In case you want to test out the most non-earthly Guitar Patch, and you have Logic Pro 7.1, Right-click on this to download this Logic Strip preset. IMHO it’s the most weird guitar sound I’ve ever produced, this after ten minutes of experimenting with Logic 7’s guitar amp simulator and the other effects. Logic Pro 7 has one of the most amazing plugin sets out there. This one has the Evoc FB filter unit, Modulator Delay, Ringshifters, and many other parts working together…

PS: In case the download has the wrong file prefix, make sure it ends with .cst.

Sometimes funny mental blocks appear. I’ve been planning on doing this special guitar-centric album next. Most of my cables are in use in the studio, including my old guitar cable. And somehow I never got to get a new one, a $15 purchase, until today. Oh well. If you want to remove mental blocks, remove them one at a time. Remove even small ones that will block you.

Anyway, with the guitar cable in place I could finally test out Logic Pro 7 guitar simulators, and they sound really good, good enough for my taste. The Pro 7 audio unit effects are also really nice for guitar work. The tape delay sound reminds me of gold old U2 days, and the stereo spread is perfect to widen out the mono guitar sound.

Had great fun jamming with Jam pack loops and my guitar tonight — next is to silently push the record button while jamming along.

I took home a couple of CDs for doing research concerning the next project, guitar music remixed into pieces with Ableton Live. Well, Seems Jeff Beck did it all with You Had It Coming, released 2000. That musician is so out there. Think that Jeff Beck has played guitar since the mid 60:ies. If you compare what he’s doing with his fellow Rolling Stones members, there’s not even any comparison concerning who’s more creative.

Anyway, I have Jimi Hendrix Axis: Bold as Love, Eric Clapton music, even listened ot Garbage that has done similar experiments. I’m sure there’s a place for another similar album.

Something I worked on for a couple of days, Download from here. Note it will be gone soon, so hurry downloading it.

There’s remixed music by a many interesting new Brazilian and Latin-American artists, Zuco 103, Cyz, Electro Coco, a real techno mix of the Bebel Gilberto song Winter that was already a wild mix - Nuspirit Helsinki Reinterpretation). The ending is more commercial, sorry, had to sneak such parts in as it will be used for aerobics instructions. But the last song I really like, Yoa Ye Ye by Snowboy.

That’s quite a job. Speaking of odd punctuations, jazz-themes, odd switches here and there. My Ableton Live was working on overtime to get things lined up.

I’m really fascinated of the new latin music scene, use of synthesizers and weird loops — seems to be a renaissance concerning new music produced in South America.

If there’s a movie with one of the best movie sound tracks ever, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest with music by Bernard Herrmann should be one of the top five.

It’s not just the music sequences, such as the build-up for the famous chase down the presidental statues in South Dakota, it’s also the taste of not adding any music to the scenes such as the air-plane chase. No music in the sound track makes the farm land feel very isolated and raw.

Hermann also switches between romantic themes, and terror themes, within seconds, quite elegant movie music. For a while I was just listening and not watching the TV (not that I’ve seen this movie many times, including on big screen in Palo Alto, if you have a chance to see North by Northwest on big screen, do it).

In case you wonder what fun you could do with Albeton Live, here are some recent links from the Ableton Newletter:

In this QuickTime movie Robert Henke shows all the amazing possibilities with the beat repeater effect.

Here Telefon Tel Aviv talks about what fun they have with Ableton Live. Especially check out the video on that page.

No wonder we Live users have more fun!

See this web page for information about Rebirth the ambient production, and this is where you could download it from, too.

Also updated the podcasting files.

Spending this night trying to find 130-135bpm songs for a world music remix I promised some time ago, and I wanted to focus on Brazilian-themed dance tracks. To my great surprise there is such a movement, I found many Bebel Gilberto remixes, as well as bands such as Zuco103, Uma Batida Diferente, and others. iTunes is very handy when browsing and trying to find music for remixes, even odd cases such as Brazilian techno.

Ok, got the ambient project ‘Rebirth’ finally done today. The problem with too much delays was solved by clever use of Ableton Live automation, I was just drawing new envelopes concerning dry/wet and feedback parameters, and this way the delay changes were more unexpected and organic, rather than static.

You could really have a fun time ‘painting’ envelopes concerning effects inside Ableton Live. You could quickly switch draw modes on/off with command-B, when draw-mode is on you could paint selections of bars with effect parameter values. I felt like Pollock when doing unexpected twists and turns using draw-mode and changing various effect parameters — it’s like doing modern art, but your canvas is the audio track timeline and effect settings.

Ok, the remix is done, see this page for the track listing and the download.

I asked my son Riker to have fun with Mondrian animations, so he did an interesting Flash cover for the page.

