Hypno dance

So, what's that picture about then? What does a cartoon character wearing a cape and a top hat has to do with the production of house music? Well, that character is no other than my favorite comic book superhero Mandrake the Magician! He had the ability to hypnotize people (and other creatures as well) by simple gestures. And that's what good house music often does, it hypnotizes people with very simple ingredients, often with nothing more than a simple loop that changes in minor ways for the whole duration of the track.

The question is, what makes something hypnotic and alluring while something else that's superficially similar bores you to death after 3 seconds? What's the secret trick? The answer is, sadly, that there is no secret trick. Knowing how to make something simple, yet interesting is what separates the men from the boys, the Kerris from the amateurs like me. It takes lots of practice, good taste and a deeper level of understanding of what works in the context of house music. Ie. things I don't really possess.

Which makes this particular post rather hard to write.  I don't feel I'm qualified to say anything meaningful about the subject but it's an important subject so I must at least think about it, even if I don't manage to say anything of worth in the end.

What I do know is that music I consider hypnotic is often very loopy and subtle, as drastic changes break off the hypnosis. There's also almost always some sort of a catchy, yet simple riff  and the drums advance the track in a subtle way instead of banging in your face. Chords are often involved in the equation as well, in one way or another. Naturally, these qualities are not unique to hypnotic music, they pretty much cover most music in the deeper end of house, at least on a superficial level.

What separates a basic, half-decent loop from a stroke of genius is in the details. The riff works on a musical level as well as on a rhythmical level. The chords accompany that riff well in a kind of a dreamy, ethereal way and of course, sometimes the chords are the riff. The drumming is simple and rolling, but every drum sound and beat is well thought of. There's nothing extra that the ear and the mind would find distracting. Everything just works. Every note and drum hit brings you closer and closer towards a dream-like state, that special vibe that allows you to dance for hours without even noticing how much time has passed. The hypnosis only breaks off when the lights come on at the end of the night. And of course, when a bad DJ plays something that doesn't work but that's an entirely different subject.

Dance music is rarely musically very complex. There isn't that many notes and at least in house and techno, the drums are usually fairly basic four on the floor type of rhythms. Getting down a basic idea of a track is thus often quite a quick process. If a melody consists of just three notes repeating, it doesn't take that long to find a good combination of them. But and this is quite a big but, the job doesn't end there.  Because it's so simple, every note must count. Every note must be just perfect. The perfect sound, the perfect notes, the perfect combination of all the variables that affect how that simple melody is perceived by the listener. It can take quite a bit of time to get those three notes working together just right. While I usually work quite fast, I typically spend the longest time on getting those tiny details of the main loop the way I want them to be. After that process, the track more or less just writes itself. If the main loop doesn't work, it can actually take more time to sort out the mess later, that's why I spend a considerable percentage of my music making time on those little details that make a boring little loop into something that can, at least in theory, be listened to for a very long time.


What kind of details are important then when you want to write a track that allures the listener? That one is impossible to answer without the context of an actual track. Sometimes stuff just happens almost automatically, all the pieces of the puzzle fall right in their places in a very short amount of time. Sometimes you spend 2 hours on editing just one tiny thing. You also got to learn out of the habit of over-editing things. When they sound right they are right, even if spending just 30 seconds on something important may seem like a mistake of some kind. Learn to trust your ears! Making music has no rules, the only thing that counts is you.

And that's it. More or less, just another episode of Seinfeld (ie. a show about nothing). I've been busy making tracks so this blog has slightly suffered as a result.  I'll try to write something a bit more meaningful in the future.

I also made a track, where I tried to emphasize the hypnotic effect. With or without success, how the heck should I know? The track also turned out almost techno-like. It's a constant issue I have to deal with, as I used to make techno for a long time and the things I learned during those years can easily overcome my housier side. Anyways, it is what it is. House, techno, something in between, I have no idea.

