Futurists

Futurists – Globules (Acid Remix) (November 28, 2009) (download here).

here’s an acid trance remix of Globules, a melodic trance song I created a while back.  When I say acid trance, I’m hearkening back to the glory days of trance – not the sweeping, epic trance of today, but that of the early 90s, during which a style of music developed that some would consider ‘true trance’.

it’s been a lot of fun remixing a trance song into an acid song, and challenging, too.  My sequence is littered with “stuff I tried” – lots of high-pass filter sweeps, side-chain compression, bleeps and bloops, cymbal crashes, etc, that currently have their channels off because they just didn’t work.  In the end, the song is quite minimal, with some mixing it up with the sample from Alan Shepard’s moonwalk, a few instruments carefully placed here and there, and a driving beat that I’ve attempted to use to lull listeners into the so-called trance.

that being said, there’s work I could do to make this remix better.  The beginning and ending are not particularly strong – I’ve done this to make the song easier for a DJ to mix with other songs, but the ending certainly doesn’t stand on its own very well.  Nonetheless, it’s time to shelve this one for a while, to get back to finishing some of the other tracks I’ve been working on.

Soundlord – Mindwipe (1999) (download here).

Mindwipe is one of the first songs I ever made, back in 1999 or so, as soundlord. The intro is too long, and the quality is pretty poor, but I still think I’m going to have a hard time topping the last two minutes of the song (starting at about 3:16). Crank it and see what you think.

one of my future projects is to turn that final two minutes into a full song. It’s trancy (perhaps somewhat ahead of its time considering I made it in the late 90s) and has some killer arpeggios. If I can remix the song to get rid of the first three minutes and keep the good stuff, that might be a win!

Futurists – Globules: First take (January 27, 2009) (download here).

so before you push the button let me mention here that this song isn’t good.

in fact, it’s so bad, I wasn’t going to post it at all, but then I remembered that the whole point of this blog is for people to follow the stuff I’m working on from junk, to not half bad, to… who knows.  So here it is.

what I’d really like to do is to retool this entire song so that it sounds a lot like what you hear between minute 3 and minute 4 of the current version.  I really like that; it seems to work.

the biggest short-term improvements will come from getting rid of the <strong>ear-splitting buzzy lead</strong> (that comes from my Roland JP-8000 – I thought it would work better than it did, but it turned out to be extremely abrasive), and remove those weird metallic swishes that go back and forth every now and then from ear to ear.  They really stand out, and not in a good way.

big changes to come with this song, to be sure.

and by the way, readers of this blog are always welcome to download, play or include in a mix anything I put up here.  That’s one of the reasons I’m doing this.  In the future I’m also going to be releasing some royalty-free samples for musicians and producers to include in their own music.  For this song, I’ll probably post an octave of samples of that squelchy bassline (right at the beginning of the song).  I kinda like it.