slowburn

I need an audio editor to do fine-tune chopping and format conversion of samples to get the drum sounds ready for the Transistor set. In the distant past I used Bias Peak, but at some point along the upgrade path they lost me and added stuff I didn’t want and didn’t like. Next I tried DSP Quattro which was pretty good, but never quite felt right and had some weird audio format quirks that my Korg ESX-1 didn’t like. I was very interested in Apple’s Soundtrack Pro, but they stopped offering it as a separate product and I’m not interested in buying the Final Cut Studio package just yet, plus I am unsure what sort of future support it will get. And Dallas pointed me to a couple other programs called Amadeus Pro and Wave Editor that I will likely also check out.

Anyway, since my hard drive crashed at the beginning of this project and I never re-installed Quattro, I’ve decided to give the free open source Audacity editor a trial run. So far, it hasn’t gone super smooth. The non-beta download they offer would not work with my RME sound card, it kept giving me errors any time I pressed play. It would only play audio through the built in speaker on the Mac, which is basically worthless for me. The newer beta version seems to work fine with my soundcard once it loads… it freezes and sits there doing nothing for about a minute every time I start it up though, which is a little weird. Other than that it seems to be okay, and I’ll try using it for a couple more days before making any further criticisms…

Orchestra of Bubbles by Ellen Allien and Apparat, 2006

Finished up recording Laguna, I didn’t really do anything special with this one, lots of chorus and delay as usual, no parts that were particularly weird or different. Drums are, as usual, a simple scratch track. I’m mostly happy with the results, and manged to record it fairly quickly and painlessly for a change which was nice. You can listen to very rough first mix here.

Next up is preparing a 45 minute live set for the Transistor Festival. I’m going to up the tempo a bit, record and process some new x0x drum samples for the ESX-1, and tweak the existing Nord Modular parts to shoot for a blippy melodic tech-glitch feel along the lines of Gui Boratto and the latest Orb. We’ll see how it turns out…

SMiLE by Brian Wilson, 2004

The Mollusk by Ween, 1997

Silent Shout by The Knife, 2006

De Luxe by Harmonia, 1975

Finished recording and doing a (very) rough mix of flicker, which you can listen to here. Seven down, three to go. I’m mostly happy with this one, I used a lot of Moog MuRF for stereo effects, lots of chorus, as usual just a very basic drum sketch track, and there’s still a couple instrument parts I’m not 100% satisfied with, but it’s time to move on…

Next up is laguna, my favorite song of the bunch, so it should be fun. After laguna, I’m going to take a quick break from recording to work up a live version of this for the Transistor Festival, then finish recording the last two songs and then finally it will be time to polish and mix.

Rev by Ultra Vivid Scene, 1992

I am still looking into native reverb plugins, I would love to find something with a high end Lexicon type sound… lush and dreamy and shimmery. I really like my UAD Plate 140 plugin but it only emulates a specific plate reverb, and it requires a UAD card so I can’t use it on my laptop. I also like the Audio Damage Reverence plugin, but again it emulates a specific hardware reverb (one algorithm from an early Lexicon) and I’d like some more variety. I also have a couple hardware reverbs I’ll be using on the final mix, the Kurzweil KSP8 and the Roland SRV330, but one thing this project has definitely brought home is how much easier and convenient it is to work with plugins when possible.

I’ll probably try using demos of a few different ones during the mixing stage of this project, and then buy the one I like best. A couple of the ones I’m currently planning to try: