sound addictions and the joys of a new moniker

I noticed this thing today which made me think a bit,

I assume you are familiar with the situation when you've got a melody or something like that without words that is playing on constant repeat in your head and it's stuck there wether you like it or not. Since emulating a synthetizer in your head is quite the feat you have to do the best with your voice to play it - bedubidu-didu didududu - and even though you can hear the original more or less clear you have to sing along a with it. The shorter the time since you heard it the more accurate you can recreate it, right?

What if you have a melody stuck in there that keeps you returning back to listen to the song to be able to hum that awesome synthline closer to the original? Wouldn't that be some sort of sound addiction? I wish I could create stuff like that and feed a fanbase of addicts.





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I came back from a lengthy stay away from home today and as soon as I had said hello to dogs and family, got drunk with friends and slept in my own bed I hit up the ol' sound laboratory. To make things interesting I came up with a new moniker that I hope will both inspire and help me stick to a new sound. Oh the things we do to amuse ourselves...

(photo from Jasmin Jodry, http://dams.rca.ac.uk/netpub/server.np?find&site=Show2006&catalog=catalog&template=genstudent.np&field=itemid&op=matches&value=1107)

essay

working in Cubase feels like an uphill struggle at the moment and even though I have a very good synth loop lying around gathering dust I do not dare to try to build anything around it as I am afraid of spoiling it by choking it in uninspired stuff.

So I thought I'd just write something here to keep the ball rolling. A reply in a forum I made earlier today sparked an old idea of mine to life that I had thought about much and refined to the point where I took it for granted, a synthetic a priori, and just let it sink away to the background.

The idea is about creating something that is good and enjoyable for others, and why some artisans simply are better than others. Surely I think the biggest explanation of it comes down to that he who practices the most becomes the better one, but what is there to practice? Becoming swift and accurate playing chords on the guitar, finding your style and perfecting it, learning the inner workings of a synth, is that all that it takes to become good?

These are miscellanelous factors, because in my view creating something is depicting something of what is inside you. We are polysensual creatures, some people might be more graphic inside their heads while others are more reliant on sounds - even the engineer with his mathematics takes something out from inside of him when he constructs his bridge. The more accurately and lifelike you can capture what is inside you and put on a paper, on a recording or whatever, the better your work is.

If a painter is suffering and depressed and successfully can capture that on a canvas then he has created a fine piece of art, has he not?

But then the young beginner who stares at the canvas feeling all his feelings and tries to paint with his clumsy fingers and runny paint, he has no less of an artistic vision than our first suffering artist, he simply cannot express what he feels and therefore is not an as good a painter as someone with the experience and knowledge of how to let out what is inside him.

So am I saying that everyone can create just as good art as anyone? Well, both yes and no. Theoretically yes, but our lifespans are in reality often too short to truly find what form of art suits you and therefore it mostly comes down to luck if you pick up a medium that corresponds to you. Also this ability to let out what is inside you, trainable as it is, varies a lot from person to person in regards to how strong it is.

So to take a modern example of an at least in my eyes truly great artist, Banksy, he has a mind full of ideas which he can express with a medium that both suits him and he knows well from years of training. A good artist lets his audience see what he sees, Banksy sees a lot of aspects of modern society in a particular and clear way and that he can share that vision to others is something not only I greatly admire him for, but also other people too.

But what I think everyone who aspires to be someone has to practice is the ability to open the valves to their insides and let it pour out. It is very much a psychological thing, but you can only reach so far copying others and if you want to reach further, then tap what is inside you.

Find your medium, learn to wield it and then fuel it with something personal.

---

Everytime I've pumped out a few tracks in a row or written a lot in a short space of time I feel a bit drained and have to let it wait. I still try but it results in little more than what banging your head against a wall and repeating yesterday would do. You guessed it; I am in one of those lows now.

But one last word of imagined wisdom, being a commercially successful artist also takes another skill; namely consistency, the consistency to negate these valleys between your peaks.

I guess that is what I am training now...

new track up

instead of drowning my sorrows the other night I decided to simply finish the track I was working on, disregarding how warped the outcome might be. I think it went pretty well and at least it was very nice to do something contructive rather than destructive. I didn't mind quality of sound at all so just listen to it with open ears and wait untill I get back to it and fix it up.

here it is, my unemployed interlude called limbo;
http://www.internetdj.com/artists.php?op=stream&song=45303

I'm busy looking for work at the moment, and drinking complex drinks, so there's not much producing going on at the moment, but I do have two ideas for a track - one of them is to imitate the Pulk, Pull Revolving Doors track from Radiohead, but I'm not sure how well I can do that.

