Final mix, IRSC numbers, CDs, MP3 files, podcast updates, and so on.

See this location for track listing, how to download the MP3 file, and so on.

This is a 51 minute music journey. My wife said I don’t make gritty music, so I tried to learn how to do it. But as usually it took another turn. The end is most fascinating, if I may say so.

Here’s another gotcha that I need to correct from time to time. I have a couple of interesting second level melodies or syncopations, but they are not upfront. As a producer I remember the lines, but a new listener would have a hard time figuring out, or listening to such toned-down arrangements.

This is a little bit like using spices in food. If you use a spice, make sure the user taste it propertly, instead of having a bland small after-taste. If you have an interesting sound effect, let it be heard, not so the ears bleed, but so that it’s obvious what’s going on.

There’s of course the extreme of everything sounding loud, this is where it’s good to take down the drum or other sections in parts of the song, and let silence and a couple of interesting arrangements shine through.

When I’m doing the final mix-down, I usually spend time pushing up certain background sounds that don’t have a chance breathing, and also taking down extensive drums and other parts, so there’s a clean aura of sound scapes taking place.

Ok, I’m trying do dump from my brain the little I know about production. So expect an article or two now and then. I’m no expert concerning productions, but you might find an idea or two that you could carry along to your projects.

First, the human brain, or mind, has a hard time keeping multiple things focused at the same time (some philosophies actually state that you could just keep one object in your mind, and there’s a rapid switch between multiple objects).

The trap producers easily fall into is that they know the songs inside out, and they kind of remember tiny details and want to hear more variations. While a listener, especially the first time, is confused about the multitude of sounds and arrangements.

There are exceptions, such as the famous Wall of Sound introduced by Phil Spector. Otherwise, keep things down to 2-3 parts working at the same time. If you have multiple melody lines, that’s just confusing, keep it to one, and have a syncopation or something else happening underneath.

Anyway, just don’t confuse the listener. It’s easy to switch to the next song on iPods.

Ok, purchased a little bit more MP3 music from emusic today. I got the Sasha Fundacion NYC, always interested to hear how Sasha takes multiple tracks and uses Live to make new ones from those.

And I found a couple of interesting remixes by Ulrich Schnauss over at emusic, and that reminded me to order his A Strangely Isolated Place from Amazon — tried to find that CD here in the Bay Area for a month, but there are less and less places wherefrom you could purchase CDs today. I’m a big fan of Ulrich Schnauss, this because he has his own unique style, kind of English guitar new wave style done with synths. It’s very cinematic in style, too.

You could find some of his material as downloaded MP3 files over at his site, too, so check them out.

I’m a big fan of artists that sound unique using electronic instruments: James Holden, Boards of Canada, Loop Guru, Photek, and so on. The litmus test is that you hear a new track, and you could nail down within seconds who the artist is.

Going back to Sasha, what I like about his remixing style is that I would pinpoint out a Sasha mashup due to the style he’s using. So there’s nothing wrong with remixing and DJ use — the icky part is if you just sound like any other DJ, remixer, or producer. What’s the deal with that?

Well, it was the original IBM Deskstar 60Gb disk that was part of the PowerMac system I got over four years ago.

It’s always good to have backups, and most of my material is really stored outside my computer.

I just reinstalled Logic/Live and all the plugins, and some other tools I usually like using. I got an ATI/133 Matrox 100Gb disk from Frys for $59, so that’s a decent price. I don’t want to spend so much money on HW on this system, as I really want to move to the Mac Intel side as soon as possible.

Anyway, always keep your tools on a separate set of CDs or DVDs, with the registration codes included, as well as any of your favorite patches. When you reinstall you save a lot of time if you are organized (and I’m barely organized, myself).

Just to test out the systems I did a quick Film music snippet, Unternet.

As for email, I use gmail quite a lot, everything’s there, and the other accounts I use are all IMAP accounts, all stored outside my world, so I didn’t lose any emails.

