what up peeps, first post on this joint- or any type of blog for that matter. watch me fuck it up >.>
lately I’ve been thinking about getting back into beat making again.. after my halfway attempt bout 8 years ago lmao. anyhow, things have been progressing nicely on that end, better than its ever been imo.
I’m little hyped about this right now as i feel like I’ve hit a ’sweet spot’ in terms of work flow, not necessarily sound but since I’ve made that little change to how i create i feel that improved as well.
enough talk though, I’m going to up load a joint i just did - let y’all see for yourselves.
btw i beez a sample heavy producer hehe.

whoever listens to this, speak on it. lemme know if its hot garbage or bumpin’ in your ipod worthy.

FEEL IT!!

in case your curious, here is the original clip that i sampled from. apparently its Swedish reggae.. go figure

Sample

back to the lab, Peace.

…And I’m having a hard time getting to sleep, so I decided to post. Shane was over today and we recorded the vocals for our track “This Is Total Take Your Soul Music”. This is going to be my most ambitious piece of production yet. It’s going to be the longest hip hop song I”ll have produced, and probably the most experimental beat I’ll have made to date. I’m planning on working on the beat a bit more tomorrow night, and hopefully I can get the instrumentation done on the second verse out of four.

Anyways, that’s a short post, but I’m definitely heading back to bed.

So on Sunday I was chillin’ at home, just doing me, and I go to put on some tunes because I need my tunes.  So I go to turn on my itunes where I have a crap load of tracks that I’ve downloaded or just imported from cd’s.  I see that my list is a little too short and I don’t know why.  Instead of having 1,184 songs in my list I only had 210.  I found that kind of strange but didn’t think anything of it.  Knowing that I can’t get my list back to the way it was unless I import everything back into my itunes, that’s is exactly what I did, but this time I didn’t go with the same line up.  I thought why don’t I change it up a bit.  So there were some albums that didn’t make the cut this time leaving me with a lot of space left on my ipod.  So Tuesday after I finished work I went to HMV to see if I could get some new music.

Now I don’t know if you’re aware but Kawlinz and I are huge fans of J Dilla.  This guy makes some really sick beats.  A while back Kawlinz picked up a J Dilla instrumental cd and that shit was off tha chain.  I was like “Damn Motha fucka” This shit is too hot.  Anyway so I’m in HMV and I’m looking for some more J Dilla.  I look in the hip-hop section and I find some stuff.  I picked up the J Dilla Instrumental cd as well as another J Dilla cd named “Donuts”.  I have to say that this is some good shit.  If you want to get blazed, chill and listen to some amazing beats then you have to get this cd.  So friggin awesome. Not only that, I also picked up the new Portishead cd named “Third” which apparently is their first release in about a decade.  I have to say this album is pretty sick too.

Fuck yeah, I’ve got my laptop back which means I can start making music again.

Other than that, Hype and I have written another track, which won’t be going in The Demo Tape, it’ll probably be reserved for the next album. I know, writing songs for a 2nd album before the first album isn’t even half recorded yet. What can I say? We needed an outlet for our creative minds, so we wrote a next track, it’s called “When My Mind Wanders”.

It’s quite experimental in the way we laid out the track, and it’s very free-form in structure. Very rarely do I jump from thought to thought the way I’ve done in this song, let alone in the middle of a line, but I’m quite pleased in the way that it came out. It’s definitely not the way I’d approach a song over and over, but for this song, it just felt really good to let the ideas flow without being afraid that the idea isn’t concrete in it’s meaning.

Hallucination’s imagination is in unconsciousness
Expand to infinity, looping in its thoughtlessness
These lies in your eyes are only delusions //
At ease, — guiding the mind to conclusions //

So Hype and I are probably going to abandon “Rhyme So Tight” for now, it’s probably not going on The Demo Tape, but on Friday night we had a writing session and we wrote a verse each, that turned out pretty good. Our faith, or lack of faith to be more accurate, was our topic of choice. It’s been coming up a lot more in my discussions recently, so I decided I had to write something about my views of the world.

…Stick to what’s real, they make up fantasies // A
Romantic view of the world, it’s so sad to see //
People get bitten by these leeches and liars
Some bend over to every preacher’s desire

I think it’s going to have a very stop and go type flow to it, almost mechanical, and I also have a few ideas for a beat that have been rolling around inside my head. I also have a pretty good idea which direction it’s going to go in. We’re probably going to do two verses each, but I’m not sure how it going to affect our track list, or the order, but I think it’s definitely going on the album. Anyways, my break at work is almost over, so I’m saving the post, publishing it, spelling mistakes and all. No firefox to spellcheck for me.

I think it mostly started with the troubles that I’d been having with my computer. When Hype and I would try to record, a glitch in the machine would happen once in a while. I thought I’d solved it, but then it came back and I realized that I didn’t know what the cause was. The my graphics card/mobo combo decided to give out (I won’t place blame, even though I don’t think his dog reads my blog). Getting that sent off and back took a while, and when I got the laptop back, I’d rather play Team Fortress 2 with it than create music, mix, or do anything productive.

I find that it happens to me a lot, actually. It happened with jiu-jitsu and MMA training. I find that I get “good enough” at something, and it becomes boring. No longer fun, I’d say it becomes about as exciting as washing dishes. I find that my music creation process goes through cycles of sorts. I get really amped about it (usually due to a new toy, a new way or working) and then desire slowly fades away. Realizing that this is a recipe for failure, I can’t allow myself to fall into that rut. I know I’m capable of doing great things with my music, and this time I’ve got a friend that’s relying on me, so I can’t allow myself to fall victim the the lethargy.

