slowburn

Any time I feel like this project is taking waaaay too long, I try to cheer up by reminding myself that Axl Rose has spent fifteen years on the next would-be Guns’N'Roses album “Chinese Democracy”. This doomed project has been spinning its wheels in the mud so long it has become the stuff of legend. Every so often they will give a release date, the last one was this month actually, and then when that date finally arrives they pretend it never happened. And now, apparently, Dr. Pepper has offered to give a free can of soda to every person in the USA (except Slash and Buckethead, for playing a part in delaying Axl’s grand vision) if the album finally gets released this year. This is a strange promotion, and I’m not sure if Guns’N'Roses are part of it or if Dr. Pepper just decided it was a funny way to get a bunch of free publicity. If the latter, obviously it worked.

Anyway, submodern is currently in negotiations with the Fresca corporation for a similar deal for “slowburn”. Stay tuned, we will hopefully be able to make a formal announcement via worldwide press release sometime around April 1st.

One of the next (and last) steps is to make some strange Nord Modular noises for various spots in the album. In some cases this is to have something extra that leads up to a big build or drop. In other cases it’s to fill in space between songs. And sometimes it’s just to have some weird ear candy to make things more interesting.

So I’ve been building a weird-noise base patch in the Nord Modular that lets me play around with making the noises using just a keyboard and the Nord Modular knobs, rather than programming each one individually with a mouse using the computer editor. I’ve found that it is easier and more effective to make these sorts of noises by finding interesting sounds while twisting knobs with my right brain rather than thinking everything through ahead of time with my left brain. In the latter case, I often waste a lot of time coming up with things that are interesting in theory (”What if this modulates this, while this modulates that modulating this…”) but when realised either don’t fit or are just plain boring to listen to. So I loop the part of the song that needs a noise, and just mess around with my weird-noise preset patch until I find something close to what I’m looking for. Then I go back to the computer editor and fine tune things with additional modulations or fine tuned parameter tweaks or whatever.

As an aside, an interesting thing I ran across recently is this open source Nord Modular editor. As I’ve mentioned before, the Nord Modular synth requires a computer editor to make new patches. You configure the synth in that editor, with various modules and connections as shown in the picture above, and then you download that to the synth itself. Once its in the synth, you can play that patch using a keyboard and the various knobs, which you assigned to various parameters using that computer editor. Without the editor, you can’t make new patches or re-assign the knobs to new parameters. When Clavia came out with their version 2 of the Nord Modular, they both discontinued the editor for the old one and refused to open source it, which pissed me off greatly since the old editor didn’t work well in OS X. Eventually (after it was leaked anyway) they released a beta version of an OS X editor, but refused to fix the bugs and again refused to open source it. Anyway, these guys reverse engineered the synth and wrote their own editor in easily portable Java, so now all future versions of Windows and MacOS and whatever else will be able to edit these synths, and they won’t become useless. I haven’t tried it out yet because its still in the beta stage and requires some Java library configuration stuff I am hesitant to do at this stage in the project (I am basically completely paranoid about changing anything until this is finally done), but I look forward to trying it out soon. Really cool!

Anyway, the album as a whole is still going through its endless iterations, getting closer (hopefully) each time through. I still need to post up that to-do list as an example of the sorts of things I’m doing. Right now though, making random noises in the spots that need them is the focus.

Universal Audio released another couple of plugins for their UAD card. The first one is yet another compressor, this one modelled after the DBX 160. I had zero intentions of getting this, because I have enough compressor plugs already, but I activated the free trial and found that I really like sending drums through it… plus it has very few controls and is incredibly simple to use, which is always a plus. So I may have to get it, we’ll see. The other one is an enhancer plugin, which is something I wanted and expected to maybe buy, but so far it is just sounding okay on the slowburn tracks. I need to play with it some more and read the manual, maybe it’s more complicated to set up than it seems and I’m just using it wrong. In theory I would use this one on tracks that were sounding a little boring to enhance/excite them and bring them to the front a bit more.

The full slowburn mix has been put together and I am listening to it a couple times a day, and coming up with to-do lists for each track. I’m planning to post the to-do lists up here to help keep track of what’s getting done, and embarass me into working on it more. The album is sounding pretty good at this point though, I think. I’m particularly happy that the latest tracks I’ve worked on are sounding the best, and the earliest tracks are the ones that need the most work. This tells me that my skills and process were improving as I kept working on the songs and the extra time was well spent.

We are also now scheduled for another appearance at the Transistor Festival in Denver in June, which will hopefully prod me into finishing the album up so we can start work on a live set.

They aren’t done, but they’re as close as the other songs are, and I feel like I’ve been chasing my tail for most of the last week and not making great progress. So here is the last set of three songs: bubblepop, laguna, and rollover. There are still some bits that aren’t quite there, and the drums haven’t quite gelled, but hopefully I can fix everything up as we move on to the next stage.

That next step is to assemble all ten songs together into the full continuous sixty minute album, add or extend some interludes to help with the overall tension and release, add some noises and bleeps to certain songs, reduce some of the sonic clutter and hide the parts I’m not happy with, enhance and emphasize the parts that really work, and try to make sure each song has something that sets it apart in the overall mix. I also have to finish up the last song, which is currently in an incomplete state since it wasn’t part of any of the three sets of three songs.

