Another fun, silly one...

[ZoeB]

Yes, I've been listening to far too much 1993 era AFX...

 

http://soundcloud.com/doggiedogster/spacewalk

[Lucas]

haha good one. during the firsts seconds I immediately thought about "Pigeon Street" (wow it's been age since I didn't listened to that, you remind me to do so!). Apart from that, nice - funny and silly indeed - little song which works really well as a whole.

 

and now I'm going to sleep (hopefully it will be make me have funny-silly dreams :P)

[ZoeB]

haha good one. during the firsts seconds I immediately thought about "Pigeon Street" (wow it's been age since I didn't listened to that, you remind me to do so!). Apart from that, nice - funny and silly indeed - little song which works really well as a whole.

 

and now I'm going to sleep (hopefully it will be make me have funny-silly dreams :P)

 

Thanks! I've been getting into lots of old AFX tracks lately, like CAT 00897-AA1, Cordialatron and On the Romance Tip. I think those kinds of tracks are going to influence a few of my tunes in the month or two to come. :) So, did you have nice dreams? ^.^

[Lucas]

Well the only thing I remember right now is being in my house and a lot of people from my firsts studies came there (at first they were in my garden and I didn't notice them) and they were filming some pictures for I don't know what kind of program (I studied audiovisual) and there was also one of the professor of that studies and I asked him if he had some job for me at a local channel station and he kind of ignored my question and leave the house with his motorcycle (I never really liked that man) and then a good friend of mine from my second studies arrived and I was very happy to see him so I sat with him in the living room but then I had the feeling of not taking care of all that people from my firsts studies who I didn't see for a while.

 

 

these days I have a lot of souvenirs from my dreams

 

 

edit : your track still sounds very good as I'm waking up. Damn you're talented !

 

edit 2 : I read "doepfer" in the topic tags, what did you exactly use ? I'm planning to buy a Dark Energy but also have to save money so I'm not sure :/

[ZoeB]

Wow, your dreams sound as detailed as mine! :D More pleasant and normal though, so yay!

 

edit : your track still sounds very good as I'm waking up. Damn you're talented !

 

Thank you! ^.^

 

edit 2 : I read "doepfer" in the topic tags, what did you exactly use ? I'm planning to buy a Dark Energy but also have to save money so I'm not sure :/

 

I used this. Not just one like it, that actual one. That's a photograph of it taken by my partner. Specifically, for that track, I'm trying out this somewhat formulaic writing technique: I wrote the whole song in Reason, drawing on notes, using just sine waves and some TR-808 drum samples so I don't get tempted to stop composing and start wiring up virtual patches. (Actually, this didn't work; re-opening the track, I see there's now some FM synthesis and the like in there... I guess I need to work on my self-discipline!) In particular with this track, I was experimenting with going from one chord to the next if they shared a key, but not necessarily the starting key, so it switches between F♯ and B quite a bit, with a pretty hazy / arbitrary definition of when it actually switches because they have some nice overlap of shared chords. So anyway, I make some nice rhythms, arpeggios, melodies and the like, then I export it to a MIDI file and open that in Reaper. Then I play out each monophonic, monotimbral part one at a time on my Doepfer, wiring up various fun patches.

 

So you asked exactly what I used... be careful what you ask for. :) Two A-110 VCOs, an A-138B mixer, two A-140 ADSR envelope generators, either an A-118 analogue noise generator's white noise output or an A-117 digital noise generator's TR-808 style 6 oscillator output for the hi-hat, I forget which but I think it was white noise from the A-118... an A-131, and then the really fun modules: an A-105 filter, which I'm not entirely convinced about... I'm thinking of selling it and buying an A-106-1 instead, so I can get some nastier sounds and more versatility. The A-105 is just too clean and normal sounding. This is my own fault for buying the Caustic Window compilation for Cordialatron and On the Romance Tip, then getting carried away listening to The Garden of Linmiri... That and I've been cooking up some reasonably harsh sounding acidlines for the Bonnie and Clyde soundtrack... I specifically got the A-105 for nasty resonance, which the A-106-5 can't do, and I now get the impression that the A-106-1 does nasty better. :) And the other filter I'm using is the absolutely wonderful A-106-5, which is quirky and brilliant. Having a single low-pass/high-pass/notch filter and a low-pass/high-pass mix knob is really growing on me (it's apparently based on an Oberheim SEM, although I've never knowingly heard one for comparison), and the character of its sound is quite unlike anything I can achieve with Thor. On the lead, or slightly jazzed up arpeggio, depending on how generous you're being to my compositional skills, I'm pretty sure I put on a splash of the A-188-1B, and on the climactic arpeggio, there's clearly quite a lot of it for that Raymond Scott / Delia Derbyshire type delay sound, and the weird feedback noises at the end. I can't recommend that module enough, it's so fun to play with the feedback! And that wasn't even with the A-106-5 in the feedback loop at the time, which just makes it sound mad in a really good way.

