Music is the salt that cleans the wounds of the soul.  It’s the reflected image we see when we look at our inner self in a mirror.  It’s the scalpal that we use to perform surgery on our inner selves.  And it’s the map that guides us on our toughest journeys through life.

You may not have noticed, but Inside The Beat had an interesting flow.  The songs at the beginning of the album were more “shallow” sounding, and were more focused on simple beats and rhythms rather than meaningful timbres and arrangements.  I think I mentioned it before, but this was all done on purpose.  Inside The Beat was meant to be a journey from the outside inward, where you’d get a sampling of all the different rhythms, beats, sounds, and themes that constantly bounce around in my head.  But what I didn’t mention was that, with a few exceptions, the songs are mostly arranged chronologically by the order they were written.  “Chrystallis” was composed very early on in the album’s life, while the remixes at the end were literally the two last songs I completed.  Truth be told, this was an accident that happened to work.

I did quite a bit of introspection in my personal life as I got closer to finishing Inside The Beat.  In a way it was ironic.  While the album was meant to move from the outside-in beat-wise, it was also moving outside-in for me personally, and I think it got reflected in my writing.  Pretty much everything after track six reflected the start of a journey I took inward.  Things slowed down and started sounding more contemplative.  Inside The Beat was really going inside the figurative beat of my soul.

The first paragraph of this entry, the one in the block quote, is something I wrote as a “working premise” for my next album.  Where Inside The Beat was about moving inward, my next one will be about working through what’s inside, and then emerging.  To put it another way, Inside The Beat moved outside-in, and the new one is moving inside-out.  I think this is already reflective of the first few test tracks I’ve written for the album.  Both of them are quite introspective and contemplative (think along the lines of “Face Toward The Horizon”).  I’ve also been working on writing something that resembles lyrics, but isn’t quite the same thing.  These vocals will hopefully add some new depth to my music and really emphasize the “inside-out” journey theme that I’m working from.

So… yeah, we’ll see where this goes.

So The Optic Nerve is finished!  It took quite a bit longer than I planned, but I think the extra wait has been worth it.  The single consists of four tracks: the original song, the “Near-Sighted Mix”, the “604 Mix”, and a new remix of “Cyberpunks”.  All of these total up for a length of just under 30 minutes, which is a bit long for a single, but I don’t think that matters much.

I’ve already written about the original mix of “The Optic Nerve”, but I figured I’d offer a few more thoughts on it now that everything is complete.  As I mentioned before, the new age 2012 vocals were not the ones I had originally planed to include.  Instead I had come up with a cyberpunk-inspired story about a guy living in a dystopian future who had just purchased new optic nerve implants from a large cybernetics company.  Upon leaving the building they start to malfunction, sending way too much information to his brain and ultimately sending him into a state of panic and psychosis.  Unfortunately I had to leave out the lyrics I had written since I couldn’t get the recordings to come out right, which still makes me sad to this day.  But maybe I’ll still use the concept in a future song.

Musically “The Optic Nerve” was influenced by both Skinny Puppy and KMFDM, and so it has a more industrial feel than many of my other songs.  In fact the entire concept was sparked by the song “Worlock” by Skinny Puppy, in which they sing the words “optic nerve” through a harmonizer.  This and the bitcrushed/aliased bell sound were basically the starting points for “The Optic Nerve”.

The “Near-Sighted Mix” is really just a dance-oriented version of the original song with a few structural changes.  It’s also was what held up the release of the single for so long since I had an INCREDIBLY hard time getting the mix to sound decent enough for release.  Things either sounded too bassy, not bassy enough, too bland, or totally off balance.  In the end I finally got so fed up that I put it on the back burner and went on with other work.  This proved to be the right decision since I was able to come back later on and actually get the mix where I wanted it.  Still, I feel this is the weakest track on the single.

The “604 Mix”, which is a goa trance remix of the original song, is probably my favorite.  It came about when I realized that I could easily make the original song sound even more trippy if I sped it up a bit and added some squelchy synths, which are a staple in goa trance.  The subject matter also fit quite nicely into that genre, and so I set about restructuring everything, adding new synth lines, and swapping out a few other sounds.  In the end the track has a very nice set of build-up-break-down sections that provide movement but still manage to keep the rhythm going.  I am also especially happy with the way the new goa-like melody turned out.

Finishing up the single is the new “Leaky Mix” version of “Cyberpunks”.  If you’ve heard the original then you’ve probably know that the song is about distrusting “the system” due to its attempts to control us with (mis)information.  You might also be aware of the massive leak of 250k+ US Embasy cables by Wikileaks that started last November.  Well, the “Leaky Mix” is sort of my way of showing support for what Wikileaks is doing.

I didn’t want to change as many things in this particular remix as I did in the “Anti-System Remix” on Inside The Beat.  Instead I saw it as a way to blend the expanded “speech section” of the “Anti-Syste Remix” together with the original song, as well as an opportunity to flesh out and improve things.  The biggest changes are definitely the intro and outro sections, which now have samples taken from a speech given by John F. Kennedy, and the completely rewritten drum lines.  Also - and this is probably something very few will care about, but I was really happy with it - I swapped out the synth that creates the bass sound.  The original one was being produced with Arturia’s Jupiter-8V software and was the exact same patch that I used for “I Love Penguins”.  But I was never really happy with it in “Cyberpunks” because I felt like it always lacked a bit of an edge.  Well it turns out that the same sound I used for the harsh saw in the chorus of “The Optic Nerve” (which was produced by my PolyEvolver keyboard) was very close to the original bass sound in “Cyberpunks”.  It was bassy, warm, and still had an edge.

So yeah, that pretty much sums up The Optic Nerve.  The only thing that hasn’t been done yet is the cover artwork, which will be shot soon.  Once that’s finished I’ll be uploading all the tracks.

So I’ve got some bad news: The Optic Nerve single is being delayed.  The holdup is a remix I’ve been doing of the title track.  None of the mixdowns I’ve done so far have sounded right, where they either lack punch or lack definition.  So rather than hastily patch things up with a bunch of sonic bandages and put out something sub-par, I’m simply delaying it.  In a way, this is annoying; I really like how the song turned out overall, but I’m also eager to get back into my normal sound.

The Optic Nerve (the song) was something of an experiment, where I played with harsher sounds and some new plugins I had found to create something closer to EBM/Industrial than my normal style.  This is why it’s appearing on a single instead of an album.  I really like how it turned out, but I’m ready to start taking what I’ve learned and applying it to my more usual style.

Warning!  Geeky post ahead!  I wrote this post to offer some insight into how I handle the preparation of the .mp3 and .ogg files that I use on the website, as well as the .flac files I keep for archives.  So, it’s a bit jargon-y.  Sorry.  But I figured someone would find it interesting or useful.

Sometimes I can be a bit OCD about the files on my computer.  Everything has a certain place, and every folder has a meaning.  The same holds true for the music files I’m working on.  When I’m nearly finished with a song, I start exporting .wav files and encoding them to various formats, including mp3 for the downloads, Ogg Vorbis for the streaming, and FLAC for my own archives.  On my file server here at home is a special folder I keep all these in called Recorded Files.  In here are four other folders, one for each type, named new waves, new mp3s, new flacs, and new oggs.  The idea is that I drop new .wav files that are candidates for release into the new waves folder, then place the other formats created from it in their respected folder.  It’s a bit convoluted, but I do have a reason for doing it this way.  In the past I would have trouble keeping track of which wave was the latest file, and knowing if the mp3 I had was from that latest wave file or not.  Now I know some of you would say, “well, why don’t you just add dates to the file names?”  I could, but when I first started working with this layout I didn’t have a lot of extra space to work with to keep multiple versions.  Plus, I already “versioned” my source files in Sonar, so I can always go back in time with those instead.  So it just made sense to do it this way instead.

Anyway, I do all my mp3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis encoding directly on my server, which runs Linux, since it’s a bit faster than my desktop and all the tools are there in one location.  Well one day I realized that I could write a simple shell script to automate creating all these different files from the original .wav files rather than doing it by hand.  Doing this would also further help prevent a situation where I’m left going, “Is this mp3 from the latest .wav file? Is the .wav file even the latest one?  Grr, I’m going to have to re-export and re-edit.”

So I wrote a script one day to do just that.  For a long time the script worked, but it wasn’t that robust.  While it did know how to recreate only the files missing from the new mp3s, new flacs, and new oggs folders, it didn’t know how to overwrite specific files.  Plus, it didn’t really handle command line arguments very well, and it didn’t handle any metadata.  So, I decided to rewrite it in Python and make it better.

