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.

I have neglected to mention why I named the songs I’ve made so far on this site, the names I’ve given them.

Globules is a space-themed song, complete with an audio sample of Alan Shepard’s moonwalk from over forty years ago.  I named this song after Bok globules, dense clouds of dust and gas that are some of the coldest objects in the universe.  I’m big on astronomy, and thought the name rather fitting.

Bobbins, of course, are spindles, often holding yarn, wire or film.  However, Bobbins is also a British term that indicates that something is junk (though I guess the British would call it “rubbish”).  When I first started creating Bobbins I didn’t find it that good, and named it as such.  It progressed from that point, but I kept the name.  There is also a character from the Oz books named Betsy Bobbin, for whom I did not name the song, but she comes up when you do a wiki search, that’s got to count for something.

one place I make sure to visit from time to time is New Mixes, a site hosting a variety of DJ mixes of different electronic genres.  Lately they’ve been having some difficulties keeping links to their mixes active (as of this writing, only the most recent of mixes are downloadable – but they’re great).  I’ve had the Nature One 2009 mixes on repeat at work since they arrived on the site last August.  At any rate, highly recommended.

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!

I’d be interested to learn how other musicians plan out their sequences.

I personally follow a certain series of steps, as illustrated in the following screen capture taken from the song I’m currently working on (a thorough makeover of the trance song Globules):

1. I create a MIDI track for the instrument that isn’t there yet, and color it a certain off-white color (to be recolored after I track the sequence).
2. I lay out the track using a software synth (I’m not too picky about which one, as long as it generally sounds like the instrument I’m eventually going to use, so a lead will become a lead, a bassline will become a bassline, etc). I change the color of the track accordingly, but indicate that I’m going to be using that track as MIDI out.
3. I choose the proper instrument from one of the synths in my rack, insert another track atop the track I’m using as MIDI out, and record the track.
4. For those clips within tracks that differ from the norm I use a certain bright orange color, so that I know generally where I’m “mixing it up”. That way if I want to copy a clip to use elsewhere in the song, I’ll know which clips are pure and which ones have been altered.

so far this routine has worked pretty well for me.  Theoretically it allows me to plan out entire songs to be recorded without having to re-record many tracks.  Of course, songs rarely tend to end up sounding as they’ve been planned, so a lot of tweaking and re-recording does tend to occur – but at least I know where it’s taking place.

Aeris – Second Glance: Concept (October 9, 2008) (download here).

as I haven’t posted any clips for a while I wanted to go ahead and put this up – it is a song that my friend Bun Mun and I have been working on. Bun Mun has an impressive musical background including having at one time been signed to Ministry of Sound with his band Redefine. He’s brutal with the minimal, but he is also a guitarist and bass player. The two of us seem to have styles similar enough to make some good sounding stuff, but different enough that we manage to complement each other quite well. One thing we don’t have is a lot of time to hit the studio together, but we can always hope that will change in the future.

at any rate, last year we got together and started working on this song, “Second Glance” (I don’t remember why we called it that but I think it had something to do with coming up with a good melody on our second take). There is live bass by Bun Mun (that admittedly needs to be tightened up – we used the first take we got) and some great sounds coming from a Korg MS2000. I had a great time playing with all the different presets on that bad boy.

although this clip is admittedly more of a concept than a song, I think it has a lot of potential. It’s simple and has a pretty good vibe. One thing we need to do is change our band name – we picked the name Aeris out of thin air to refer to the works we put together because we’re both fans of Final Fantasy. Sad, or cool? Maybe both.

I’ve been studying for a certification lately, so I haven’t been getting at the music, but I’ve still been listening to it. Right now I’m listening to an excellent mix by Pinky Chukkles called Ruminations. This mix takes me back in time to what I feel was an awesome era in dance music – the mid-90s – and features several of my favorite bands from that era, including The Drum Club, The Orb, and The Irresistible Force. How can anyone not like “Fish Dances”?

I must admit I’ve listened to this mix many many times. I find it to be a great airport journey mix… the kind you can listen to while camped out in a terminal with your laptop with a big cup of coffee steaming on the table beside you.

I used to think that the younger generation had a bit of an edge when it came to making electronic music. They have the spirit of youth, a good grasp of technology, and more than anything, lots of time on their hands! A lot of producers seem to be in their low 20s, and producer profiles on Last.fm often tout the amazing things these young hotshots have done at such a young age. And I am indeed impressed.

lately, however, I’ve started to think a bit about the other side of the coin. With age comes experience; not simply time spent figuring out how to produce, but also the experience of simply “being there” – growing up listening to certain genres of music that can formulate the kind of tunes that you eventually create. In my case, I grew up in Toronto during the 80s listening to (what else?) 80s pop music. When I got a bit older I started to get into Chicago house music (something that I still enjoy) and I was huge into mixes of the Hot 103 (and then Hot 97) dance party sessions that my friend Phil recorded and brought back from New York City every couple of months. I never set foot in Studio 54 or Emerald City, but I still have some old cassette tapes with some fantastic dance mixes spun in those clubs.

I can still remember the first time I heard a techno song; or something like it, anyway. It was Information Society’s instrumental version of Running, which I to this day feel was way ahead of its time. That genre of music didn’t really have a name back then, so in my youth I called it “Space Music” for lack of a better term. When techno started to flourish I was on the cutting edge of that. When the rave scene first broke out I went to a few raves, and what an era that was. I spent most of the 90s listening to bands like Orbital, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Drum Club and Underworld.

I missed the disco scene of the 70s, but I wonder what sort of attitude experiencing that culture would have brought to my music. Or if I could go further back, to the early days of electronic… what kind of an upbringing would that have been?

I have great respect for those who are making electronic music well into their 40s and 50s… what experience and breadth they must have!

Futurists – Bobbins: First take (March 8, 2009) (download here).

I actually think this song is pretty good.  It has a bit too much sound wandering from ear to ear (which is a function of the instrument I used, and the type of reverb on it), but generally I think it has a decent downtempo vibe, and I like the breakbeat near the middle.

the end actually features three instances of the same instrument (off the Blofeld), recorded three separate times and tracked once in the left ear, once in the right ear, and once in the center.  I really like it, though I’d understand if people didn’t think it fit.

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.