At least I can show you my album cover. This is a spray paint artwork, photographed and then cropped with text added.
I’m still working on the first album. You know, then one I wanted to finish before the end of last summer?
I really hate giving excuses, but here they are. For one, I took a pretty heavy load at school last semester, 15 credits, all advanced engineering classes. This semester, it’s 14 credits of the same thing. I’ve really been pushing my schooling pretty hard, as I want to finish as soon as possible.
However, the real hold-up has been a creative one. One of my songs, called “Here and Now”, is still missing a verse. No matter how hard I try, I cannot come up with lyrics that I like. It feels really horrible that it’s only for the lack of a few words that I hold the entire thing up. I understand that no work of art can ever be perfect, but I still feel that I need to achieve some minimum level of “perfection” before finally releasing the album.
Of course, I still have plenty to do in the meantime. I still need to sort out some photos and artwork for my “official website”, wherein I’m going to bring everything under the umbrella of my own name. Including this blog, probably. I also need to make some decisions regarding things like buying a UPC barcode, which will allow me to get into Amazon, which will give me a shot at getting onto Pandora. I still don’t know if all of that is going to be worth the trouble and expense, though.
In the end, I just want to show that some progress has been made on the album project. I have a preview of the album cover above, and as you can see, I’ve decided on a name for it. If you’d like, you can go take a look at the raw artwork, and a few other bits, at my Third Contact Flickr set.
Being this close to finishing, it seems unacceptable to give up now. So I won’t.
Sorry it’s been so long since my last post! School has been taking its toll, but I intend to get back into the swing of things. To that end, here’s a short video where I tried to feed strips of aluminum foil tape through a Dymo embossing labeler.
I’ll have an update on the album soon. Thank you for your patience!
I’ve been disassembling an old piano over the past couple of weekends. This is an upright piano we got some time ago. Since then, it’s sat like a big piece of furniture and collected dust, so I was finally told I can have at it and use the pieces for whatever I want. Cool.
It's been disassembled even further since this picture was taken.
My primary goal was to keep the strings, frame (that big cast-iron piece that the strings attach to), and the soundboard intact and bring it down into the basement to become the world’s most awesome reverb. However, even after a video appeal, the logistics just didn’t work out. It turned out that, even with everything else stripped off, the main frame, string frame, and soundboard were just way too heavy to maneuver. If you were to see the path it would have to take to the stairs then down to the basement, you would understand. So, a full salvage it is.
Stop! Hammer time!
Some of the hammers have been cut off and are now mallets in my sound design kit.
My latest task has been to de-string the entire frame. This has been an extremely tedious job, but I’m getting all sorts of amazing parts from it, like the tuning pegs. They’re small and very hard steel pegs that friction fit into wood to allow tension adjustment on strings. Those will be handy on a number of future instrument projects.
Here’s a link to the Flickr set I made for all the pictures of the disassembly process so far. I’ll definitely be making a video of all the cool stuff I got from this project once it’s complete, and I’ll talk some about what I plan to do with it all.
So what of my ultimate piano-based reverb? Well, free pianos of all shapes come around a lot. So I’m hoping in the future I can find a smaller and more modern spinet piano to salvage a frame and soundboard out of. That should be easier to get downstairs. I’m not really in a hurry, though.
My latest video is about Paulstretch and a Japanese hand saw. The saw is amazing and every home handyman should have one. Beyond that, though, it also sounds cool.
Watch me stumble all around that explanation of FFT and how Paulstretch works! The sad part is, I still didn’t quite get it right. I can probably do better now, but I’d still need a blackboard to illustrate some key parts. That and a teleprompter are on the short list of things to build to improve my podcasting.
The main point, though, is you really don’t need to understand what it’s doing to use it. Just understand that changing the window size does have an effect on the final sound.
I have some mix tweaking to do (the opening solo is definitely too low, and the second verse is too busy – things you’d think I’d notice before uploading), but other than that, this song is pretty much finished.
This will be track six out of seven on the first as-yet unnamed album. It needs some mix tweaks, but other than that, it’s complete.
Other than the kick drum, there is no found sound in this piece. It’s still a great example of doing a lot with what little is on hand, though. I have a cheap beater snare that doesn’t sound that great, an old ride cymbal I got from the side of the road, a crash I got for cheap from Craigslist, and yet, thanks to some creative sampling and determination, I was able to layer together a very effective drum track. The kick and snare were sequenced, and the cymbals were both overdubbed later.
