Mosiac Mosaic - Both Sides Of The Same Side EP

A wonderful piece of work by a member of IDM forums. A must download. What follows are my feelings of each track.

Irresolution (Solution)
Guitars bouncing back and forth backed by a dirty industrial complex. A very relaxing piece. Silky smooth reverberations that pulse and evolve yet stop just sort of a fantastic breakdown.

Bird Rib
Lots of crackling, bleeps and blops fly around the sound-field. Beautiful acoustic guitars combine with broken fax machines and stutter to a close.

If I Had A Hi-Fi
More upbeat from the start. Stuttering beats and rhythms breath life into the track. The guitar scratches away from the silence in the middle of the song adding a subtle layer that isn't noticeable at first but adds a warmth to the soul of the song.

Mr. Owl
A piece most ethereal - speaking of wise old age and patience. Everything is smooth and soft yet glitchy and noisy. A very soothing piece, reminiscent of Boards of Canada. Fine craftsmanship polished into an imperfect perfection. My favorite piece in the EP.

Overall this EP is simply put, brilliant - excellent. It has a cohesiveness that is hard to find and brings the whole album together into a netting of warmth. I can't help but compare it to BoC - dirty, warm, soft, silky, bubbly, and glitchy.

Highly recommended.

4 Tracks
Running time - 9:24
Download Link: http://www.idmforums.com/showthread.php?t=30960

coming along

I've been working (mostly) on the song that I started on the 19th. I've gotten a nice progression so far. Along with what I had, I've switched up the bassline with a few breaks, and added a couple extra instruments.

3-19-09b by pirahna1

I've changed a few things since this upload. Mainly lowering the cutoff on the bassline (it was a little too rezzy) and upped the last synth line an octave.

Along with this song I came up with two other loops. One's an arpeggiated Cynthia VST line with some drums and the other is a house-y riff with some simple drums. I'm keeping those on the backburner until I finish this song - just adding to them when I get an idea in my head.

I also got some graph paper out today to map out song structures. I was stumpted as to how to advance on my tunes - they tend to end up too repetitve. So I went after 'Got Glint?' by The Chemical Brothers. I love how their songs are simple in structure, yet have so much going on. They're masters at tossing about little effects and sounds. I'm going after that in my current work - hopefully I can come somewhat close.

back on track

After being lax on music for the last month I'm back in the groove. I went to revisit WiP 7 (out of 8) but ended up, as usual, starting a whole new track. It's really smooth and groovy - tastes like wine.

I was reading up on techniques, namely Breakbeats via Wikipedia. I knew the fundamentals thanks to The Chems, so I took a hand at creating a polyrhythm with a dash of syncopation for good measure. I came out with a funky little drum line. I planted a bassline on top of that and added some wispy pads on top. The result is a groovy little funker that I really dig. I only have 4 bars so far, but it's coming along nicely.

I also stumbled upon GOLD tonight. A persona by the name Kutiman takes youtube music clips and edits them together into entirely new songs. His project is called ThruYou and it's simply amazing. Not only is the music astounding, but the video editing is fascinating as well. At least listen to 'This is what I became' and 'Babylon Band', his style ranges from Jazz, to Hip-Hop, to Drum-and-Bass. It's just amazing the talent this man posseess. Great stuff, and very inspiring.

Working in progress

A couple days ago I scored a new set of headphones. Granted, they're $20 Sony MDR-V150's, but I was using a shotty $5 pair of Coby headphones with ripped wires that emitted a constant buzz. Once I get the funds I'll be upgrading to a pair of AKG K240's, along with a new soundcard (did I mention my current one crackles constantly and has the latency of a dying elephant?).

Today I uploaded a set of works in progress to Soundcloud (embedded below) to try and get a feel of where I should be heading. GAME 5.0 is coming up (releasing in June) and Project 168 kicks off on Monday, April 13. I would like to have 2 songs for GAME 5, and another 3-4 songs, comprising an EP, for P-168. I've been slacking on music lately, so I'm going to have to kick it into high gear to churn out 6 unique songs in April.

Give these WiPs a listen and let me know which you'd like to hear turned into a choon. I'm thinking of making an Acid-House track along with a complimentary ambient/chill tune for my set of GAME 5 songs. The theme is Summer, so it shouldn't be too hard to get into the vibe.

8 works in progress by pirahna1

GAME 4 Released!

GAME 4 has finally been released! You can visit the thread on NeoGAF or download the album directly from m0dus' website (that also includes the previous 3 GAME compilations).

GAME 3.1 will be released shortly, from what I understand. We're currently working on the theme for GAME 5, which will probably end up being a summer party themed album. We're looking at a June release date.

Time to get back in the studio!

I was abducted

Not really though. I haven't been making much music lately, took a little hiatus. Although I did manage a work around on that MIDI CC issue in FL Studio. Seems FL Studio has a bunch of MIDI channels that it doesn't respond to. I re-mapped my nanoKontrol around most of them. Some of them still pop up from time to time but it's not a huge deal anymore.

