I’ve got quite a few things on my mind, and hopefully this post works, as there are features to the Wordpress.org blogging tool that I’ve yet to try. If everything on this site goes wonky, blame wordpress.

UNKLE

I went to UNKLE’s first show in Canada and I thought it was great. They opened with Chemistry, probably my favourite song from them, and it really lends itself well to being an opening song, as the drums are packed with constant snare rolls to hype everyone up, and the general mayhem near the end of the song… also good at amping a crowd. Gavin Clark was a guest vocalist, and I really like his singing on the album, and he sounds nearly identical live, so that was a nice treat.

My only one complaint about the show is that for the album songs that featured guest vocalists other than Gavin, they all used a sample of the vocal track, which they played along to. I don’t mind that some of them did, but I wish either Gavin or their actual singer would have tried singing at least one of the songs, May Day comes to mind. Even though the vocal styling for May Day is very distinct, I think Gavin could have done a really good job with it. Despite that, I thought they were really fun to watch.

Reason 4 and the Thor Synth

Wow wow wow. Reason 4, from a work flow standpoint alone, is a vast upgrade from Reason 3. I won’t get into the improvements much here, they list them on their website, but basically the way that it works now makes me more excited to try different things, rather than thinking “I hate automating things in Reason”.

And when they advertise that “Thor is a very powerful synthesizer”, they’re not just speaking that way for better advertising. There are so many complex routing options are available, it will take me a long time to figure out exactly what it can do. I can run it in it’s most basic form, mimicking what I do with other synths, but the modulation matrix section is a god send. They say on their website that the modulation matrix “gives you complete control over your signal flow, letting you modulate anything within Thor with anything within Thor”. Instead of being stuck in a certain signal flow, where certain things such as an LFO is designed to route to maybe the pitch, volume, mix and other basics, Thor lets you route it to anything else in itself, like maybe the amount of chorus you want, the shaper tool, or a filter knob.

So, in short, I’m having fun.

Sneak Peak ZOMG!

So I was messing around with said synth, and I put a drum loop to what I was doing. Hype came up with the melody, and the rest came up as I was showing him how to automate things, how filters worked, and a bit of the routing options of Thor. So we decided that the tempo was good for one of our songs, called “Feet, Life, and Munchies”. Coming back to my original statement, I’m not sure how I’ll link to the file, so I may have to edit this post a few times.

Okay, so that didn’t work, I’ll link to it the traditional way.