And then also I would like to put a bounty on the head of the French rapper who made a song using that track for his beat. MC Solar or something I think his called. Cash on delivery.

Untill better times come I guess I will just fiddle around randomly in Cubase and see if anything good comes up.

tjenixen,

the hilarity continues: today my already shred up ear got itself another mauling. How? I was hugging my girlfriend one last time seeing as we broke up and the bastard of a piercing got stuck in her hair.

I guess I'll just have to kick it Beethoven-style for a bit longer then.

There is also another not so favourable effect coming from this last hug of good bye; I reckon that I'll just have to bin the track I was working on.

You see that workplace I mentioned turned out to be run by a twat and I didn't come back for a second day so I am what they call unemployed these days. Yesterday I channeled all my time and boredom into a track that is incredibly stripped down and quite repetitive but cool as fuck still, and my aim was to finish it off in the coming days as it is more one of those spur-of-the-moment novelty tracks than that technical masterpiece.

Well, how can I continue working on a track that silently screams unemployed now that I am more heartbroken than actually unemployed? I mean I want it to sound cool and personal, not like some other electro emo stuff from Stephan Bodzin - mind you that I still think that his Daytona Beach EP is awesome.

I have heaps of theories about alcohol and creativity, other substances and creativity, anguish and creativity and just plain creativity in general, I should really write a disseration about it, but the basic principle is that creativity itself is a sort of energy and that you physically need energy to channel it out into something. What charges creativity is emotions, but also it is flavoured by them. Not necessarily in a corresponding A leads to B way but you get the point: the more things you have inside you the easier it gets to create something, be it a musical piece, a text or a drawing.

But now that my main source of energy has changed, do I dare continue with what I was doing as the risk of not being able to maintain style is quite big?

Maybe that's what skill is, to be able to form any sort of energy into exactly what you want to be.

Tomorrow I am starting a new not overly fantastic job and right now I am spoiling myself with allowing myself to update both this and my Swedish blog and then get cracking in cubase instead of doing stuff that really matters, like fixing up the bike or checking the shortest route to get there.

As they say, forbidden fruit is the sweetest.

My new track, the Polar Bear Tango, can be listened to from this link;
http://www.internetdj.com/artists.php?op=stream&song=45207

One thing that made me feel good was that a mate jumped on the chance to remix it so I'm eagerly waiting to see what he can bust out of it. Damn him if he outdo's me.

Man I wish I had Battery for my drum samples again, I so miss the pitch envelope and saturator. If you ever stumble across some stand-alone pitch envelope generator thing then give me a shout, eh?

Hans Carstens

sometimes it just happens, you randomly download an EP from a dude with a cool name and when you first listen to it your mind simply gets swept away.

Or in my case, I want to drown in the music.

http://www.tropic-netlabel.de/tropic_48.htm

Hans Carstens' Aeroplane EP simply is the shit with its Trentemöllerish click noices, extremely flowy beats and profound pads. The last track remixed by dsoul, Passenger, is 10 minutes of awesomnes that I deeply recommend anyone to listen to.

Some other funny facts is that my father's name also is Hans, and that Hans the dj uses the same myspace theme as me. Great minds think alike I'd like to tell myself.

Hearing music this good really made me want to finish the track I've been working on so I decided to ignore panning the percussion and mastering before I upload it to the net. I found a pair of old crap head phones that I can use without severe pain so I am feeling pretty keen to try to make a track using them and see what happens, and I want to clean of my slate off before I get cracking if we put it like that. Patience has never been my strong side.

I'll return with a link to it later

3.3 (oh we suffering artists)

well I feel rather silly now, because last night I pulled a drunken stunt when ramming a stretcher piercing into my ear and now I can't wear my headphones anymore.

Work on the Polar Bear Tango project is paused for an undetermined length of time.

3.3 (I can see the head!)

hmm it's late and I am done for tonight, ears slightly ringing but that's a price I am willing to pay.


But somehow I can also invision this grumpy gray haired old man complaining about his stupidity in his youth to his grandchildren and then not hear when they call him a weird old fart and run off...