Most likely only those who live around here in Silicon Valley knows this route, but hey. This takes me between 45-50 minutes, and that’s the time I need to listen to an LP of material that I usually put together. I dump the material via WaveBurner to a CD, and jump into the car, and slowly drive around.

This usually happens at evenings, 9-11pm. Sometimes I have a cop car behind me, most likely wondering why this lonely car is driving around on a late Saturday evening, if I’m ever stopped, I wonder if they believe what I’m doing…

Anyway, I start from West San Jose, and drive to Cox, and via Cox Avenue and Saratoga I end up on Saratoga-Sunnyvale ave. This turns into De Anza Boulevard in Cupertino, and I’m driving past the Apple headquarters, and continue to Sunnyvale. Then at El Camino Real I turn off to the right. El Camino Real is part of the ancient Spanish royal highway between San Francisco and Mexico. Most of the road is no longer present, but here in the Valley it’s a stretch from the beginnings of the peninsula up to San Francisco, and most of it is stores and shopping centers. It was quite an interesting experience first time I drove along this road up to San Francisco about ten years ago.

Anyway, turning right and driving along that street, listening to the mix. It’s good we have 35-40 mph driving speed restrictions, so there’s little noise in the car. At Kiely I turn to the right, I’m kind of halfway now, 25-30 minutes of listening to the mixdown. Then I’m driving Kiely, crossing Lawrence where all the myriad car dealer spots are, and over to Saratoga Avenue. Then driving along Saratoga, over 280, and turning off at San Thomas Aquito, and then along that one back home.

So don’t be surprised if you see a white Mazda 3 driving around one late evening with a person deeply immersed in a music mix…

That seems to be the next thing I’m doing after “Nocturnal Digits” is finished and uploaded. 24 the TV series — fifth season — started last weekend. My idea is to do something similar, do a 50-60 minute full production during 24 hours, starting a Saturday morning at 8am, and finish it by Sunday 8am.

Maybe next weekend, I need to look at my schedule. I was even toying with the idea of forcing out one song an hour, but maybe that’s pushing it concerning consistency and making the whole thing sound interesting — so I will leave that option out.

People sometimes are confused when I tell them how I work. “Yes, I use loops.”. “And yes, I create all the loops myself, too, using my fingers.” Somehow I think there’s a preconditional assumption that if someone uses loops, then they cheat, or can’t play an instrument.

In my workflow, I could play all the sequences myself, but why bother. If you look at classical composition, there are many places where the orchestra repeats itself, there’s even notation for doing this when scoring. Repetition is as ancient as when the first cave musicians started banging on drums.

Actually, when I move the music produced with Logic Pro into Ableton Live, I start to modify the sound loops even further, so they start to be mangled and have variations on their own. Thus, the production itself will take a form of improvisational loop creativity. The output is not even what I expected in the first place. The closest I could think of is like what the editors do when they edit movies from raw footage.

Had time today to go in and do all the final fixes and additions. Next is the two steps I use for critical listening, burn a CD and listen to it in the car, and anywhere else. Do this and take mental notes. Somehow I forget phone numbers and people names, but my memory registers fixes in a 51+ minute long piece of music, and what to fix, and how. Weird.

I’m also using high-pass filters on all tracks to take down the low-level energy rumble. My poor 2×867MHz G4 PowerMac struggles along with it, so sometimes I don’t even know the final outcome. So the critical listening is a must.

I also need to get my son to do the animation sequence that I need for the album page.

I upgraded the WordPress blog system from 1.5.2 to 2.0. At the same time I looked around for a new, nice theme for the site.

WordPress 2.0 has very nice admin capabilities, AJAX support for various settings, preview at the bottom of the editing screen, and so on. I also know they fixed bugs…

It helps to be a SW engineer when doing such upgrades, it was not exactly copy-and-paste…

Been a while, busy at work. Anyway, had an hour to spare on Saturday, so back to composition mode. This this Clock Ticking, Local Train Arrives in about 30 minutes.

