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!
Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 3)
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.
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!
I guess I’m going to change the rules a bit. The “90 minute minimum challenge” since I seem to hang around longer when I have time.
Today’s track is more messing around with Objekt trying to learn more about it. This time I am still using the same patch for 3 tracks but each is tweaked a bit to sound slightly different. No composing this time, though, all me and the Linnstrument + Expressive E (which explains why the timing sounds off even though it shouldn’t).
Probably take another pass at this one down the road.
Took a little longer than planned today.. as usual I’ve come across a new musical obsession – a physical modeling synth called Objekt. I’ve only just started learning how to use it, but this simple track is a demo of the first self-made patch using it! A good bit of it is composed with me playing along on the Linnstrument but wow I can’t get over how incredible this synth sounds… it’s like creating your own fictional instruments and how they behave from nothing…
Looks like it’s off to read a manual! I need to figure this thing out!
Third 90 minute challenge is in the can and sounding bad! 😛 Truth be told I wasn’t as focused as I was trying to be. Got off to an interesting start composing the acoustic guitar part which I think turned out decently. Then I got into the vocal bits and there’s way more work getting them to sound right than I originally thought so my brain was spent by the time I stopped tinkering.
The intro bit doesn’t fit at all but I like the way it sounds so it’ll probably wind up being used somewhere else. I left a gap at the beginning to fill in later and after frying the last of my energy on the vocal part I noodled with a couple synths and the first 10 seconds are what ended up coming out of it.
Back again today for my second 90 minute challenge of the week. I’ve decided I’m going to shoot for 3 of these every week and possibly if time allows an additional 90 minute tweak challenge where I go back to the tracks I’ve made that week and see if I can improve one or more.
This one started as an attempt to combine playing an expressive patch using the Expressive E Touche SE paddle combined with a 1/2 bar automated path cycling between two additional effects. Solaris GTS guitar and descending bass parts were added afterward.
This was a tough track to bounce and took me a few tries to realize I’d overdone it on the panning effects that were causing weird issues!
Finally took the time out to redo the Negligible Noise logo and album artwork. I kinda slapped together the original artwork just to have something and it was fine but now that I’m getting close to releasing something I figured it was time for a more proper scalable piece.
Quite a few tweaks and revisions in this update, plus the parts finally have proper titles/timestamps. Double tracked and added stereo delay on the guitar bit in Part 3. Did some volume automation to smooth out the transition between the opening and second sections of Part 5 as well as re-recording/arranging the synth section at the end. After a couple of hours of trying to get that synth part to sound the way I wanted it to, I came to the realization that i had to toss most of it and start over. I think its far better now, not as boring!
At this point I’m calling it done and starting the final surround sound mix this weekend.
Part 1: Even Nothing Has A Beginning (0:00)
Part 2: Adrift In A Sea Of Nothing (1:46)
Part 3: There’s A Lot More Nothing Where That Came From (3:54)
Part 4: The Whistling Echoes Of Nothing (5:44)
Part 5: The Decaying Bright Future Of Nothing (7:54)
Part 6: And I Leave You With Nothing (15:14)
Getting closer to maybe being “done”. Added a couple of new transitions between parts near the end to smooth it out a bit. A lot more mixing and tweaking to do but overall this version is a bit better than the previous.