Ok, all 51 minute done today. Next is to go through the whole composition and remix and produce it. Usually I need to go through each part, remix sections, add more effects, cut down parts. It’s a little bit like editing a movie and make it usable. It takes about the same time as just composing all the songs.

This is a strange composition, indeed. I wanted to have more gritty sounds, and hip-hop:ish themes, and other techno-gritty parts. And it was fun breaking rules left and right.

Ok, just got a confirmation letter, the film music podcast is now part of the iTunes podcast directory, it should show up under Music. Not that there are so many podcasts in that directory, so it’s like a needle in the hay stack, but hopefully someone finds it so they could use music for their indie productions.

My son and I invented Unternet today, it’s like another dimension of Internet. We have half of the animations done, rest should follow tomorrow, meanwhile I uploaded the “Going through the Unternet Tunnel” background music up in the Film Section. Fun with Ableton Live, flangers and backwards loops.

Finally convinced my son to build a couple of flash movies needed. This is The Cosmic Clapper!

At the same time, we found The End of Internet, very spooky, didn’t realize the end was at our web site….

As part of creating 10-20 movie tracks a week, I need a lot of titles. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out good titles for them, but they are needed. When I register songs for BMI, for example, I need some kind of a representation name for the song, otherwise it’s getting hard to track such songs in future.

Also, it would be nice if the title gave an indication what it was used for — and it’s also a hook for someone for downloading.

So, in my desperation I started to type in certain key words in Google, film, dark, passage, and so, and got a lot of good hits, for example a Japanese film called Dark Water. I didn’t want to copycat this title, so I called my next uploaded film music piece Dark Water Ascending, as the tone of this song had something to do with water, darkness, or something similar.

Ok, have film material uploaded, so I’m starting on a project called Nocturnal Digits. It was inspired by a James Holden remix tape I heard one night — somewhat gritty techno, simplistic, odd drums, strange synth gritty sounds, and so on.

It should be a 35-50 minute piece, consisting of 12-15 parts, or less.

I’ve recorded ten base songs, and I have plenty of additional loops and other melodies just in case for building the collage. Actually I have even more material today as I went through my old projects and put them in storage, but before that dumped out interesting audio material. The fun part is that I don’t even know how it will sound like, ultimately, there’s plenty of experimentation to be done. Anyway, it should be simple/gritty/odd/gnarly kind of modernistic techno.

A lot of the synths used are LinDrum’s Octopus and Zebra2 (beta version I’m testing out). And other strange things, stay tuned.

To get latest film music along the way, subscribe to the Film Music Podcast

I have a lot of film music material, just need to export it along the way. I will also export this podcast via iTunes in case the material reaches a bigger audience that might need such material.

See The Film Section for latest film music I’m working on, and uploading to the site. The page has more information about the licensing deals, it’s a good one for any indie film maker, that’s for sure.

Hey, my kids and wife gave me one of the best Xmas presents ever, Tranzport from Frontier Design Group. It’s this small wireless controller for controlling DAWs, works flawlessy with Logic Pro, not so great with Ableton Live (sigh). Anyway, I could start, stop, scroll to a position with a wheel, and otherwise control the DAW. It could even jump between mark points, and I could change volumes per channel — so it’s like a mini controller, too.

As a test I mixed a Logic Pro track from my living room.

Purchased Octopus last night from Linplug. It’s a hybrid FM and additive synthesis. The user interface reminds me of Star Trek the Next Generation.

Anyway, it has a lot of nasty FM sound effects in combination with making odd harmonics by changing the additive levels, and you could import wav files for more odd combinations. I’m personally not a big fan of clean FM synthesis, never owned a DX-7, neither liked Ableton’s Operator, but this is a very good FM approach. Gritty sounds are more fun.

So inspired by this synth I put aside the other projects and I’m now working on Nocturnal Digits, a combined future hiphop and minimal techno compilation! More later.

I totally reinstalled Logic Pro when 7.1 came out, and after a while I had this nagging feeling that many EXS sounds I used to see in the EXS palette were no longer there..

Until today. I was looking inside the Logic Pro 7 box and realized that there was a separate Extra content DVD that I forgot to install as part of the big reinstallation. Duh. Now I again have the ‘female voice sample’ that I’ve used now and then to get some kind of voice imprint on some songs.

