David’s Adventures Through the World of Music Creation and Sonic Exploration

Okay, so I’ve been quite busy at the office with various stuff and haven’t had the time to compose, nor to blog about anything interesting. Sorry ’bout that.

Anyhow, I’ve written a new track and I’m now working on the lyrics for it. I might have got a female vocalist for it, so hopefully this will turn out to be something good.

The track is based around a couple of thick, layered, pads and a cute melody. The drums might sound Enigma-ish (in a good way) and there’s a Tangerine Dream-ish arpeggio in the background.

No title for it yet, but I got a couple of suggestions.

Sorry for entering a journal post instead of a blog post. Will blog more when I got more time on my hands.

Oh, the pads in the track are created in Kontakt 3 using waveforms bought at Galbanum. Since Rapture won’t start in my 3-bit version of Cubase 4 I just started creating patches in Kontakt 3. I’ve been using it too little. You can do crazy things with it!

It became a blog entry after all… ;-)

Almost every song, track or project, I produce is a journey. A journey through sounds guided by inspiration and the machines I’m working with.

Some projects have a destination, or a goal, which I have a pretty good view of. I want it to sound in a certain way, not be short than a certain amount of time, have a specific feeling to it and so on.

I don’t have my mind set on the type of sounds I want to use - I only have a hunch. Therefor I most often let the machines guide my way through the creation process and a lot of sounds I’m using are tweaked presets that gives me inspiration while playing something when browsing through them.

I’m right now listening to the first track of the upcoming Pretorium album and I must admit that I’m very pleased with it. It would be fantastic to do a live show with loads of musicians. Live drummers, guitarists, bassists, a string quatet perhaps and vocals. Not sure that any label would be interrested though… but I’ll have a look around. It’s at least well worth trying - isn’t it?

I’m in LOVE!

I’m going to through Cubase out the window any day now. It’s full of bugs, it’s crashing right before my eyes and bouncing mixes might fuck up my UAD cards so I have to reboot to get it working again. It’s a piece of crap actually!

A few things:
When mixing down an arrangement to an mp3 file - do you think the mp3 tag editor actually works? Nope.
When adding the MIDI Intert “Track Control” - do you think those settings will be saved with you project? Hell no!
When mixing down different soloed busses - do you think that you will get anything that sounds? Well, sometimes…

What should I be using? I don’t have time to spend almost 3 hourse bouncing loads of tracks and then find out that they don’t contain anything except silence.

I’m right now bouncing a song for the fourth time hoping it will actually contain something that is audible… *sigh*

Arturia has a nice offer this month (and last too, if I recall) which I wrote about here. But I’m skipping that one in favour of an Akai EWI 4000s. I need to get back to the roots and find new inspiration and I think that can come from another way of playing music.

I’m also waiting for the Spectrasonic Omnisphere which seems to be a killer. So that’s on my list instead of the Arturia stuff.

A lot going on at the moment, so I’ll try to recap some of it later this week. Stay tuned.