Oddly, these thoughts coincide with a great piece of inspiration. A few days ago, I heard Peter Angelo’s song “Show Me The Exit” (right click and “save link as” to download), which I’ve now linked to since he’s put up the final final mix. I can’t believe someone I that know personally could make such an outstanding track. I’ve told him already, but I think the song is probably going to end up in my top three tracks to listen to — ever.

So the other night, when I came home from work at 2 in the morning, I turned on Reason instead of TF2, and I’d realized something. Part of why I think that I get into a rut, is because I approach composing a song in nearly the same way every time. My goal every time is to create a final product, or at least work toward it. It makes sense, because I want to make songs. But, the reason I initially want to make songs is because I find it fun. If I no longer find it fun, then making a song in a manner that I don’t find to be fun is pointless. So, my new approach to making music is to have fun, and if I get a song out of the process, then the song is just a fortunate event of that fun. It may take longer, but I’m going to be happier in the process.

Instead of working on a song when I booted up reason, I made a very simple synth patch, pressed record, and jammed on my MIDI keyboard controller for about half an hour. I’m not that great of a keyboardist, but who cares? I get to nail three birds with one stone this way. I can learn better techniques on the keys, get some material for music, and now I’m finally having fun again.

I’m a hypocrite. I’ve recently been made aware of this, and the only option that I can stand by is to change the actions that lead me to being a hypocrite. It’s something that I don’t tolerate it from anyone else, so obviously it’s something I won’t tolerate about myself.

The gist of the story is that I wrote a few lines in a song to insult Hype. I wasn’t thinking and I wanted to call Hype the most offensive word I could imagine, so here are the three lines that I started the verse with:

Yo you can’t touch me, getcha fingers away faggot // Get
Back in the closet and dress up in drag with –
All your fuckin homo friend’s setting up abnormal trends…

Yeah, it’s pretty offensive, but not in the way that I intended it to be. I intended it to be offensive in the “using harsh language” sense. The way it actually comes off is that I’m a gay hater. For me to actually use this as an insult, one would probably assume that I have something against being gay. Since I don’t have anything against gay people, I can’t stand behind my using of the word “faggot” as an insult. I also can’t believe that someone actually had to point his out to me.

So yeah, we have a song that will either not make the cut for the album, or will need to be reworked to be put on the album. In it’s current state, it’s definitely not going on. If we decide on reworking the song, we’ll definitely work on making it offensive, but only in the way that we intend it to be, nothing inadvertent.

So I recently acquired a program called Melodyne. Basically it’s a real time pitch correcter that I can use on singers. The intent with the program isn’t to make people who aren’t singers to magically sound professional (although it probably could), it’s just a time saver. I read somewhere that Frank Sinatra for one of his songs did over 70 full length takes to get the ‘perfect’ version. Most of us don’t really want to wade through 78 takes. I say you get 5 near perfect takes, splice the best parts together, and any part that’s still a bit off can be corrected. It’s just a tool to save time and money.

When I first started sound school, I was quite against the idea of using the computer to “perfect” a vocal line, thinking it was unnatural to do so. My teacher told me that he was against it at first as well, but he changed his mind. His view was, that the music recording and creating process is anything but natural. You record all the instruments one at a time, as opposed to playing them all at once. You don’t search for “the perfect drum kit” or “the perfect guitar”, any instrument will have its faults. Is the kick drum lacking in the 120 Hz range? Beef it up with some EQ. Does the snare sound a little dry? Add some delay and a touch of reverb. Guitar sound too clean? Run it through a distortion unit. Does the amp have a hum? Take out the 60 Hz cycle with EQ. The singer is a bit loud in one part and a bit too quiet in another? Use the volume knob or put some compression on that.

Knowing that we mutilate our music to enhance the good parts and get rid of the bad parts, why should anyone draw an arbitrary line, saying that we shouldn’t do the same to pitch? We shouldn’t. Drums don’t really sound like that when they’re recorded, nor do guitars, nor just about any other instrument, why do we draw this distinction with the voice? We shouldn’t. If we wanted a realistic sounding music, we’d record an entire band at the same time, with two flat response mics, nested inside a device that mimics the human head and ear drums. If anyone wants to record that way, and only records that way (like many classical orchestra recordings), those are the people that have a right to bitch about the use of pitch correction. Anyone else that doesn’t record in that manner and feels that pitch correction is a detriment to the singer is a hypocrite.

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.

Finally, no hitches in recording a song in our last meet, besides re-installing reason, that is. But after that it was smooth sailing. It was frustrating for the past few times getting together to record, and not being able to. Since we have completely a long awaited task, that means that I get to mix it now. Hopefully I’ll be done in a short while, as there’s not a lot of work left to be done, just to create an effect for the backing vocals, and maybe a bit of EQing to make the vocals pop out a bit more.

We’re also pushing the date of our album back by a month, since there was approximately a month of downtime that we experienced. It makes sense to me, at least. I’m not sure if we’ve stated when the album should be coming out, so if either of us have, you know when to expect it now. If we haven’t, then the seemingly arbitrary and unknown date doesn’t really matter, except that you know it’ll be at least a month.