But the real exercise was to see if I could live with using Logic Pro 7 with no external software synths and plugins or not? The reason is that just now I have a hard time concerning upgrading my studio computer setup, which is a G4 2×867 PowerMac. Each time I’m about to get the next system, Apple hints at new hardware, first it was the dual core PowerPC chips, and how it seems that Apple might release the Intel-based desktop systems far faster than anyone anticipated. Apple HW engineering is doing a good job — which puts me into a dilemma.

I don’t want to spend money on a 2x G5 system just now, as the dual Core Intel chips will have a performance increase of at least 2x, if not more.

However, there’s this iMac that Apple just released. I could maybe live with this system for 6-12 months, and after that purchase an Intel Mac desktop and give the iMac to my over-productive graphics expert son for his experiments.

In that scenario I need software tools that work with Intel chips, and the Logic upgrades in March will provide this suppport. However, again, it will take a while before the third party plugins are updated.

Going back to the first sentence, phew, hence I’m trying to use Logic only for a while to see if this is doable or not. It is absolutely a modus operadi — actually it forces me to think more about composition and editing rather than chasing for that elusive sound that might lurk in a specific plugin somewhere in the universe.

This reminds me why Woody Allen is so productive writing scripts on his sofa with a pen and a block of paper.

Been busy doing non-music work for a while, sorry, need to make money for the family. Anyway, uploaded a short 40 second film music snippet done tonight, The Playful Hitman. Testing out Urs’ Zebra 2 synthesizer, quite a good SW synth!

Don’t ask me how the song names are created, there’s a hint somewhere else in the blog what tools are used when someone is in a hurry.

Spent most of tonight writing boot startup and bell sounds for a computer. That was interesting. I tried to emulate the Eno style of ambient style sounds. The Mac had these rough sounds, style sosumi, but I tried in this case to convey a feeling of pleasant usability, or something like a friendly sounding computer. The sound startup is also not a big fat chord, like the Mac, rather a pleasantly upwards going triad.

The hardest thing is that I don’t know how these samples sound over various loudspeaker setups, most likely I need to equalize them.

I also spent a lot of time making sure the samples are small, faded out the end parts rapidly, no delays, rather ambient reverbs, and so on.

I did a rough mixdown of Nocturnal Digits, the 51 minute gritty techno/hiphop opus, and when doing a quick listening it was strange that the levels were so low. Usually I use PSP VintageWarmer to push the final mixdown to the level that alas most of us have to do now, hover close to the 100%/0dB level without clipping. But in this case the signal was low.

Hmm? What happened? When opening up with an audio tool, in this case an old Spark application that I still use from time to time, it was obvious. In the beginning there’s a nasty big transient that spooks PSP Wintagewarmer’s limiter, so it passes through, and causes a big peak. Then when Ableton Live goes along and finds the top peak for normalizing, it takes this one and then uses it as the max level.

The image above shows the situation. It’s always good to open up the final or temporary mixdown to analyze how it looks like, to find problems like this one. You could also see in case your limiter is clipping all the time, that’s not good, either.

The solution is to find the spot, in this case I had on the master track both a really tight flanger happening, and some of the voice effects I added in causes a very sharp transient, and the job is to remove whateve happens in this specific section, limit that track itself.

Ok, did some more film music and I used Octopus the FM synthesizer to lay out a sequence background, using as a default startup one of the sequencer presets. It’s easy to make really gritty and over-the-top sounds with FM synthesis, one has to be careful. I had to finally go in and tame the beast, change some of the operator settings and make things more mellow. Some like this kind of over-the-top FM modulations, other hate it. Hard to know. Best not to push the luck.

It’s usually easiest to just change the modulator frequencies or the filter settings in the FM synthesizer itself to tame it down. The second best is to play with the equalizer, try to find the spot where the overtones hit very high, and take this frequency down. This is where very good tools such as Elemental Audio InspectorXL comes to picture. I don’t use Inspector that much, but when I need it, it’s very handy. I could quickly narrow down the problematic frequencies.

Some have very good ears and could just by listening find the sore frequences. Me myself, I’m always surprised when I see inside Inspector where the problem frequencies really are manifest.