Ah well, so what did I do to the track? I added some percussion and swooshy noice to the introductionary part to make a little bit more sazzy as well as work on the post-climactic stuff and then the outro. Did I tell you that I love working on the last half of the song? Because I do.


It's just such a joy to work on the latter part because pretty much all the synths are already tweaked and so are the percussion, and the automation lines are just there for you to play around with freely, so you can just go nuts for a minute or two enjoying and making the most of what you've laboured forth earlier before it's time to come back to reality and end the track.


So that I did, and duly enjoyed, and now I think only some minor tweaks and some panning of the elements remain before I can wrap the track up with its name and proudly show it to the world.

The name? I'm thinking of something like 'Polar Bear Tango', and it's actually not so random as it first might seem, because the track sounds very cold and blue to me (arctic) but there is a lot of energy and momentum in it still, hence the tango. The polar bears are just there because they are cool.

3.2

allright, tonight looks there's going to be another session of creation. I am warming up in the best possible way I think; I am catching up on two months of Swedish gossip from a good friend and I've just finished a conversation with my parents. All the while I've listened through some old tracks I've never payed any attention to. I can't say that I now realise how great they are or anything but it's definitely something fresh for the ears, considering that during my 2 month NZ-trip I only had 2 gigabytes of music.

Mind you I'm one of those guys that listens to 320kb/s-tracks.

I had a listen to what I rendered after finishing working on the track last time and I noticed that the beginning is incredibly weak. It sounds dry and dull and to be harsh/realistic the actual loops themselves are pretty crap. We will need a lot of fx and tweaking to get them up to level.

This habit of always rendering what you've got before turning the computer off is to me extremely helpful. Not only do you get into the feeling of what you were doing last but also you hear the song without seeing it (as in whatever application(s) you are using).

For me working strictly in cubase is quite the different thing to experience a song without seeing the endless lines of the midi kick- and syncopation patterns with the synths swirling in and the occasional dots of effects. You might get a good overview and a sense of structure and perspective hearing it unrendered, but at least I get pretty blinded to how the sounds actually sound together - how the bassline and the synth interact and what colours there are in my head since I don't have to look at the gray and dead blue of the working area.

Also rendering is sort of putting whatever you've made of clay in the oven to make it hard. It simply behaves differently when taken out, and I'm not just meaning the psychological aspects I just mentioned but also that it simply sounds different when rendered. I am not nearly well learned enough to know what it actually is that gets altered and so but I have rendered enough stuff to know that there is a distinct difference in sound.

Well, I guess it's like what the chefs always tells you: constantly taste a spoonful of what you're cooking throughout the process.

So, time to load up the old application and see what happens then eh

3.1

allright, it feels like I have to finish my current project this afternoon if I'm supposed to ever get it done, because I am flying back to Australia the day after tomorrow and I doubt that I will have time and concentration enough to put into it over there.

I just finished a post for my other Swedish blog and I can't say that my fingers ran totally freely over the keyboard as they sometimes do. Writing can sort of be used as a measurement of how creative I am for the day I've found out, and unfortunately I've seen better days so it's going to be a bit of an uphill struggle with the track today.

Why oh why did I take a look at some technical stuff with it the other night? Why didn't I leave it for now? There's no better way to get back into a track than to start sorting out mixing issues I've found, and I so wish I could sidechain the high's and the kick and bass all over again just for the sake of doing something with the track instead of just staring at it.

Ah well, I'll start out by trying to make a smooth transition from climax to break. Already I've got a vague structure in my head: about 1.30 minutes of building, then drop and new long build for ~2 minutes before there is some 30 seconds of everything going before stuff starts to fade out.

The last few songs I made before I left Sweden were these massive 9 minutes+ tracks so I'm kind of met my quota for that, right now I am perfectly happen to do ~5-minute tracks without any super extended builds or fades.

Time to get into it, wish me luck

3

I am finally getting up to date with what I write. This third file that I am currently working on is still in the process of breaking free from the minds gravity and I will take delight in following the process of completing it. It started out as a something I did during only a few minutes before I had to get out of bed and get to work. It didn't sound good at first, but it did captivate me enough to make me arrive late.

I named the file psychoblippblopp.

At the moment I am staying at a major hostel in Wellington where I make beds and clean the place in return for free accomodation and the predictability of it all suits me perfect. I have a lot of time to write stuff, read stuff, produce stuff and even play Civilization IV sometimes. But then on the other hand people insists on dragging me out to the busy night life here every now and then in the capital of New Zealand, which I think houses more tourists than locals.

