Planar Crystal 020

The planar crystal is a device which can transport someone spatially, temporally, and inter-dimensionally upon touching.  Those who touch it accidentally may wander the multiverse searching for the way home.


Motif ES7 with PLG-150DX (used for Skrillex sounds, Waldorf Pulse, Dune (Plug-in), mixed in Reaper, Kicks from Pulse and Little Phatty, some effects using Lexicon Vortex.  Drums using BFD Eco and MPC500.  Sound effects include home made electronic drones, filter modulated bulldozer samples and glitched effects.  Audio damage Replicant, Michael Norris Drone and glitch plugins.  Final noise sweep is a Thing 1 Noise generator modulated through a Korg EMX1.  Vocals recorded with DP004 digital recorder and modified using Michael Norris FX and Replicant.  Voxengo Elephant used for mastering compression.  EHX Stereo Talking Machine used on arpeggios near the end to give vocal effects.

Planar Crystal

I am currently working on a psytrance piece.  This piece is somewhat inspired by groups like Infected Mushroom, Ott, and Shpongle.  It is still a work in progress and may be so permanently.  I am using the creation of this piece to help me learn Reason better.

(Note: The latest version is above in a more recent post.)

I started by listening to some psytrance songs to get a better feel for the type of music I wanted to create.  I decided Heavyweight by Infected Mushroom was close to the feeling I wanted to create.  I picked up a simple kick snare rhythm from another song and started working on that.  I set up a couple of kick tracks with one set up as a straight 4/4 beat and the other a somewhat more complex rhythm.  I then set up a snare track to complement the kick.

I set up a track for the hhats and combined hhats and snare and sent to an outboard processor (Lexicon Vortex flange delay effect).  It took me a while to figure out the correct configuration that would allow me to send output to the processor and record the input while monitoring it.  I kept generating feedback loops when I would try to monitor the effect.  I ended up having to go through a mixer with a headphone output to listen to it.

I also figured out how to use Reaper's folders so that I could group all of the drums under one master track.  That way I can "collapse" the folders down so they don't take up so much space as well as control the overall drum volume with a single envelope.  That makes this much more powerful for producing music.

I then used Dune to create the introductory bubbly bass synth sound and played a few notes until I found a groove that sounded good.  I used Reaper's MIDI editor to add filter sweeps to the sound.  I went through my collection of samples and tried to find some that would make good sweeps to be used before a transition.  I put a few sweeps at different spots throughout the song.  I also added some background sound effects with a drone generating plug-in.

Next I wanted to get some analog synth in the song so I went to the Motif and figured out how to send the output from the arpeggiator to Reaper to record an arpeggio while listening to the instrument.  I recorded the MIDI sequence into Reaper then used Reaper to play back the sequence to the Waldorf Pulse Plus.  I modulated the sound of the Pulse with the filter knobs while it was playing and recorded the result directly to Reaper.

Rig with Motif Pulse and MPC

I have been attempting to make a psytrance song lately.  This is a picture of my keyboard rig.  The wood ends on the Pulse make it much more control friendly.

The MIDI connection is as follows:

Motif MIDI In <- MIDI Out of Computer
Motif MIDI Out -> MIDI In of Computer
Motif MIDI Thru -> Pulse MIDI In
Motif Local Control = Off
Reaper is Running on the computer with a track set to:
  I/O = MIDI Out
  Record enabled
  Record input: Audio or MIDI
  Monitor enabled
  Input = MIDI In (All Channels)

That way I can play the arp on the Motif (Note the Motif arp can be set to a different MIDI channel than the regular MIDI channel!) and either record it to Reaper or listen to it on the Pulse.

MPC is not connected in this photo.

Hadronistics

Hadronistics involves the study and application of Hadristors; gravitational devices which which play an essential role in FTL (Faster Than Light) transportation.

Took this one down.

This piece was done by improvising four different long sounds using home made boxes including the Thing 2 device depicted in the image.  The Thing 2 device combines an Atari Punk Console, a NAND Synth, an Odd Filter and a noise source in a single box with four LEDs, two of which are blinking.  The walls of the box are covered with fresnel lenses to give the impression of something which look larger on the inside than it does on the outside (TARDiS).  Other instruments used are an APC expanded with a capacitor array and odd filter used as input to a Bass++ drum trigger for rhythm patterns.

The Thing 1 noise source, NAND Synth 1 and 2 with VCF LPF 1, some signals were processed through a Motif with chorus, reverb, phasing and delay.  The entire sound was processed in Reaper with Apple reverb and Voxengo Elephant for compression.

Inspiration

Sometimes I find myself searching for inspiration when creating music.  I want to make some music but I'm not sure what to do.  I think everyone has this problem from time to time, staring at a blank page.  In this article I'll describe some sources of inspiration that you might want to try.

