertvansanten.nl