All of the drum tracks are then bussed through the same reverb and compressor to create the illusion that they are all played in the same room. I think it works very well, although I might have “overhumanized” the kick-snare sequence a bit. I can fix that, though.
Other than that, the rhythm synth sound is a factory preset on my Kawai K4r called “Reso Syn”, and both solo sections are patches on my Akai Miniak. The middle section solo is a sixties’ organ patch played back at double speed. In other words, I recorded it with the varispeed slide in Reaper set to half (0.5). I got the idea from Terry Riley’s “A Rainbow In Curved Air.”
I thought I’d jot out a quick note that I made an episode for the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. It’s called “Songs of Distant Earths“, and it’s available for downloading and listening today.
And just so this post doesn’t feel too empty, here’s a picture of Nick Baker holding a horseshoe crab:
The opening pad is one of the corrugated whirly-tube toys I got for a buck from Toys’R'Us. The high-pitched toms are ceramic ramekins with balloons stretched across them, then played with chopsticks. The main bassline is built from a sample of me smacking the end of a PVC pipe. You can also hear the membrane-fitted penny whistle in the ending drone.
Originally, this song had been combined with “Time to Go“, and the entire piece had that name. I decided since then to split them up into separate songs. I’ve always been lousy at naming instrumentals, so I just perused an astrophysics glossary until I found something I liked.
If you like or hate what you hear, leave a comment down below or at Soundcloud. Thank you!
You don’t need a real drum set for that real snare sound! You just need the awesome new plugin YOTTASNARE ULTRASUPERMEGA! This awesome sample set and plugin features nothing less than 3000 different snares, each one sampled ONE MILLION TIMES at OVER NINE-THOUSAND velocity levels! Get it now! Only $999 for all that snare goodness!
Just listen to this example, done with YOTTASNARE ULTRASUPERMEGA!
Okay, in all seriousness, the snare line in that clip was created with no more than six samples. And to top it all off, they were six samples recorded using an inexpensive workhorse mic (an Audix i5) pointing at a cheap beater snare I got from a guy on Craigslist for $25. I’m also using the free and excellent Shortcircuit 1.1.2 sampler plugin. I should also point out that no humanization has been done to the MIDI track at all. Every hit is at 100% velocity and in perfect time. (Humanization is usually the last thing I do once I’m finished with a song.)
The six samples were three loud hits (the basic backbeat snare), two soft flams (where you let the stick bounce lightly on the head a few times), and one soft hit (like the soft flams, but no bouncing). Here’s what one of the hits looks like in Shortcircuit:
One of the snare hits in Shortcircuit. Click to embiggen.
The important parts are the high-pass filter and the modulation routing. (The graphic EQ is there just for sound shaping and has nothing to do with the dynamics of the track.) The filter is set to a pretty high cutoff, but that’s because the velocity is being negatively mapped to it. In other words, the higher the velocity, the lower the cutoff and the bigger the sound. I’m also using a random number source to affect the cutoff of the filter, to add some dynamics to the final sound. All of these setting are the same on each snare sample.
So how does the round-robin part work? Well, it doesn’t, at least not with Shortcircuit:
In short, I basically choose which hit to use when programming the MIDI parts. (The lowest note in the screenshot is the kick drum.) I don’t find this to be a big deal at all, but it might annoy some people. However, you might have a more feature-rich sampler plugin with those capabilities, in which case you’re all set.
Now, huge sample packs with lots of velocity layers are nice, but in the world of most rock and roll, the vast majority of your snare hits are really just at two dynamic levels: loud and soft. Pick your levels, create a few variations within each level, use your filters wisely, and you can make a very effective snare track.
And it’ll sound even better once I’ve varied the velocities and humanized it all.
Some people can sit down and write a whole song in an hour. Me, I come up with some interesting seed of an idea, then I have to let it sit for a month. That’s what’s likely to happen with this one:
It sounds like something Weather Report might do. I guess we’ll see if anything comes of it in a few weeks.
The chords you’re hearing are from the Kawai K4r, a patch called “Reso Syn”, which has two oscillators tuned to fifths. By playing intervals of major seconds and minor and major thirds, there are patterns that start to suggest themselves.
If you’d like, you can go take a look at the raw artwork, and a few other bits, at my Third Contact Flickr set.
Darren Landrum