Groove is in the heart

Groove. What the heck is that then? Sure, it makes you wanna dance and shake your rump but what exactly is groove and more specifically, how do you achieve groove?

Some people say you are just born with it and that it's impossible to learn. What a load of bollocks! At least according to my knowledge, Bootsy Collins wasn't born with  a bass guitar. He might be extremely gifted in the sense that it was easier  for him to learn to play that instrument than it would be for someone else. Still, most people with a working brain and a pair of working hands can learn to play it funky. It just takes dedication, motivation and understanding the building blocks of what groove consists of, either intuitively or via careful analysis.

In house music it's even easier. You can manage with just one hand and at a pinch, with a set of very nimble toes. In house music you can even cheat. You can sample a funky drummer (quite literally) and use that sampled loop in it's entirety or if you think that's lame or too old school, you can always use some fancy piece of software that extracts just the groove out of that funky drum loop. You don't have to know how to play an instrument, you can just program stuff until it sounds funky enough for you.


It's never THAT easy though. Even when you use every cheap trick in the book, you still gotta understand how groove works and learn to recognize when your  loop grooves and when does it need extra work. As I often do, I try to chop a big problem into smaller, more manageable pieces.

According to my research, there are four major factors that contribute to groove. Timing, the sound itself, the shape of the sound and interaction of the elements.


Timing. The most obvious one but also the hardest one. For the groove to be, well, groovy, there's no room for mistakes. One drum hit or a bassline note slightly in the  wrong place and the groove falls apart. This doesn't mean that everything should be tightly quantized or otherwise in a robotic order, quite the contrary. Slight, controlled timing fluctuations create the groove, particularly if we're talking about playing instruments and not just programming them. I won't touch the subject of playing here, simply because I'm not that much of a player and I don't have anything of note to say about it. The easiest way to create those slight, controller timing fluctuations is by using the swing function of your sequencer. Most sequencers and drum machines have some sort of a swing parameter to work with. Not all swings are equal however. Some sequencers create beautiful swing while some have swing that sounds like a drunken robot was playing it. Swing is only one way to do it though, often you simply want to manually move notes around until a  groove shows up. Though, I must admit that I'm a bit lazy at this part, I often use quite rigid quantization and choose to create the groove by moulding the sounds to my liking and sometimes messing with channel midi timing offset values.

Related to timing is the length of the notes. Might sound trivial, but is actually quite important. Da da da da doesn't sound rhythmically very interesting. Da daa daa da is a bit better. In real life situations, you might want to spend a quite a bit of time on getting the note lenghths just right. Often a simple riff can be quite boring with equal length notes, but if you play with the lengths, all kinds of interesting rhythms start to show up. I don't think there's a formula to this either, just play around with the values until you like the results.
 

The sound.  What does the sound have to do with groove you might ask? A lot, actually. While a skilled programmer or player might be able to make everything sound really funky, in reality some instruments just sound funkier than others. A bass guitar is much funkier than something that creates long, sustained tones for starters. Even in relatively similar sounds the differences in the funk factor can be tremendous. Many people, me included, like to sample old dusty breakbeats, chop them up and re-arrange the pieces. If you're not even using the same rhythm as the original sample, only the sounds the sample contains why do this? Why not just use something that's less immoral and illegal, like one shots from drum machines or acoustic drums from a sample pack? The answer is that those old, crackly, dusty drum sounds simply contain something that is either impossible or at the very least very difficult to create with anything else. They contain the essence of funk, which you can use to your advantage. Usually, when I make or audition sounds, playing just one note or a drum hit is enough to tell me whether it has the funk or not. A good sound inspires me to make something funky as well. Using bad or unsuitable sounds might not get me the kind of results I want, simply because it doesn't inspire me at all. Some people can make complete compositions on one instrument and only later transfer that composition to the instruments that end up in the final recording. I'm definitely not like that, I need to have the right sounds or at the very least, sounds that are in the ballpark from almost the very beginning.