 

Oh yeah, and for the TR-808 style kick and snare drum sounds, I'm using an Analogue Solutions BD88 and SD88, which are pretty neat. You have to use an A-183-3 amplifier (or something like it) to get the A-190-3's gate output to a high enough voltage, though, and I keep on getting outbid on this MCV-24 I'm bidding on right now which would replace both and then some...

 

My partner was sort of trying to talk me into getting a Dark Energy instead of a fully blown A-100, but this thing's so versatile, it's wonderful. And I still haven't yet broken habits like always going from oscillators to the mixer to a filter to the attenuator in that order, so once I open my mind and experiment a bit more, it should open up a whole world in sonic possibilities. (When I was a teenager, I had to apply effects to sounds before I actually played notes on them, because I used tracker software. Looking back, that really gave me a distinctive sound back then, and forced me to think in a very different way from non-tracking musicians in terms of how I approached things.)

 

Yeah, I'd recommend the Doepfer A-100. Start selling your music, and start saving! :D

[Guest kokeboka]

Have you heard of Wiard? What are your thoughts on their modules?

 

I'm a bit put off by the learning curve of assembling and using a proper modular synth, but there seems to awesome stuff out there (thinking of Metasonix, WMD, Macbeth and others).

 

Oh, and nice track :)

[ZoeB]

Have you heard of Wiard? What are your thoughts on their modules?

 

I can only really comment on the modules I've used, which are by Doepfer and Analogue Solutions. While I've heard of a lot of other modules by a lot of different companies, I like the simplicity and consistency of a cohesive system built mostly from products by a single company. There really aren't many modules that Doepfer don't make that I feel I can benefit from (so far, TR-808 sounding drums are the exception where I've gone out and bought some Analogue Solutions modules because Doepfer don't make any purpose-built kick and snare modules; I may get a distortion module from elsewhere too, as I suspect modules like the A-116 are more interesting from an electronic engineer's point of view than a musician's, but I'm hoping the A-106-1 will be dirty / nasty / distorted enough sounding that I won't need to). I realise that I'm arguably missing the point of a modular, in which you can and perhaps should mix and match the best of all worlds, making a jerry-rigged mongrel from hell, but really, I have an OCD-like preference for aesthetic consistency and things that work together without much hassle. (I also stopped using BSD and GNU/Linux a while back and switched to OS X. While politically I'm still a hacker, in practical terms I have work to get done, and I want to actually release finished music at regular intervals!)

 

So there are some great modules out there by many different companies, but I really don't know that much about them, and haven't tried them first hand. When I'm having so much fun tinkering around with this A-188-1B right now, for instance, I don't really have time to pine for other things...

 

I'm a bit put off by the learning curve of assembling and using a proper modular synth, but there seems to awesome stuff out there (thinking of Metasonix, WMD, Macbeth and others).

 

I'm not sure why people so often talk about a steep learning curve... I'm not sure if it's how my brain's wired (I also use vi, which I like very much, and I find most other text editors cumbersome by comparison), or how much I pined after modulars a while back and read up on them, how much Synth Secrets I've read or whatever else it might be, but the night I first got my A-100, I'd managed to hook it up to my computer, with MIDI going into it and audio coming out, and never really had a problem trying to figure things out. There are one or two instances where there's no sound, or something seems to not be working, and it takes a few minutes to troubleshoot, but that's about it. You just have to remember that, like with programming, the machine is incredibly dense and you must tell it exactly what to do, step by step, in minute detail. ("Oh, you don't want to hear anything after you let go of the key? Well, you should wire up an envelope generator to an attenuator and run the oscillators through that then! How was I to know? I'm not a mind reader," it might say if it was feeling particularly anthropomorphic that day.)

 

Oh, and nice track :)

 

Thanks! ^.^ I'm glad you like it.