slowburn

The final rough mix is done and all the files have been backed up. Currently the project contains about 75 gigs of audio data, which is, let’s face it, somewhat excessive. But at least it’s all recorded and sitting there and waiting for the final bits of sonic shaping that will turn it into a 650mb or so CD.

I’ve been taking a break from listening to it over the long weekend, as I’ve finally started getting to that point where I’ve heard it so many times that I just don’t enjoy hearing it any more. So instead, I’ve been working on re-configuring the studio so that we can spend some time tweaking our live set for the Transistor Festival in June. This week we’ll start doing some of that work on the live set, and also begin working on the final slowburn mixes, one by one. I’m planning to start with the easiest songs and working our way through to the ones that still need some help. This is the final step for these songs, so I’ll write a little about each song as I work on it.

There was a slight delay in finishing up last week when a heatwave hit San Francisco. Being without A/C I was pretty much relegated to laying on the couch in front of a fan for a few days instead of working in the studio.

It has since cooled off, and all of the necessary work has been done on all the songs for the final rough mixes. Today I will be stitching together the sixty minute rough mix of the album from all the individual songs. We’ll listen to that mix for a few days and then crank out those final mixes one by one, focusing on reverb, EQ/compression, and adding a little magic and polish where needed for those last final touches.

Almost there…

Slight distraction the past few days when I received a Tenori-On earlier than I had expected. Or maybe I was working on slowburn longer than I had expected. Either way, I wasn’t supposed to get this until I finished up the album, but, well, here it is.

I’ll write up a full review once I have some more time to play with it, but the basic verdict is: fun!

Here are a couple quick song sketches I put together this weekend using just the Tenori-On and some plugin effects:

sunshinespring
blippybliss

Okay, enough of that fun stuff. It’s back to the slowburn salt mines for me. We hopefully will be ready to do the final mixes later this week…

Stop laughing, please! I’m serious this time… no, really… stop…

Nine Inch Nails released another album this morning. That makes three albums (one of them a double album), plus an album of remixes, since I started working on slowburn. Talk about making me feel like a slacker. Thanks a lot, Trent.

The album is completely 100% free to download, available in all sorts of high resolution audio formats here. You can even download a version that is higher fidelity than you would get on a CD. His business model gets weirder with each release, but obviously it is working for him creatively.

Slowburn is still almost ready for the final mix, hopefully by the end of this week. Maybe after it’s finally finished I can go on a productive tear and release a bunch of new music in a short amount of time, like Mr. Reznor. But I kind of doubt it.

Yes, I’ve been playing GTA4 this week just like everybody else. If you live under a rock, it’s an ultraviolent gangster themed videogame where you drive around carjacking, running over pedestrians, doing drive-bys, and otherwise ditching your moral compass and indulging in your darkest human impulses. It’s also a lot of fun and has a great sense of humor about itself. One of its nicest touches has always been the radio stations you listen to in the car, which are stocked chock full of good up-tempo heart-pumping music from a variety of genres and time periods (the Miami Vice themed GTA, for example, had lots of eighties music), with hilarious fake ads and DJs. In this latest installment they added an electronic ambient/chillout station, which, while seemingly unsuited to such a fast paced violent game, is nonetheless filled with incredibly good music. In fact, well over half of these tracks can be found in slowburn Album of the Day entries. So if you are playing the game and want to relax a bit while you contribute to the moral decay of society at large, turn that virtual dial to the “The Journey” radio station…

The Journey
DJ: A computer
Genre: Ambient/Chillout
Tracklist:
Global Communication – “8:07″
Terry Riley – “A Rainbow in Curved Air”
Steve Roach – “Arrival”
Michael Shrieve – “Communique ‘Approach Spiral’”
Jean Michel Jarre – “Oxygène, Pt 4″
Philip Glass – “Pruit Igoe”
Tangerine Dream – “Remote Viewing”
Aphex Twin – “Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 CD2 Track 5″
Ray Lynch – “The Oh of Pleasure”

Update: Here’s an article on how Rockstar made it so you can buy mp3s of the songs you are hearing on the radio while playing the game. Also talks a little about them being very into the music/soundtrack aspect of their games, and briefly mentions Rock Band / Guitar Hero.

On the slowburn front I am making slow but steady progress every night. I’m currently working on adding little random blips and build ups to each song, after that I want to add some extended sections of weird abstract synth noises in a few places. I have a list of every sound I want to make, and every place I want to put them, so right now I am just making them and checking them off one by one. I will hopefully be completely done with this in about a week, and then we will be ready to do the final (yes, final!) mix.

I am also planning on buying that Tenori-ON thing, and will put up a review and some samples once I get it.