As such I want to work on a couple songs. I just remembered the IDMF compilation, I really have to bust my ass to get in on that. And it seems GAME 4.0 is finished, it just needs to be packaged and uploaded. Hopefully the people working on it can finish it by the end of the week. Regardless I'll post links up here when it's finished.

I broked MIDI CC 66 :(

So today in FL Studio I revisited an older project I was working on. It's a tight little acid line written on the TS 404. I wonder, is that v2 of the original stand-alone TS404 application? I wonder if Fruity bought them out? Anyways, I added a patch I had made in Synth1 called Ressosaurous. It's pretty acidic and thought it would mend well with my track.

So I go to set the arpeg gate to knob 9, scene 2 on my nanoKontrol (those black units look mighty fine) but I turn the knob a little too fast. Now, these knobs aren't the best in the world and are a tad flimsy. So when I do that FL totally bugs out and stops responding to that knob. At first I thought I broke the pot, but that knob worked fine on all other scenes. So I hop over to Ableton and that knob works fine on ALL scenes.

So here I'm stumped. I go into the Kontrol Editor and change the CC# on that knob/scene from 66 to 67 and viola! FL now recognizes that knob. So I turn on my Alesis QS6.1 and set slider D to CC 66 and guess what? Nothin' doin'. FL totally freaked out and now won't accept any form of CC 66. Not even after a reboot. I really don't want to reinstall FL yet again damnit.

So my music was cut short because I didn't feel like messing around with one less knob. It just totally ruined my workflow for the day. Hopefully I can find a solution, if not, here I come reinstall...

Vangelis

Today wasn't very productive. I caught a piano riff during work and quickly recorded it. It was just a simple major chord that I played along to Boards of Canada's 'The Beach at Redpoint'. I had some trouble nailing down the tempo so I aborted to a later time. Then I messed about with some stock Impulse banks and came up with a couple groovy little drum lines.

Over at IDMF someone asked how to get the Vangelis arpeggiation in the intro to Blade Runner. I poked around youtube for a bit and found a nice demo on how to get the strings for the intro, but nothing on the arpeggiation. Then I found a video of some guy going to town on the outro theme with his Korg Radias, Trinity and Moog Little Phatty. So I grabbed the chords from the video and recorded the outro into FL Studio using my newly created VangelisRunner patch. I might elaborate on it later and try and pull off the entire outro. Once I figure out the intro arp I'll record that as well. This time I'm doing the entire song though, none of that half-assed 'oh I got the chords down time to quit' shit I did with Underworld yesterday.

The Best Mamgu Ever

Today I decided to revisit my attempt at scoring Underworld's 'Best Mamgu Ever'. I had figured out a bit of the bassline a couple weeks ago so I gave it another go today. Man, does working with MIDI suck when you have a shit-ass sound card. I can audition the MIDI through my QS6.1 just fine, but as soon as I try and capture its audio I get a mess of noise. My motherboard is a piece of shit, I'll tell you what.

Anyway, I got the piano bit down after slowing the song down in Audacity. Now I just have to figure out the thousands of variations on the bassline they used. I have the opening two minutes out of a total of nine minutes. I'm going to be pulling an all-nighter and get this song layed down. From what I can tell there's not much going on, a pad in the background, some piano, and a solid bassline.

After this I might have a go at some more complex pieces, probably something from Nobuo Uematsu. I figure the best way, at least for me, to learn how to properly compose a song is to learn by doing. I'll figure out what key pieces are written in by re-composing them, how to transform from one line/riff to another, and how to play on chords throughout a song. Of course I'm still going to supplement all this with further reading.

Back to work!

A Drop in the Bucket

I actually worked on music today, how awesome is that? I picked up a nice arpeg in Synth1 and made a simple beat for it. Kick into claps into rolling hats into snares, just basic but building. Then I decided to toss a filter onto the arp and rise it through the intro. It's a nice effect and sounds good so far.

I was listening to some other works on Soundcloud and thought to myself that I should start recording some non-synthetic sounds from my QS. But I was in FL Studio, so I couldn't record from my non-shit soundcard (that's reserved for Ableton!). So I decided to load up my newly acquired E-Mu Proteus VX synth. I had a hell of a time trying to load the presets from that thing, a bad case of read the fucking manual. But once I did get the presets loaded I found another problem. Whenever I press the button to go to the next patch it skips two patches. So it's a complete pain in the ass to audition sounds. I eventually gave up and decided to export the song to Ableton as MIDI. Too bad that didn't work either...

So I got a nice little part going in FL, kinda stuck there at the moment. I went to add a bassline and all my inspiration was apparently gone and it just sounded like ass. I really need to read up on key signitures, harmony and chords. I've heard that dropping a bassline in the key of C sounds like ass when looped over a lead in the key of G or whatever. I'm really not sure what any of that means, even though I have a pretty strong background in music. I was never really taught chords or anything like that in band. Good old monophonic trumpets can't be bothered with that much theory apparently.

So now my task is to read up on music theory. Along with my previous task of organizing my damn sample library. Hopefully I can accomplish something bigger tomorrow. I know I keep saying that, but it's gotta happen one of these days!