After that, the last step will be to bounce out all the individual tracks and do the final (finally!) mix. This will entail creating the final reverb patches, doing corrective EQing and sidechain compression/gating to fix mix problems, and the final volume automation. This stage is basically all technical work. We’ll also be able to make remix packs from the bounced files for people to play with.

I’m going to take a break for a couple days, listen to the current full length mix, and then get back to work and hopefully finish things up soon. I think it’s sounding pretty good at this point, but I also know I’ve listened to it so many times that I’ve lost a lot of perspective, so we’ll see…

I’m using the Mutronics Mutator filter on some of the laguna drum sounds. Unlike the previously mentioned weirdo Jomox, this one is pretty much your basic standard low-pass filter with cutoff, resonance, an envelope, and an LFO. Like the Jomox, it has two filters that work independently on the left and right channels, so you can get some fun stereo effects. One thing I like is being able to set the sensitivity of the input into the envelope, unlike on the Jomox where you have to actually change the level of the input itself if you want to trigger the envelope differently. I also like how it has left and right knob controls for pretty much everything you’d want a filter to do: envelope amount/attack/decay, LFO amount/shape/speed, cutoff, resonance. It also has nice MIDI and CV control options.

The only problem is that I haven’t really warmed up to the basic sound of the thing. It sounds nice enough I guess, but very clean and kind of boring. To me it just sounds like a regular old lowpass filter (albeit with various handy modulations) no matter how you set it. Which is a good thing in many respects, but is also the sort of sound that these days is easier done with a software plugin. I wish I could put the sound of some of my other filters into this one’s form (rackmount is nice) and controls (knobs for everything). Also, they’ve been discontinued and for whatever reason people really like them and recommend them constantly, so they are fetching a decent amount of money at the moment. In fact, it sells for about as much as all my other filters combined, and I have a decent (maybe even indecent) number of filters. I feel kind of lame and vaguely guilty owning something that is discontinued and rare and expensive but that I’m just not crazy about, and that somebody else would probably love to use. So, when this project is done I will likely sell it and just stick with my other cheaper and weirder filters.

Here’s a demo of a Korg Electribe ER-1 making some bloops that are then run through the Mutator. First four bars just the Electribe dry, then each four bars after that with some different settings on the Mutator. Listen in stereo if possible.

Mutator Demo

I’ve been using the Jomox M-Resonator filter on the rollover drum sounds. The drums were sounding kind of boring so I decided to go heavy on the filtering for one song and throw it on (almost) everything. The Jomox is a weird little box, it has stereo ins and outs and has a pair of standard lowpass filters with envelope followers, so in theory it’s just your standard stereo lowpass filter. But, it also has some weird feedback paths, both within each filter (the traditional resonance can go positive or negative) as well as feedback (again positive and negative) mixed between the two filters.

The result very easily turns into weird distorted feedback madness that does not at all resemble the original signal. In fact on a lot of settings the thing sounds more like an extreme distortion effect than a filter effect. Which is to say, basically, the sort of thing that is fun to play with but not very useful in most musical contexts. So you have to find the sweet spots within all the various feedback paths, and since the two filters are affecting the right and left sides differently you can get some interesting stereo effects. At the same time, turning any knob in the slightest can result in howling, painful feedback, and there is only so much rational thought you can put into predicting what turning a particular knob will do… at some point the thing just kind of seems to do whatever it wants to do. For this reason, I don’t see it as a very useful live box, its just too random and crazy, but it’s a lot of fun to experiment with in the studio.

Hooked up to the Machinedrum, the feedback seems to reinforce the bass and make everything a little more interesting. You do need to pay attention to the input levels, since the envelope that gets triggered by them has a big effect on the results. As long as you don’t overdo it, it can be pretty cool without being too obnoxious. And it can be kind of cool when you overdo it too…

A little Jomox Demo, where I go out of my way not to overdo it. A Machinedrum pattern into the Jomox, first four bars dry, then each four bars with a slightly different M-Resonator setting. I did not include any of the really messed up ones, these mostly sound like a normal filter, with some interesting stereo bits.

Of course you can also just use it to make bizarre howling feedback noises, with or without an input signal. This isn’t really my thing musically, so I mostly avoid those bits, but as I mentioned before it’s hard not to stumble upon them just by turning a knob a little too much. Here’s a Youtube video made by somebody that shows its weirder side.

The last set of three songs is almost done, they have one more cycle of listen’n'revise to go through and then I’ll put them up and move on to the full mix.

Nine Inch Nails released another album today, pretty much out of nowhere. This one is two hours of instrumental electronic soundscapes, which is exactly what I’ve been wanting to hear from Trent Reznor for a long time. So far I’m digging it. Priced at $5 for download in a variety of formats, you can’t beat that. Available from his NiN site, which is currently completely overloaded, or through Amazon’s mp3 store. Also available are fancier versions, one of which again includes all the master tracks, for all sorts of remix fun. And a completely free version, that is the first quarter of the album.

To make the album, he holed himself away in the studio with some collaborators for ten weeks with the goal of releasing whatever random stuff they came up with. Ah, I remember when I thought slowburn was only going to take ten weeks… that was over a year ago I believe…

He also released three of his older tracks for my favorite video game Rock Band last week. Trying to play the drum and bass tempo breakbeats of “The Perfect Drug” on the drums is fairly insane.