stunningly cool music and vid

this is awesome in ways i don't even know about yet :)

Marching Too

New tune: MarchingToo.mp3 It is a bit of a "march." There's a crescendo at the end so listen all the way through!

This has one of my first attempts at non-trivial drum fills/rhythm change-ups.

A real song would throw on some sort of non-trivial melody and maybe some vocals. But I'm sticking with it being a "march" and calling it a day (weekend+day).

Dancy120

I remixed some more freesound.org samples into a 120 bpm dance jig.

Song here: dancy120-cut3

The samples I used are attributed to: h.quinius (dutty grains.aif)

and ErrorCell (EC-Digi 006.aif EC-Digi 009.aif EC-Digi 016.aif EC-Digi 017.aif

Freesound remix

I've been lurking on Freesound.org for a while now. I like their idea so much I've contributed and have not one but two t-shirts to show for it :). It is a site dedicated to reusable-for-attribution sound samples. I enjoy poking around listening to bits and pieces. I'm weird that way.

To this point I've never used any of the samples. Usually in a search result I start one looping and play others on top. Much like using them in a song... sometimes the result is useful as an inspiration for something else.

Today however I found three samples right in a row that sounded neat superimposed, just by themselves. So I pulled down the samples and did a little tweaking. The result is freesound-remix-1. This reminds me of Amon Tobin. Here's a screen grab of the Logic-work necessary to get this put down: freesound-remix-1-screen.

Freesound is awesome in that it keeps track of the stuff you download so you can attribute really easily. Here are the samples I used:

By f_tts
Untitled01.wav

By dropthedyle
bongox.aif
resclaps.aif

Update: I posted to the Freesound forums to announce this little intro.

ABDF Hierarchical Pattern (Dancemix)

First tune on next album/set. I need to learn how to get off of one phrase and into another or something... abdf-hier-dancemix

Butte songs...

Here are some of the first reasonable sounds generated by "Butte". These are MIDI sequences which I pulled into Logic and created mp3s for. All the notes are auto-generated. I didn't touch them! Sounds neat to me:

Dec2-one-multi-mix.mp3

Dec2-one.mp3

Updated: 12-7-09

swirlybounce.mp3

Updated: 12-8-09

Ok, Ms. Anonymous/Mom: how about this one?

swirlybounce-4mom.mp3 (note this was hand-edited so it isn't really 100% auto-generated any longer :)

Tinsul Pop! Butte

"Butte" is the name of a rendering library I wrote ages ago while in grad school. I never distributed it outside of my own hands... and I probably can't even dig up the old code. If I recall correctly it was a retained-mode graphics API with some stuff like what wound up in VRML. That was back in the day when just getting triangle spans rendered in hardware was a big deal. "Mesa3D" was fairly new back then and "Butte" was a play on that.

"Tinsul" is the name I made up for a WoW character (gnome, warlock of course) my son played. Created from a few syllables I took from LoTR lore it means something like "sparkle wind." That it also sounds like "tinsel" makes it cute to me. Now, long ago when I was making ever more WoW characters for myself I named one "TinsulPop" for what should be almost obvious reasons: Tinsul's pop/dad, get it?

Later I just liked "Tinsul Pop!" so much that I am likely to use it as the nom-de-whatever in any media/software sales I attempt. I have a product/codebase under works which I am declaring will be the "Butte" I never released.

Umber Thanksgiving Tune

Here's a little ditty Bailey and I worked on today. I just started with a few 4/4 beats and started adding in bits. Bailey suggested the Japanese flute part. I called it Umber...

Randrone

One of the staples of truly ambient music is the drone.

For a while now I've been listening to ambient/drone music while I fall asleep. I was curious how a random drone would sound. I fired up Plogue's Bidule and got to hacking.

What I wound up with uses 3 notes (here A, D and F). I feed the frequencies of those three notes into sine wave generators. These sine wave generators each are then modulated by randomly triggered amplitude envelopes.

Because I wanted the ability to "play" some high frequency drones on top of the lower frequency bass line I added an overtone of each of the notes with its own random envelope and mixed these now 6 sound sources together. The performance aspect of this was just me moving sliders around on the mixer to select the random sources. (Bidule v. 0.9685UB file: threenote-sine-drone.bidule)

The result is "Randrone." Enjoy...

