Been very negligent with the blog sorry for that. Very focused on getting my second record ready for an October release to coincide with my first in October of last year. Been making heavy use of the Transit plugin from Baby Audio/Andrew Huang in a lot of my tracks. Sharing one I’m working on that still needs some work but I’m liking it so far!
Life happened… creative blocks… burnout… blah blah you know all the stories. I’ve neglected the blog since my first album came out. Been working pretty hard lately on new material and have built up a long list of ideas for the 2nd. A bit overwhelming trying to go through all this stuff and the leftover ideas from the 1st album that I didn’t use. Still on track to get #2 out in October so that’s the real silver lining! Here’s a sample of what I’ve been working on.
Took a break after finishing the first album, didn’t have much energy to start right away on something new. Been noodling around the last couple days on a few new track ideas. Got three stems going at the moment, one is a little further along than the others.
Physical copies of the first album got here today. Posting photos of those soon. They came out very nicely I’m pretty happy with them.
My first album went live across most streaming platforms today! I’m still in a state of shock that I’ve finished a journey I started almost 15 years ago… never really thought it would happen!
Find it on –
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/negligible-noise/1712203736
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0sGwyPgxqk0bjT2pdkj9ua?si=F4qW8NtuQUijxAwC9oN5AA
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/albums/B0CL5L6TD4?marketplaceId=ATVPDKIKX0DER&musicTerritory=US&ref=dm_sh_JERAf8kXsn7fTwcYJ7kVzrumD
YouTube is up but not yet tied to my artist account so links are forthcoming 🙂
Another bit of away time – been working on mixing and finally finished the last track today! Looks like about 52 minutes total which was a bit of a shock. Over the last couple weeks another long track I didn’t expect to come up with wound up coming together.
All that’s left now is the artwork and publishing. Started some of that tonight. Hope to have it out by the end of this month!
Didn’t have a lot of time tonight but managed to put together a brief transition piece for the demo album rework. Pretty simple thing using a Reason Rack pad and a patch from Cherry Audio’s Harmonia.
Also got a good way into cataloging the demos I’ve put together over the last couple of years making a list of pieces for my upcoming first album. There’s a lot more usable stuff in here than I would have thought. Maybe I need to be a little less self-critical!
Took a shot at working up another piece of the remake. This one is pretty much in the middle of the longer piece. First pass at a lead part isn’t too bad probably one or two off notes I can work around.
Had some trouble with the mixdown when I was exporting. Weird static at the very beginning I think caused by one of the instruments glitching. Doing the export in real time seems to have fixed it.
Slowly making some headway on this remake project. The centerpiece track of the original album was about 14ish minutes so re-doing it bit by bit to stitch back together later is proving to be a big challenge. This piece is a pass at a piano interlude I fumbled pretty badly back then. This one is a far better forgery!
A little shorter than the original that rambled on way too long for a transition between two more upbeat/louder parts. Pretty happy with this pass at it 🙂
Damn COVID got me again! 3rd time’s the charm, I suppose. Been working on this one short bit this morning trying a couple new things out. Did manage to put a few things together while I was sick but nothing really worth posting here. Hopefully have some time to get back to those and flesh them out more.
Reason Objekt on the melody, Lofi Keys for the chords/keys, CUBE for the bass, and a brief experiment with Baby Audio’s “Transit” in there.
Stumbled into a really cool way to turn pad patches into moving, evolving transition pieces using a rogue iPad app that’s not certified to run on MacOS but does! I started looking around earlier today for iPad apps that worked as remote MIDI controllers to send CC values into a DAW/plugin. Found a couple that worked pretty well but wireless latency seemed to be a problem as they’d control various MIDI parameters in Logic on the Mac but have occasional dropouts. Rolled the dice and installed one called CC PAL onto my Mac and though it said it might not work as expected, it did. Now I can program up to 16 different CC controls with parameter loops!
Mapping a few CC loops into Lunacy Audio’s CUBE synth produces some incredibly cool results. Looking forward to trying this out with other synths!