slowburn

Wonder Waltz by Susumu Yokota, 2007

I’ve been sick the past few days, and was mostly coming up with random tasks to avoid recording the drum parts before that. So most of what has been accomplished has been organizational rather than creative.

- Started mixes of “tea&toast”, “flicker” and “upbeat”, even though I said I was going to finish up “bubble” “laguna” “rollover” and “lurp” first
- Have been making new full length mix CDs of the whole album and playing around with the song order a little
- Have the full mixed CD at almost exactly sixty minutes, which is where I wanted it
- Re-organized all the Logic song projects to get rid of alternate takes, name busses properly, etc so things look better and the Mackie Control displays useful info instead of 10 copies of the same track
- Changed songs from 0db pan law to -3db pan law, don’t ask why, it’s pretty boring, but just know it should have been -3db to begin with and I don’t know why it was set to 0db
- Have been working on the rough edges, so that I can listen to each song without getting annoyed by something
- Have been coming up with little plans for places and parts to add a little something extra special, to make sure I spend time trying to make the things I like even better instead of just joylessly eliminating the things I don’t like

Next up:
- Need to get over the drum recording mental hurdle and finish that up. I am always much less stressed once things have been recorded and I can move on to the tweak stage. Currently I’m suffering from option paralysis here and I need to get past that soon
- Need to work more on the transitions between songs now that I have the track order and mostly have the arrangements in their final form
- Need to think about how to give each song its own sonic character, while also keeping the album as a whole sounding coherent
- Need to think about what to do at the very beginning and very end of the album

On an unrelated note, the last two album of the days were downloaded using Amazon’s new mp3 service. 256kbps encoding, no DRM, pretty easy to use, catalog needs some work but getting there… about fricking time. Hopefully the record companies will let Apple and others do the same thing, so we can stop having boring arguments about various pointless digital formats and just get back to trying to make some music that people might want to listen to.

Sorcerer by Tangerine Dream, 1977

Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy by Múm, 2007

Audio Damage just released a new chorus plugin named Fluid that sounds fantastic. It’s the first one I’ve heard that matches up with the UAD Roland choruses and sounds like a “real” hardware chorus. It also has more control over the sound than the UAD ones do, but, importantly… not too much control. Sound-wise, it reminds me of the Analog Man Chorus pedal, which was modelled after the Electro-Harmonix Small Clone pedal and ended up being my favorite non-Roland chorus that I used during this project. This plugin along with AD’s through zero flanger Liquid and their analog-modelled delay Dubstation make a great vintage sounding plugin combo pack. I’ve already used Fluid on a couple slowburn tracks, I’ve been trying not to overuse Liquid, and Dubstation has been used heavily from the beginning.

Since we started the project, the native plugin effects world has really improved. Audio Damage released those effects, and SoundToys released their set of modelled plugins which also sound fantastic. Add in the latest release of AmpliTube, the native plugin versions of Line 6’s models, and the already superb UAD ones and things are really starting to get pretty good in the world of computer based effects. I’d go as far as to say that if all of these had been available when I started, I probably wouldn’t have bothered buying a bunch of hardware effects for this project. The flexibility and ease of use of software effects have been there for a while, now the sound is finally catching up, a few years behind when the same sort of progression happened with software synths.

Murmur by R.E.M., 1983

You won’t find many recent interviews with legendary producer Dr. Dre, one of my heroes. Eight years later, he is still working on his long awaited and much postponed Detox album (and you thought slowburn was taking a long time…).

Here’s an article from the LA Times.

Kontakte by Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1960

Quatermass by Tod Dockstader, 1964

Faust/So Far by Faust, 1971/1972