The shape of the sound. What does that mean then and why is it important? It's actually of utmost importance. Unless you take your sounds from some sort of a premade kit, it's unlikely that they play well together and especially groove well together. You usually pick  or make sounds that kinda sound nice together, but don't fit perfectly. That's where the tools that mould the shape of the sounds come into play. In practice, if you want perfect results, you got to spend quite a bit of time with envelopes, compressors, transient designers and such until the whole ensemble plays and grooves together as one. It's of course possible to just get lucky and simply stumble upon sounds that sound groove well together, but most of the time you have to do some pretty heavy-handed production work. Especially important is working on the attack phase of the sounds. Sometimes all a sound needs is a small tweak of the attack stage of an envelope. Sometimes you it needs a series of tools, all doing relatively minor things which then add up to create a sound that works in the context of your track. It's very situation dependent and you need to really know your tools as there's simply too many variable for random knob twiddling to work.

Interaction of the elements. Unless you're using some sort of a premade construction kit, it's unlikely that a hodge podge collection of random sounds works together as a whole. You must pick, make or edit sounds so that they make musical sense together. Even though it sounds easy, it's a difficult thing to pull off without resorting to cliches. Something like 909 + 101 + Juno is a formula that works, but it's also a formula that's been used on thousands of records already. Not saying that it's impossible to write a good house track with just those instruments, but it'd be very difficult to make something that really stands out and has it's own personality. It's difficult enough with other tools already, no need to make things even harder.

How do the elements interact then? What causes it? Unfortunately, it's something that's very difficult to explain, especially by an amateur. My best advice and the one that I've given myself is simply learning to listen properly.  Try different things, learn to recognize when the elements are in the pocket. Listen to other people's music in a similar vein, try to hear why they work and your music doesn't.

And that's it for now. I would've liked to write more about the subject, but most of my free time is spent on actually making music, this blog is just a documentary side project of it. Most of the advice is more or less just about using your ears. Then again, that's very important and something I occasionally forget to do too.

Oh, and I made a new track too. I tried to focus on the groove, but not so sure it turned out the way I wanted to.

4 hour party people

The topic of today is efficiency, getting things done in a short period of time.

Even though I've always worked fast, particularly with my former hardware setup, the strict deadline I have for this project means that I must work even faster and with even more efficiency. I have no time for procastrinating or wasting time on irrelevant things. I must focus focus focus on the task at hand and do my best to improve as much as possible with the time I have left. Which isn't much, only 2,5 months as we speak. Now, I've already made some decent progress so far both from my own point of view as well as according to others. However, this isn't a cause for celebration. I'll open the champagne bottles in July if I manage to reach my goal. Until then, I'll settle for a single pint of cheap production beer.

While I've always been a fast and efficient worker at whatever job I had at the time, the creative arts are something else. You can't just show up at 8'o clock in the morning, put your working gloves on and start working. It just doesn't quite work like that in music or at least, it doesn't work like that for me. I need the right mood, the right spirit, the right mindset that allows me to focus analytically. Those don't just appear out of thin air, unfortunately. They need to be lured out somehow.

The first 3 weeks of this project were very easy in that department, I was feeling really creative and energetic, I was able to just turn on the DAW anytime I wanted and write something I was at least somewhat satisfied with. The last week has been something entirely different. All music, including masterpieces I usually love, have just sounded plain bad. I've been unable to turn on the DAW without forcing myself. I was unable to judge what I had written because everything just sounded wrong. I might have accidentally created and deleted the greatest melody ever written, simply because I've been unable to analyze anything.

But, since the ongoing topic of this  blog is improving myself both as  a producer as well as a human being, I decided to take the bull by the horns. For a second I imagined that my mouse is a sling and I have to take down the mighty beast that is Goliath. At least for the time being it seems to have worked, as I managed to write this track in about 4 hours. It's not the greatest thing ever written, but that wasn't the point either. I just had to regain my confidence, show myself that I can start and finish tracks, not just write a loop and listen to it for 10 hours, thinking about what to do about it.




