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.