Since the local dj's know that they're never playing for the same crowd they don't bother to vary their placelists much. Not that it would matter much anyway considering the surprisingly narrow taste a crowd that is so uncaring of what it listens to displays, but for me having to hear that shit through the window every night when I go to sleep is like enduring that artificial drowning method of interrogation the CIA confessed using.

Well anyway, at this point it might be a good idea to try to describe the process of the birth of a song for me. When I sit infront of an empty Cubase project I start by usually loading either Angular Momentum's Virtuadrum to lay down a kick and work from there, or I add a midi-track and lay down some notes played by Window's generic synth (that has the sound of a piano).

Maybe the percussion sounds good and I work from there or I stumble upon a loop or sequence that I am content with and loads up a synth to play. I have a few channels playing and I copy them and add some more elements, copy them and add some more and repeat this process untill I think that I have enough to make a good track. Then when I think I do I save the file to a new name and I start structuring it. Most often I have minded the mixdown along the way so that therewont be any sudden road blocks coming around the next corner.

Anyway, I returned to my little file later on in lack of better things to work on and at this stage it was about 8 bars long. One of the first changes I did to it was to swap the dominant bleeps into an actual synth. The result made me feel a hint of great potential, but more predominantly a saturated light blue colour. I see colours when hearing sounds you see, sexy eh?

With a more than enough distorted beat and some squelchy bass hits it sounded good, but something was missing. A copy of Computer Music's version of the 303 synth came to the rescue, and already at this point the track was touching upon raw quality I seldom achieve.
I added a generic ride and played around some with Cubase's chopper effect. With a 1/8 sine chopper and a 1/16 positive Saw one I got a pretty nice shuffly thing going to emphatise the flowy nature of the track.

I returned back to an old discarded method of mine which involved bouncing everything into .wav files and then arranging in Sony's Acid, but this time only rendering the main synth into a .wav that I chopped manually and gave a companion synth to interact with. Sweet frosty magic was everywhere. At this point the track was very crispy blue for me and made me think of arctic landscapes so why not stick to that idea? Funnily enough I had just seized a folder of 'ice fx'.

Sometimes I wonder if the the subconscious sort of picks and selects, and cencors, what ideas strikes us? We think it is perfectly spontaneous but in fact we have already considered and planned it without knowing ourselves. Who knows?

I have never quite achieved a good breakdown. Everytime I listen to Oliver Huntesmann's Sao Paolo my heart virtually melts with awe and jealousy, and if I could ever recreate something close to it I would be able to die happy. I had made a try and gotten pretty content with my previous track, the Aniara one, but I felt like giving it one more shot because I could certainly do better. Besides, what's more arctic than some sweeping strings?

This time I think that I actually got something, the combination of two growling basses with a kick and a string over that gives at least me a feeling of something menacing. I arranged a long build inspired by some old Steve Bug track a mate showed me and I was pretty damn impressed with myself.

Then I realised that no matter how good a break I achieve I suck at introducing it.

This is the point where I am up to now. I am going to make a render of the track here for you to listen, and I will write more when I've made a bit of progress I think.

2

During my pretty random travels around the coast of Aotearoa's south Island I did occasionally sit down to play with some synths and so but it never amounted to much more than a few bars with maybe a good loop over a generic beat, and I was content with that as you can be for a while, but then just as my patience started to wane my meanderings led me first to a huge musical experience and after that to a place where I had the time and peace and quiet to actually sit down and digest the impressions and mold them into ideas.

It was in the beginning of February I went to a pretty old school but still legal rave out in a hidden valley near Nelson, and although I was pretty unsure at first about venturing out from my comfort zone of crisp and clean groves with avantgarde synths I am really glad that I did dare to try something new. I can never say that I've been a huge fan of psy and the whole mushroom worshipping cult thing, but progressive house has always held a sweet spot in my heart. A little bit reluctant at first I was soon enchanted with something totally new to me, namely progressive psy. Or something. I don't know what to label it. It was good though.

Brickwall basslines, repetitive structure, quirky noices, breaks with delayed vocals speaking of various suggestive things (no, not sex you little Bennassi fanboy). 72 hours straight. My accurate and precise taste got hammered blunt by this.