Okay, mission accomplished. Sorta, kinda. It's just one track. How about something more generic instead of just something that applied to this particular situation? How do you do something creative when you simply have to do so, because of a specific deadline or simply because your income is dependent on it? How do you force yourself to be creative when in fact you'd rather watch a few seasons of Seinfeld?

As always, there is no universal answer to that question.  We're all individuals, what works for me might not work for others. For me, there are three major factors that lure the creative spirit in me out of it's cave and allow me to actually finish something relatively quickly.

1) Inspiration. Quite obvious. Listen to something great and it might inspire you to write something great too. There's more to that than meets the eye however. It's not always clear what exactly might inspire you. It's not necessarily even music. Eating a delicious pizza when you're suffering from the mother of all hangovers can be a borderline religious experience. Watching a great movie or a TV show can trigger your creative side. Even if it's as simple as listening to music, it's not always clear what music exactly will do the trick. Sometimes something similar than you want to make might work, sometimes it might be black metal. Thankfully, living in the 21st century has it's merits such as having instant access to practically any kind of music you can think of for free, thanks to Youtube. It can be extremely inspiring to just listen to something you didn't even know existed. Happy accidents for the win! Or if that doesn't tickle your fancy you can always just play something that you know you love, even if you don't own the record yourself. Listening to other people's music to find inspiration is of particular value once you have trained your ears to analyze what's going on. Not necessarily traditional music theory analysis, just having a keen ear and being able to spot things other people don't even hear unless they're pointed out to them. Production tricks, arrangement, melodies, harmonies, rhythms, most forms of music have something of value that can be useful to analyze and learn. The most important thing in this is that it can set your mind to the right state, a creative state. You don't necessarily need to copy the things you heard or make anything resembling the source of inpiration. You just want to enter that "I wanna make music and I wanna make it right now" kind of zone.

2) Knowledge. By this I mean musical knowledge (the scales, the chords and such) production knowledge (when and how to use EQ, compression, reverb and so on) and simply knowing the tools you own from the inside out, so when that moment of genius hits you you are actually able to do something about it and not just spend the next 3 hours finding the right kick or whatever. Gathering this knowledge can take some time, quite a long time actually. There are some shortcuts such as Youtube tutorials, but those usually just scratch the surface or alternatively, aren't that relevant to what you want to accomplish. Very few people are able to make great music with little to no training. Some insanely talented individuals perhaps, but most require years of practice and hard work to reach a satisfactory level, some never reach that. Once you reach that level however, you can very quickly turn a simple idea into something resembling a finished track. At least for the way I work, it's important to get a rough skeleton of a track quite quickly. It's hard for me to imagine, for example, what might happen after the breakdown if all I have is a short loop. That's why I quite often make a rough arrangement quite early on, to have some sort of a frame which I can later fill with better elements. Without that frame I very easily fall into loop zone and just play the same thing for hours, doing irrelevant, minor edits instead of focusing on what's really important. Having something that roughly feels like a complete track helps me to actually finish that track to a satisfactory level.

3) Planning. Related to knowledge, but still somewhat a different entity. By planning I mean that you should know what you want to achieve. It's not always relevant of course, sometimes you want to just experiment. But when you're stuck, it can be useful to have some sort of a plan that you follow. The plan could be something quite specific, like "I want to make a track like Bar A Thym with cowbells and parallel chords". It could also be something like "Today I will learn how to use polyrhythms".  The way I usually do it is by simply using a template in my DAW which has a basic house beat ready and all sorts of carefully chosen plugins ready to be used. Some might condemn that kind of behaviour, saying it leads to just repeating some kind of a stagnated formula. In a way it's true, I openly admit that I'm not trying to invent anything groundbreaking here. I just want to write a great house track. Having that template saves me about 30 minutes of work that I'll nearly always do the same way anyway. It also means that I can just start laying down musical ideas, instead of going through tons of tools.