I spent some more time installing other EXS samples, Jampack 4 with all the orchestral instruments, and other EXS samples that’s been in my TODO folder for a long time. Most likely I will seldom use all those samples, with the exception of the Jampack 4 that I need for film music — but the popup window with EXS samples looks really big and long now!

Ok, this is what you get when you don’t clean up your MIDI keyboard from time to time, particles settle in, and cause all kind of havoc. This time I recorded a couple of film music snippets (more about that shortly), and at that time I didn’t think about it, but some of the Zebra software synths sounded really sharp and with a high filter setup.

The more I thought about it, it’s not good, so I went in and looked at the MIDI input with Logic, and yes, the velocity settings were all totally wrong, high values! So I had to go in and clean up those strange values, one by one.

Lesson learned, always keep a bottle of compressed air around, and spray out any strange particles inside your keyboard.

Sigh, listening to radioio70s.com is dangerous, I’m feeling old. While listening today I heard two songs that for me personally had a big influence.

The first one is the B-Sid song from Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery, or Karn Evil 9. What a trip! So many parts, variations, funny arrangements, non 4/4 bars, out-of-your mind passages. Sigh. We need to get this back to music today. Most ELP fans also consider this to be their master work. Another interesting side note is that ELP took classical music and rearranged such pieces — how many are doing this today?

The other was a song that got stuck in my brain for a long time, especially in my past guitar-centric world and bands with guitars, that’s Three Man Army’s Polecat Women, it’s not that special as a song, but it has a wacko guitar line, a hook, something that makes it fun playing or listening too. Such guitar hooks are really the spice of guitar-centric music.

Anyway, those two songs are also music that inspired me when I was a kid with my ears glued to a cheap FM radio.

Maybe it’s good to write down some biographical content, hehehe.

Each one of us has a record or song that has a big influence in your life. One of those for me, definitely, is Todd Rundgren’s Real Man, the opening song on his Initiation album. I think this was back in 1975 or so, I got interested in Todd after hearing his songs, the few times they played, on the Finnish radio. At that time you could hear rock music maybe 30 minutes a day, every second day or so. Those were the times..

Anyway, I took a field trip with the middle school class to a local town, they were visiting schools and so forth, but for me it was just an excuse to get there, sneak out from the scheduled programming, find a record store and purchase Initiation. After that it was listening time. We didn’t have iPods or even walkmans at that time, so they only way to re-listening the song was to try to remember it in your head, and while I was working on the farm the song played in my head, over and over. I could analyze the arrangements and so forth.

What struck my young mind at that point was how Todd used strange synthesizer instruments, weird sounds, in a classical song structure. The lyrics and theme of the song is also uplifting. Todd really inspired me, even today, especially with the concept that you could really do something, anything, in the studio. Maybe that’s the reason why I like to produce and write any kind of music, why my musical career has been extremely diverse, maybe even related to my professional computer career…

When jumping to a new project I tend to do a lot of research, get the feeling for the concept. In this case it’s about taking a guitarist from the early 70:ies, put him or her into a time machine, and transfer him or her into today. When arriving, into a studio, this guitar player finds a computer setup, drum machines, effects, and what would happen next?

I checked out the Cream renunion concert two nights ago, on PBS? It was fun watching it, especially as the first band I ever played in used to play Cream covers, such as Sunshine of your Love. Here’s by the way a weird dance remix of that song. Anyway, the beaty with Sunshine of your Love is the structure of the song, the ending is especially fun for a band as it ends up being a free-from jam session. I still remember gigs where this ending became a long fun session.

Another resource I’m using just now is radioio70s, available in the iTunes radio listings. The nice thing with this streamcast radio station is that they don’t play the obvious 70:ies hits, of which I must confess a large part is crap, rather album tracks, B-sides, and other interesting songs. What I’ve noticed was that bands and artists had far more freedom to experiment with songs, arrangements, lyrics…

So that’s good, I want to work on the next project as a free-form guitar/electronica album, anyway.

For those who don’t have Logic Pro 7 and are curious about the Space Guitar sample, a loop showing the Space Guitar in action. This is where the (c)Space Guitar encounters aliens that wants to destroy all the tubes in the Universe.