Did you miss me?

I couldn’t make it through the whole year on schedule but I’m catching up.  Here is my song for June and it’s already August.  Most of the summer is behind me.  And behind you too.

Most of June I was in Job search mode and although I’m not yet fully employed I’m at least bringing in SOME money and some money is better than no money.  Can you hear my desperation in the music?

The germ for this piece sat around for quite a while on my hard drive and was worked on in several versions of Cakewalk Sonar.  It was just the main piano riff and final guitar solo which had this sound of staring out a window.  I’ve finally filled it out with drums, accordian, more guitar and synth.  That’s what’s so great about having this blog, it forces me to, occasionally, get focused and give these snippets their due.

Rendered entirely in Sonar 7 it features 2 real guitar tracks along with a handful of sampled instruments.

Happy Listening:all the rectangular rooms

I almost missed September! But here I am with hours to spare.

This piece was built around a vocal sample that I’ve had for so long I forgot where it came from but I really like it. Unfortunately it’s in a foreign language and I don’t know what it says. I don’t even know what the language is, but it sounds like something from the middle east.

As a consequence, I had to come up with a title that could possibly be completely inappropriate given what the singer is actually saying. To me the piece sounds like it could be the soundtrack to something that pops into your head while you’re not quite awake but not quite conscious either. Hence the title.

But for all I know the lyric could be the punchline of a dirty joke sung in Farsi. If anyone knows the language and can fill me in… awesome!

This started off in cakewalk’s Project5 but when I decided to add guitars, I added Sonar. You can record audio in Project5 but it’s more difficult to work with because it can only use one audio device at a time. So I can’t use a firewire device to get audio into my computer while using the computer’s soundcard to hear the song as it plays, which is what I like to do.

So this song contains the vocal sample of forgotten origin, a couple of real guitar tracks through a digitech GXN3 and midi programmed drums, percussion, string bass and violins.

Happy Listening! An Aesthetic Twilight

This is an instrumental cover of the Led Zeppelin Hit. I tried to modernize it a with a bit of an industrial accent.

It was recorded and mixed in Sonar, with Reason handling the synths and percussion. The only real instruments are the guitars of which there are 3 tracks worth. Although the guitars are real, they were recorded through amp and cabinet simulation.

The song was a lot of fun to do. I’m a huge Zeppelin fan and I like doing covers so they can be re-spun and possibly viewed from different angles.

I’m particularly happy with this one.

Happy Listening: immigrant song.mp3

Is this piece too weird? It came out of some free form experimenting with a free VST plugin called Delay Lama. It’s one of the most unusual synths I’ve seen. It simulates the sound of a human voice reminiscent of Tuvan throat or overtone singing. You have control over the pitch, the size of the vocal tract and the vowel being sung.

Of course I had to automate it in completely inhuman ways to make it clearly still a machine (am I threatened?)

What makes the plugin so unusual is that it also visually represents the singer. As you manipulate the synth’s output an animated monk’s face follows right along. It’s fun to play with and watch during playback.

It works on both windows and mac and should work in any VST host although I hosted it in Sonar. I used propellerhead’s Reason, in rewire mode, to do the percussion. I think the percussion options in Reason exceed that of Sonar by a good deal.

So I ended up with with a short, world-music inspired bit of electronic music.

Happy Listening: newage-sewage.mp3

A sensitive piano solo about picking one’s nose perhaps?

I can’t play the piano so this piece came about from just noodling around with a midi controller (M-Audio Radium 49, no longer available). I recorded the midi results of my halting, uneven playing into Cakewalk Sonar and through the magic of midi editing, I was able to fix it up and make it sound like it was played somewhat competently.

It was then rendered through a piano patch in Sonar’s DS864 software sampler.

Happy listening: Just Out Of Reach

This song was inspired by the printing on the side of a grocery bag from an Asian grocery store.

Check it out:

The lyrics are taken entirely from the text on the bag. Also, for some reason I tried to make the piece sound a bit like a theme from a TV show (from the days when TV shows had songs that introduced them) so it’s short. Of course, due to my stunted imagination, most of my songs are short, so it’s not like I really needed to make excuses.

While being short is not rare, me singing *is* rare. Most of the singing is heavily processed so I felt OK doing it. All the spoken parts are NOT me. They’ve all been synthesized from various web sources all of which I’ve forgotten.

Other than my voice the only other real instrument is my guitars. Everything else was done on the computer.

Elephant Family was recorded entirely in Cakewalk Sonar. The guitar was recorded through a Digitech GNX2 processor.

Happy Listening: Elephant Family

Every blog has to have a first post, so here it is.