That's pretty much it. When I don't feel creative but have free time and the desire to make house music, I just simply listen to something inspiring, then load my template and use the knowledge I've gathered over the years. Sounds pretty basic, but the difference is that I do it consciously, after analysing what works for me. It's not random, it's not something I read from a book, it's just what works for me personally. Just aimlessly throwing sounds together is fun of course, I've spent countless of hours on that. However, now my aim is to get certain kind of results in just a few months, so I must streamline my process, almost to a degree of building some sort of a house music assembly line. Sounds quite boring when I put it like that, but that's what you get when you start a crazy project like this.

Unfinished business

I haven't been feeling that great the last couple of days. All music, either from me or music that I usually love just sounds really bad. I know, it happens to everyone every once in a while. I just gotta find a way to snap out of it somehow as I have no time to waste.

I did manage to write a new track too, but since I feel the way I do it's simply impossible to work on it anymore so I'll just leave it here as it is, call it done and move on to the next project. It's not a great track by any means and could use tons of extra work, but I just gotta get it out of my system.



I do have about four unfinished blog posts in the works as well, about various aspects of production. I'm constantly working on those too and hopefully will have something worthwhile to say in the next few days.

There's nothing going on but the rent

This post was originally going to be about how to make something simple and hypnotic. I studied the subject, tried to analyse some hypnotic house tracks but in the end I just felt that I'm not qualified yet to say anything meaningful about the subject, so I'll save that topic for a later date.

I also tried to make a track that is simple and hypnotic but I don't think I succeeded very well in that either.

So, the last few days have been full of failure and I feel slightly disheartened. I have no time for self-loathing though, just gotta pull my head out of the gutter and get back to work.

Here's the latest track. Hypnotic or just plain boring, you be the judge of that.

Minimal nation

This time I'll talk about what minimalism means in the context of house music, according to me.

It's easier to start by defining what minimalism is not. Minimalism is not genre, it can be applied to any form of music. Minimalism is not about making a boring loop, playing it for six minutes and calling it a finished track. Minimalism is not about using an artificially limited amount of elements just for the sake of it.

What is it then? It's a way of thinking, sort of like a philosophy applied to music production. It's about adding only the elements the track in question really needs and nothing else. Sometimes a minimalist piece might actually need lots of elements (such as in Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians - which as the title suggests is written for  18 musicians and is sometimes performed with even more than that), but it's still considered a minimalist piece while something else might be composed for just four musicians but would not be minimalist in nature no matter how far you stretch the definition.

Minimalism in techno is well documented as well and there's an entire sub genre called minimal techno, even if some of the music associated with it actually rather maximal. However, often when people try to make minimal techno they are more interested in what equipment Robert Hood happened to have in his disposal in the 90's, rather than actually try approach their own music from a minimalist point of view. No, you don't need a vintage 909 to make minimal techno. You need the right mindset and the right vision.

 Steve Reich and Robert Hood aside, how about house music then? How does one strip a house track to it's bare essentials, yet make it funky and danceable and interesting enough so that the listeners don't get bored? It's a fine line and one of my main weaknesses actually. I tend to hide my poor taste and my  lack of compositional and arrangement skills with a wall of sounds, effects and mediocre, useless melodies.  It's an area where I really have to improve, learn to concentrate on what's important for the track I'm making and lose the rest, or at the very least use the less important bits more sparingly.

The basic principle is that the less elements your track has, the better they need to be if your goal is to make a track that hypnotizes the listener for 6 or so minutes. To an extent, everything has to be just perfect, because in a barebone track even the slightest of mistakes can break the illusion. Perfect sounds, perfect melodies, chords and rhythms, perfect arrangement, perfect mixdown. Perfect everything pretty much. Sounds like a daunting task but fortunately, pioneers did most of the hard work already so you don't have to start everything from scratch. If you've listened to house for a long time you probably already have some kind of an idea how things should sound like and how a house track is structured. I'm not suggesting directly copying an existing tracks (except as an exercise), just trying to say that you should carefully analyse them and see how and why they work. If you don't analyse them and dissect them, you're more or less just guessing. There is no shame in using a frame someone else created, especially in the context of this blog where I'm not even trying to invent something new, just trying to learn how to make a great house track.

