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

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’ve spent this weekend leaning over a Mackie Onyx 1640 mixing Joachim Rogalski’s upcoming EP. I’ve also done a remix of “Kosmopolit” which might be a bit weird if you’re not familiar with what I’m sometimes working with - but I got free hands so don’t blame me! ;o)

Besides that I’ve mastered Electro Nova’s EP, been fighting a bit with the 4.5.2 update for Cubase and seen Strangers in Wonderland live at Alcazar, Nalen.

It’s been a good weekend after all even though I’m a bit behind thanks to Cubase…

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.

I remember when it was 1997 (or was it 1998? I don’t really remember) and Steinberg introduced their new technology called Virtual Studio Technology, but today most commonly known as the abbreviation VST. Okay, it might have been earlier than 1997 too, but I do remember specifically when I tweaked Neon for the first time in 1997, or 1998. It was the beginning of something new. It didn’t sound that good compared to the hardware I had back in those days, but it was a new concept - that’s for sure.

Later came TC|Works Mercury-1 which (back in those days) sounded fabulous compared to what was out there. It could play four sounds simultaneously, if you had computer enough, and it reminded of a Roland SH-101 but, dare I say it, more powerful.

Back in those days you would load up a sound on your hardware synthesizer, record the MIDI to your host and then you change the MIDI track output to the soft-synth instead. Since it would use almost every cycle available in your massive Pentium 2 CPU running at 450 MHz you quickly bounced the track and used it as pure audio.

I must have missed the turn-around point when you started doing it backwards.

Today, you load up a sound in any VST instrument, use a MIDI keyboard to record the MIDI data on to a track and then… Then you start fiddling with your hardware synthesizers. You change the MIDI track output to your massive MIDI interface and dial up a great sound on the hardware unit connected to it via the data protocol from the 1970’s. Then, you record its audio onto a new track and mutes the MIDI.

I wonder what’s next.

Cubase is ready stretching some audio files for me since I’m cranking up a dull track from sleepy 128 bpm to more dance-y 139.