Patch it

Synthesizer patches or presets can often be a source for inspiration.  I hate to use someone else's patch directly but they can often inspire me in a piece.  Often times a patch can suggest a certain mood or type of piece.  Or it may inspire me to create a similar patch.  One cool source of patch inspiration is the randomize feature.  My Waldorf Pulse analog synth has a random patch generator.  This is a really cool feature for patch inspiration without having to worry about copying someone else's work.  You can keep generating random patches until you find something that sound really cool, then tweak it a little bit to make it more usable.  I notice some software synthesizers have this randomize feature and I wish others would included it.  You can also get some inspiration from a new plug-in.

Got Rhythm

I'm not a drummer and I must confess I don't have great drum intuition which is probably OK for working with ambient sound but hurts quite a bit when I want to make some techno.  One technique I found is to find a piece of music with a similar style to what I want to make, then focus on just the kick.  I try to match the kick pattern, not necessarily the kick sound.  I don't have to match the pattern precisely because I really don't want to match the pattern precisely.  I just want to have a nice sounding unique kick pattern.  Sometimes once I have the kick pattern I can add the rest of the percussion sounds myself.  The second drum I usually add is the snare.  I may also base the snare pattern on another track if I need to.  The next pattern to add is the high hat pattern.  Then add other sounds.  I also like to mix acoustic and electronic drum sounds to provide more depth.

Sacred Chord

Stealing a kick pattern from another song is OK for inspiration, why not some chords.  Of course you probably wouldn't want to steal all of the chords for a song, then you would just have someone else's song, but there are some other ways to do this.  I have a large number of music books.  Sometimes times I like to browse through them and play certain chord progressions, ignoring the rest of the music, just jamming on the chord progressions to see if I can find a groove I like.  So even if the progression was originally from a country ballad or a classical piece it may end up in a bit of my electronic music.  Beethoven and Mozart were great at putting together chords.

Another variation on this is to take a certain artist and try to integrate their overall sound.  I'm a big fan of Pink Floyd and I like to make music with a bit of a Floyd vibe but I wouldn't want to copy their music directly.  So I studied how they bring their chords together, the types of chords they use.  Then use similar chord structures to make original songs.

Limit Your Palette

I have a lot of equipment but sometimes have too many options works against you.  I sometimes like to stick with just one instrument or a pair of instruments.  Once I tried to do a whole piece with just software synthesizers.  After you get a good sound going you can always fill it out with other sounds.

Beauty

A beautiful landscape, a beautiful person or feeling can also be the source of inspiration.  Don't forget those.

Hopefully you may find this information helpful when you are seeking to stimulate your muse.

Remixing Part 2

I was working on a remix of my friend Brian Bethke's song Red Window.  This song works really well for a remix because it does not have a complex bass part, so I could just low shelf filter the bass out of the song and work from there.  Here is my original remix:

Red Window (Plasma Remix 1)

At this point I like to take a little time and listen to the song.  I usually burn it to disk and listen to it in my car to make sure everything sounds balanced etc.  I wanted to make the break a little more interesting too.  I worked some more on it and added some new parts.  I think I increased the length of the breaks a bit.  After that this is the version I came up with:

Red Window (Plasma Remix 2)

I then posted both copies for Brian to review.  I also asked a DJ friend of mine, Alex, to review the songs.  Alex had some great suggestions on how to build energy and I did a third version of the song based on those suggestions.

Red Window (Plasma Remix 3)

At this point I am planning on giving this project a rest for a while and work on some other projects.  I may come back to it later but the remix is pretty good as it is.

Blog out,
Plasma Portal

Remixing

I decided that a good way to get into music production would be to do a remix.  I contacted a friend who had written a song with a bit of an electronica vibe to it about doing a remix of the song and he was happy to agree to it.  He even volunteered to send me some files. To get started I ripped a copy of his song from a CD and loaded it into Audacity.  The next thing I needed to do was to figure out the tempo of the song.  Let's say a four beat measure is 1.845 seconds.

BPM = 4 beats /1.845 s x 60 s/min = 130 bpm.

The other way to do this is to load the sample into Reaper and modify the tempo until the song matches up with the measure lines in Reaper.  This is probably the best time to do any time stretching to the entire file if you intend to change the original tempo of the song since the next step is to chop up individual pieces of the song to prepare for remixing.  Changing the time often results in artifacts so its best not to do it if you don't have to.  In this case I did not want to change the time.  Both Audacity and Reaper have time stretch/pitch shift capabilities if you want to change the key or tempo of the song.  I suggest auditioning them all to see which one sounds the best.