What does perfect mean then? It doesn't mean an over polished pop production, neither does it mean a great composition in a classical music sense. It simply means that within the boundaries of the track you're working on, everything just fits and there's no extra fat. Everything makes sense. It sounds good sonically, even if it contains distorted or lofi elements. The melody (if it even has one) might only contain a handful of notes, but they are the right notes. The same goes for chords. There are some amazing tracks that have no melodies at all and the chord progression is just one chord repeating over and over again. Aril Brikha's Groove La Chord comes to mind immediately. That doesn't mean that every track using similar elements is great. Most of them suck and suck badly actually. Brikha just happens to have great taste, vision and a good sense of drama. He can write a more complex melody or a chord progression too, it's just that Groove La Chord didn't need anything more complex than what it has. A lesser musician would've either added more notes and made it unnecessarily complex or alternatively, his lack of dramatic sense would've resulted in an arrangement that doesn't do justice to the the elements.

Speaking of arrangement, it's one of the most important if not the most important aspect of a minimal track. Some rather minimal tracks actually contain lots of different elements. They are just used sparingly when needed and are almost never all played at the same time. Those elements are also purposefully introduced or removed at certain points, where they make dramatic sense. Two different tracks might be superficially similar, but if the other track is arranged to tell some kind of a story and the other is just a loop with elements dropped in and out almost randomly, it's the first one that will get noticed and played by the key DJ's.

One could go on and on about this subject, but I decided to stop right here and keep it minimal (pun intented). Feeling somewhat exhausted  so it's difficult to think clearly, write in a coherent manner even less so. So I'll just leave this as it is, maybe return to the subject later.

Oh, and I also have a new track! Again, I tried to make something relevant to the topic at hand. Stripped down, minimal house track, using only what the track needs and nothing else. I would've preferred to make it even more stripped down but I'm not perfect, it is what it is. Also tried to inject a bit of humour into it with that speech sample from an interview of a certain, quite famous musician known for his opulence and pomposity.

Deep inside

What is deep? What does it mean in the context of music to be more specific?

As with almost all music-related subjects the answer is: It depends. Depth is not a scientific measure, it's a highly personal issue. To get a feeling of depth some people require lyrics, some people prefer instrumental music. Some find depth in complex music, while some get anxious from listening to the very same track. Some like it really simple while some others find simplicity boring,  unmusical and especially lacking any real depth.

It depends.

Which is why this topic is so difficult to write anything meaningful about. I've been consciously trying to avoid using the phrase deep house (until now that is) in my blog. It used to be a phrase that at least tried to mean something. Usually something like a Theo Parrish or a Larry Heard record. Nowadays it has lost it's meaning and is casually used with almost any four on the floor song that is somewhat mellower than a typical EDM banger. I try to avoid it and to honest, I wasn't the biggest fan of it in the first place. Just like intelligent dance music, deep house sounds quite pretentious and artificial. It tries to make it sound better than it actually is. It's only music, house music, that evokes certain kind of emotions in certain people. That's not a real, defined genre (not that defining genres is ever easy). It's all just house music to me. Some of it just happens to awaken deep emotions in me but there are no strict rules for what causes it, neither can you  make a repeatable formula out of it.

Typically, music that evokes deep, positive emotions in me is fairly mellow and moody, doesn't have a fast tempo and uses sounds that are smooth and soothing instead of harsh and abrasive.  Most of the time it's instrumental too, as lyrics often break the illusion of depth in a sense that you have to think and feel what an instrumental track is about, vocal tracks often announce what they are about in clear words. But, these are not rigid rules. Some fast music is quite deep to me, such as certain forms of drum & bass. Some lyrics are deep. Sometimes it can be quite aggressive even.  So, it's impossible to make a formula out of it,  not even in a house music context.