After having recovered from this experience which among other things involved sleeping on the ground in the open, doing my hygien in the river and realising that I had brought with me way too little food I met some people with whom I fled north of Wellington to a little beach community. Here I used to stay up a few hours later than the rest every night to work on a project that had happened to reach further than its embryonic state and was showing promise. I wanted it to start out as a strictly minimal groove with attitude, but soon I realised that it had a lot of progressive house undercurrents in it. I'm a person bad at saying no, and why not try something at least slightly different?

By a chance my father had sent me a copy of the story of Aniara which is an extraordinarly beautyful story about a spaceship full of emmigrants missing its target destination Mars and continuing out of the solar system with no chance of returning back. I realised just how lucky I was having a copy this beautyful epic read out in not only a solemn and sermonal way, but also in Swedish!

I had found my theme for the song.

I sampled the part where the spaceship loses its bearing and applied the standard hi-pass filter and delay chain to it to give it that dramatic science fictiony sound we never grow tired of. It was a pleasant change from all the bitcrushing I've done lately.

Just as the last track I've sort of finished it but not really, it just needs a lot of more work that I can't be bothered with now. I captured the idea and that is enough for me.

But what really bugs me is that when I render it to .mp3-format the mainsynth loses a lot of its body somehow, and what is even more annoying is how unbalancedly strong it becomes as it is being run through a bit crusher. My theory is that the cheap (free) synth either has very crappy algorithms that I've overloaded with various functions or that I've got one nasty case of anti aliasing on my hands. I will deal with the problem when the time comes to master and finish the track. At the moment my plan is to render the synth separately to a .wav and see if it sounds better. Also that solution would free up a lot of much need processing power.

1

well, the first post is always the hardest I guess. Specially for me because I wish I had started this blogg about two months ago when I left Australia with few possesions other than some t-shirts and my laptop. I guess that I will try to write a bit about the latest tracks I've mad to get the ball rolling, so here we go - track n.1 - Christchurch, NZ.

Well, what can I say? A busy hostel is not the ideal place to put on your Stanton MDR-v700's and try to get creative. I certainy don't mind having a few people about when I'm producing as I think they give my eyes a welcome break every now and then, but with many people also comes a lot of noice. But what also sucked was that the radio was playing the same eight songs over and over again from 7am to 11 pm in every room of the hostel non stop. Sitting down in the daylight hours was obviously out of the question.

Actually this didn't bother me much as I am quite the night owl and the coffee happened to be free, but anyway.

The first track I made featured a very awkward kind of breakbeat that just leaves you longing for that steady syncopation to come in and I still havn't gotten around to fix it to be honest. Some day I will though. I think. There is a lot of pretty distinct and 'personal' elements in this track that I thought was too good to abandon and they gave me a really hard time to merge them together into something that would fit into the maxim of Aristoteles: 'The sum is greater than its parts'.

I reckon that the fragmented style of the track is mostly due to the fact that I couldn't sit down with it a few hours every day for a couple of days and just marathon it like I usually do, but also I think I was adjusting to my new work flow seeing as I earlier was very dependent on Fruityloops to process samples in but now had to suffice with Cubase alone. Earlier I used NI's Battery for percussion and effects and I was absolutely not ready to let go of that approach to samples so I grabbed a free drumsampler vst that features pitch control, a filter and a primitive envelope to fill my needs. Without this little baby I doubt I could have done very much at all actually.

If you're starting out with producing go to www.amvst.com and search for Virtuadrum because it's a great tool to learn with and it is a wonder how the author can get away with handing out vst's of that quality for free. And if you're not starting you should check out that awesome website anyway.

Anyway, for me the track has a very dreamy and ethereal feel to it, and I am proud of the progression of uniting the sounds I sort of achieved. I might go as far as to call it one of those tracks you dislike at the first listen but then take to your heart after having heard it a few times, because there is definitely something very emotional and personal in it, for instance a bassline that seems to be searching for something and some wide portamento slides on the synth. For now I consider the track a rough diamond, because there sure are a lot of work left to be done on it to be able to comfortably showcase it without making disclaimers.

I have always been intent on finishing what I start but this track sort of drifted away from me because I can only remain interested for so long, and also I left the city of Christchurch to pursue some adventures in real life so that held me back from sitting down for quite a long time. But now I have a good Cubase file to refine whenever I find the time, and that is more than enough to keep me happy.