This leads me to a thought I had (which I'm sure is not novel)... much of music is hierarchical, whole notes, 1/2 notes, 1/4 notes, etc. At least in the time domain. I wonder if creating notes in a fractal sort of way is noticable?

Fire Op aka Pentatonic Scale Freestyling

This tune came from an quick exercise in freestyling with a pentatonic scale. I'm not good at playing multiple voices on the keyboard. So I captured the D-A bass line sequence then played on top. After a little re-arranging later I added the harp piece. Then the stretched out viola voice and staged in the sound effects tracks. Short and I think sweet.

I realize Fire Op is a pretty simple piece. But it makes me happy that I can arrange something halfway decent sounding.

Sound Sketches: a little Harmony and Phrasing

After "multiwalk" I decided to think about harmonic progression early in any new works. Multiwalk didn't really have any, actually. There was some disharmony raised in counterpoint, but nothing resembling a "chord progression." At least not on purpose...

Yesterday I dug up an old melody sketch and began playing with it. Listen to the bare bones. Pretty simple: this phrase is ultimately rooted in C major (E and G in C,E,G) but by the third note it is leading toward F major (A in F,A,C). At the end it comes back to C after having shown the F and so technically this would be a form of I-IV-I chord progression. Well, close to one anyway, especially if you loop it.

After recognizing this progression I set about to both embellish the melody and also strengthen the perception of the progression. I really like the idea of layering in music so starting with that bare bones melody structure I began adding bits. The result is a "layered intro" sort of sound. This piece has 4 copies of the bare melody. To each new instance I've added something. In the second phrase I added two instances of C-maj chords to strengthen the I-ness at the beginning. The third adds a little rhythmic embellishment. The final phrase adds IV-ness (FAC chords) at the end. I suppose this ruins the I-IV-I and turns it into a hanging I-IV. Or maybe just mishmashed. But I think it sounds nice at the end... like the setup for something big!

One thing I also didn't like about Multiwalk was that each voice while having modes didn't really have very distinctive modes. By that I mean I didn't alter the rhythmic or note structure in any of the voices apart from the initial distinct phase it started out in. Given the "layered intro" bit above I decided to try to give it a rest/bridge to the fourth repeated phrase. So I set about to find a set of notes somewhat compatible and create a separate distinct melody with it. Using the circle of fifths and knowing that I was already using C and F it appeared that G would be a good fit. It turns out G is "V" and mixing I, IV, and V in a progression doesn't exactly suck. The result is a "bridged, layered intro." The bridge, as I'm calling it here is where the third phrase was in the previous example. Thinking about this some more I should probably drop the IV-ness at the end of the last phrase and make it I-ness to bring it back home. Maybe I'll update and add that later.

Multiwalk

"Multiwalk" is the title of the first song I've created I'd consider decent enough to ask others to listen to. I think it's been cooking long enough that I should stop tinkering with it and see how it ages. I'm reminded of an art teacher I had once that said (I'm paraphrasing) "the difference between 2nd graders and adults is that 2nd graders know when to stop cutting." Or something like that.

The idea behind this song is a series of intertwining "walks" that lead to a near-miss crescendo then resolve with the pieces moving apart again. Well, that's the idea anyway. In practical terms there is a dominant piano piece and bells piece. The piano part has two main modes and is colored with flourishes along the way. The bells part is really a faster mimic of the piano part but does have some changes, not only in tempo. Background for the whole thing is a cello and other slow background, almost, drones. The crescendo section is not quite emphatic or lined-up enough. So you're left feeling (at least I am) that it "just missed." I do like the plaintive squeal in there though...

I produced this in Logic Pro 8. I think it took something less that 6 months of calendar time. Real editing time would be on the order of days, though. Along the way I've produced probably 4 or 5 different versions... each with a different feel to the bass/slow lines. At one point I had a staccato, almost military sounding drumbeat going on behind it. After some feedback I tried using a cello and dropping the drums (except for the flourishes). I think it works the best so far.

Enjoy "multiwalk." I'd love to learn your opinions.

Update: early version with drums.