Which brings us to an important question: If you can't define it in any meaningful way, why bother to write about it at all? Well, first of all this blog is not about science, it's about my personal journey written from my own point of view so I write about whatever I feel like or what I think is somehow important or useful on my ambitious quest.

It's also very useful to think about these things, even if they don't lead to anything immediately useful and concrete. I had no idea what I wanted to write about the concept of depth, so I started to think about it and wrote down my thoughts. It was never something I was consciously thinking about, I just felt depth in some tracks and not in others, even if the tracks in question were quite similar.


I also didn't just babble about the subject and waste all day writing this! Thinking and expressing ideas in literal form is useful but I also wanted something concrete, a soundtrack for this blog post. I didn't want to use an existing track so I made my own instead. It's a bit of a sidestep as the track I made is very chill and relaxed, not necessarily something that Kerri might play at peaktime hours. However, it was an useful exercise and I learned a few new tricks, so it was in no way time wasted.

Whether it's deep or not is impossible to say. As I said, depth is a very personal thing. You be the judge.

It's time

I have a few posts about some production subjects in the works but I've been more in a music making mood lately rather than in a blog writing mood. A good thing obviously as this blog is just a side product and not necessarily all that important. It's just a document of the journey, not the journey itself.

As a result of some precious DAW time I have a new track for you.

This time I was aiming for something quite specific. I wanted to create a bona fide club banger. A cheeky (used without permission, so I'll probably get into trouble) sample everyone's gonna recognize. A bit of acid. A catchy chord riff (it's intentionally a bit off-beat, though I'm not sure yet if I like that effect or not) that seems to build and build, without anything actually happening.Simple but effective drums. High-pitched strings to create a bit of tension. It has it all, basically!

Intentionally trying to make a hit is something that usually doesn't work though. They easily come out as too cheesy, too obvious, too contrived. While I like this track now, I might hate it next week. It's hard to be objective about your own music, particularly just a moment after you've finished it.

Anyways, here's the latest track. A bit of a sidestep, as I'm not sure it's anywhere near something Kerri might want to play in his sets. Might be good, might be bad, might be mediocre, you be the judge.

Money's too tight to mention

Some of you might wonder what kind of a setup I'm doing this project with.

Well, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words so here's a handy picture of the entire setup:

I do actually own a few pieces of hardware but those are for sale as I seriously need money for new monitor speakers as well as a few well-chosen plugins. I admit, I'm a hardware junkie and love working with it. However, to get professional kind of sound quality, something that might get released in 2016 requires quite a setup, a setup that would cost at least 10 000€, preferably more. Considering I am currently unemployed (I wouldn't have the time for this project if I wasn't), I simply can't afford to buy anything too expensive. So, a laptop and software it is!

So, what I have is not exactly  a professional grade studio with tons of analog synths, all kinds of funky processing gear, a large Neve console and whatnot. Then again, DAW's and plugins have come a long way and many professionals work solely in the box these days. Shed as a prime example, doing sonically really great house music with just a computer.  So, it's entirely possible to get great results with what I have, it's just the matter of acquiring the right skills and buying a few key plugins to patch the holes I have in my arsenal.

Anyways, enough of my financial blight!

Here's a track I started yesterday evening and finished today. It's quite a quickie job as I only spent about 5 hours on it. It's not exactly a dancefloor banger, more like a moody warmup track.  While it could use a better mixdown and stuff, I'll still call it a done deal, as I don't really have any more new ideas for it. Maybe I'll get back to it a week or two later, if I think the track is worth a major rehaul. At least it could be a bit shorter, I got carried away.

Some people might recognize the speech sample. It's from an old favorite of mine from the 70's.