Just did some last tweaks and changes, but at some point it’s best to stop and just publish the material.

The tracks start with mystical sounds, move over to robots taking over the world, then into more intense trance and techno material, and at the end it’s just strange mayhem and final pop-trance song. We listened to it tonight, me and my wife, while doing the traditional Saturday movie trip, and it was Ok for finally publishing the remix.

I had this three-month old remix project that I started, but never finished as I didn’t like the final cut. Anyway, last night 1am I took another listening, and took a crazy approach to just do everything differently concerning remixing.

Usually, there’s a certain pattern with longer DJ remixes, you build up the tempo from let’s say 120 up to 126 along a timeline of 50 minutes or so, and the style of the songs blend into each other, so the outcome is like this long ’same’ song.

Anyway, hey, I like shift-stick cars rather than automatic cars. So the tempo is going up, but there are all kinds of dramatic changes in the drum styles along the remix. I also mixed in all kinds of funny effects, chopped parts inside out, used the Live plugins to stutter samples around, and just had fun.

Sometimes rules have to be broken. If everyone did same kind of remixes, the world would be a boring place. And how could each remix artist even be noticed, if they copycat the style others use?

I just need to clean up the parts and then the remix will be uploaded to the web site, this weekend.

Another issue was that I used for this mix MP3 files, mostly from beatport. Argh, the sound quality, even with 320kps MP3 files are not there, the biggest problem being the high level of compression that causes strange overtone distortion in the losssy version.. So from now I will only get WAV and FLAC files, that’s for sure.

I was trying to finish up the Rebirth project that was 55 minutes of birth-giving music to my cousin, and noticed when doing a critical listening in the car, that ‘wow, a lot of delays everywhere…’

I suspect this is the curse of producing ambient music with huge sound walls, it’s so tempting to crank up the delay settings to achieve a spacious sound, but at some point too much sugar is just too much. I must say one of my favourite ambient records is Steve Roach’s Magnifient Void, but that album is really pushing the limits of ambient reverb and delays.

Oh well, back to the mixing stage, take down the levels, remix, do critical listenings, and release something….

The nice thing with having a well-paid daytime job is that music-wise I have full control over what I want to achieve. If this would be my only way of earning money for my family, subtle and obvious commercial decisions would crawl into the creative process. Most likely it would lead to frustration and a sense of not being in control.

I really admire a director such as Woody Allen that is now in a position to produce and direct any kind of movie he envisions. Frank Zappa was in a similar position.

I actually feel sorry for any starving artists, especially newcomers, that know that they need to conform to a concurrent style or musical direction in order to generate income.

The drawback is that there’s less time for music creation, but this is a valid option. I rather go with integrity than compromise at this point of time.

Each year my kids ask me to put together ambient horror music to be played outside the door at Halloween. By which I overreach and spend some time putting together a 15-30 minute piece of music making parodies of horror musis genres of all kinds. Usually I end up taking only few pieces for the ‘outside the door’ music.

Anyway, this is good for the creative juices, usually I have only a day or so to put it together from zero, compose, write, arrange and mix it together. This year I only had close to four hours.

Below is the URL where you could download the final rough mix of the 2005 Halloweed project, code name ‘Cats and Wolves’:

Download MP3 file here.

Here’s the playlist and short notes of each of the 11 songs:

1: The Cat on Top of the Church Organ
How that would sound like.

2: Trance Monster Baby
Just wanted to hear what a Euro-Trance producer would produce, cheese-wise, for Halloween…

3: Space is Dead
Don’t know, kind of “Space is Dead” stated by Willian Shatner, or something similar, sounds very philosophical… Like the death of all bad SF movies…

4: Slave to the Rock Monster
My first attempt on 15 years doing heavy rock, shades of Spinal Tap, I would think…

5: El Horror El Un Cafe
Took the title and the citations from my son’s Spanish text book, he promised to translate this to me later this week so I know what I said. I was thinking about scary latino women in rock videos… Notice the clever transitions from the rock song to this latin rhytm one, took me 3 second to mix it together.

6: Spam
Yes, Spam emails are scary stuff.

7: Horror Movie without Horrors
That’s what my wife said when she heard it, just wanted to try out something nicer with wolves and cats in the background.

8: Couch Ghosts
They lure in women into a boring dance with boring music so the women scream…

9: African Spirits
Something about exorcists running amok in Zimbhave.

10: Synth Terror from Eighties
That’s the sound you hear in some early 80:ies horror movies, when the arranger got their hands on a Prophet 5, and had two hour to make a horror score. Still wonder why that man is moaning at the end of the song…

11: Beaks
My son on clarinet, figure out what variation of a famous song…

Anyway, enjoy. –Kent

PS: Projects such as this shows the true meaning of something/anything.