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.