I did not need to make any real modifications in Audacity except to save it as a wav to a new directory that would hold all of the remix files for this song.  I then went through the song and isolated different song sections.  There was an intro with some reversed instrument sounds that lasted about a measure, the outro was nearly identical.  There were a couple of two measure sections of groove.  There were longer sections of verse and chorus.  There was a short two measure instrument break with just the basic groove.  There was a bridge for a few measures.  There was an electric guitar solo at the end of the song for a few measures.  I used Audacity to create a separate sample for each of these sections and saved them in the remix directory.  In some cases I broke the section down to a single measure and in other cases I saved several measures.  You can do some of this inside of Reaper but I wanted to have easy access to these files.  When I get a little further I may ask my friend for a separate track with just the vocals, just non-percussion instruments, bass & kick and other percussion as separate tracks.  Actually as long as I have vocals on a separate track compared to the other instruments I would be in pretty good shape.

I then opened up Reaper added a new track and loaded this song as a media file into the first track. The first thing I wanted to do with this track was to add a 808/909 kick to it.  It had an acoustic sounding kick that was set far in the background so I wanted to spice up the kick for a dance groove.  The first think I did was to apply an FFT based low shelf filter to filter the lows rolling off around 150 Hz down to zero.  This took much of the bass from the keyboards and drums.  This opened up some space for me to add the drum machine kick and the synth bass.

I really like the Dune software synthesizer plug-in.  I have tried a few others but this one seems to have the best sound.  For this type of work it is probably good to start with MIDI and a software synth.  I can always go to MIDI analog synth later or record digital audio on an acoustic or analog electronic instrument later.

I first added a basic kick drum sound, with the intention of modifying it later to make it more complex (or simpler).  I used Dune and MIDI to create the kick sound.  I then copied the MIDI file to an identical file.  I modifed the copied file to actually remove some of the drum beats.  I used this as a small intro for the kick drum.  I repeated copying and modifying the kick MIDI part to create some more drum variation through out the song.

I next added a bass part.  I auditioned a variety of synth basses until I found one in Dune that I liked and worked with the song.  I created a simple bass part to underscore the melody.  I had to figure out what chords were in the song at this point.  It turned out to be basically a Bb minor song.  I added the bass notes using an Akai mpk mini.  I then went into the MIDI file and quantized the notes manually.  I then added some envelopes and applied one to the amplitude and the other to the filter cut-off so I could fade in the bass and sweep the filter during the part.

I thought the song could use a clap and I added this with Dune as well.  I added an amplitude envelope to fade in the claps over time.

After the first chorus there was a single measure of groove before the next verse so I split the song sample at that point and added a few extra measures from the sample sections I had saved earlier.

In this part I added some strings.  I auditioned a few different strings and although Dune has nice strings I went with Komplete elements strings that I had just bought and added the Guitar Rig Phasor from NI to achieve a phased string effect.  I then played in a string part starting with a lower line then adding a second line about one octave higher.  I copied the string phrase to a few different places throughout the song once I had a part that I liked.  To get a good part I played back the song main line and improvised string harmonies along with it  until I ended up with a nice sounding part.  I added volume envelopes to the sound arranged the fading.

I had learned from reading some articles to always mix at a low volume.  I find this technique works really well.  You know you can almost always hear a part with the volume cranked but can you hear it at low volumes?  When I do a mix I always turn the volume down to a low level and bring each instrument down until you can't really hear it then gradually bring it up until it sounds balanced.  I do this with each different part one at a time.  After I think I have a good mix I turn up the volume and verify that no parts need to be adjusted.

After this I saved a mix to disk brought it into Audacity and used Voxengo Elephant for compression (Master's punch) finally saving to MP3.  I burned the original song and the new mix to CD so I could listen in my car.  I have quite a bit of car time so I like to listen to mixes in the car.  It also helps me understand if it is a good mix if it sounds good in a car with all of the traffic noise.

That's about as far as I have gotten in the remix process so far.  Some of the next steps are to expand some of the other non vocal parts and add some solo synth instruments.  I'm thinking of adding a more complex sound to the intro or possibly the outro.  I may want to capture some of the original kick rhythm, use some extreme filtering or effects on some of the original tracks.  I have to add some sweeps, ramps, splashes and rolls to improve the transitions.

The second aspect of remixing was to review some remixes that I liked.  I read the Wikipedia entry on remixing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix and then found several of the suggested remixes on Youtube and listened to them so I could get a feel for the history of the remix.  I also found a number of remixes in my song collection and listened to them to see how they handled it.  I also listened to some of my favorite electronic artists to study how they put their songs together so I could use similar techniques.

Blog out,
Plasma Portal