The new script can look for .wav files to encode in any arbitrary directory, and can also output each format in any arbitrary directory.  It also knows how to insert some default metadata tags into each file it encodes (the defaults can be changed in the script), figure out the title and track number (if it exists) from the file name, and how to work on individual files.

So there you have it.  A small bit of insight into how I handle my music.  It may not seem like much, but having this script actually saves me a lot of time and headaches.  If you want, you can download a copy of the script here (right-click and Save As).  To run, you need Python (2.6 and newer, though an older version might work); command line tools for lame, flac, and oggenc; and id3v2.

+1 to this guy.

There’s a reason why I sell physical CDs of my music, but still make it all free to stream or download online. And why I encourage my listeners to make copies, pass them around, and just generally share my music.

Wow, things have been incredibly busy lately!  I’ve had a lot going on in life that has kept me from updating this.  Sorry everyone! Thankfully things are starting to level out, though.  The work on the new single is progressing rapidly.  If everything goes well, I should meet my original goal of having it done early next month.  However, don’t hold me to that.  There’s always the chance I might get some crazy idea for it at the last minute ;^)

Outside of that, I’ve been doing some more experiments with granular synthesis.  This is a synthesis technique where you take an incoming sound, sample a small slice of it (say 10-50ms in length), apply a volume envelope to that slice, loop it, and then pitch shift it.  These small slices with the applied envelope are called “grains”, and you can layer multiple ones on top of each other.  You can also adjust where you sample the sound in real-time, creating a sort of morphing timbre.

Well, one idea I’ve had is to take a sound normally considered harsh or mechanical, pass it through a granular synthesis engine and some effects, and turn it into a warm or lush sound.  Reaktor comes with an instrument called Travelizer that I’ve been taking apart to use as the granular synth, and so far it sounds awesome!  I did a test of it the other day where I sampled my vacuum cleaner turning on and off, then applied an LFO to the start position and length of the slice.  It had this really airy sound that kept morphing over time.  I’m still not finished with it, but when I am, I’ll be sure to post an audio clip.

New song time!  Listen to it in the embedded player above, or click here to download the mp3 directly.

“The Optic Nerve” is a trippy industrial song I’ve been working on since last November.  Originally it was going to be about constructed reality with a cyberpunk theme layered on top of it, but my original lyrics just weren’t working out.  So I placed it on the back burner until I could come up with something.  I finally revisited the song earlier this month when I had the idea of scouring archive.org for trippy vocal samples (this is also where I found the vocal files for I Love Penguins).  During my searching I came across a recording of Rodleen Getsic giving a talk about the 2012 prophecy.  While I don’t personally buy into the whole 2012 thing, the talk did seem to fit with the music, and her pacing was just right.  The recording was under the Creative Commons Attribute-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, and so this song shares the same license.

I’ve also been working on a more dance-oriented remix of it, though it isn’t quite ready yet.  But this actually brings me to my next point: where Partition 36 is going now that Inside The Beat is finished.  “The Optic Nerve” will actually be part of a new single, and will have the original track, a “vocal-less” mix, the remix, and another completely new track.  I hope to release it by the end of February or early March.

Aside from this… a new album is underway.  There’s not much to say about it yet, except that it’s going to be awesome.

For now, enjoy the new song!

PS: if you follow Partition 36 on Facebook or Twitter, and were expecting this post a day or two ago, sorry.  Blame StarCraft 2 :)

Late last year, not too long after I had released Inside The Beat, I started working on a new song that I called “The Optic Nerve”.  It had a much more noisy sound to it than my previous work and would probably be described as some sort of industrial music.

For the longest time I was stuck with what to do for a melody or verse section.  I knew that I wanted it to have lyrics or some sort of spoken word section, but I just couldn’t find anything to fit.  Searching at archive.org (which, by the way, is where I found the audio for I Love Penguins) didn’t turn up anything worthwhile, and my attempt at writing lyrics wasn’t going so well, either.  But it was still a good song, so I placed it on the back burner and decided to come back to it at a later date.

I finally revisited it a couple of days ago after finding recording of a woman giving a talk on the whole 2012 thing.  It had a really trippy feel to it, and her pacing actually matched the song’s BPM quite nicely.  But my initial enthusiasm waned after I played around with it for a few days.  Thus I forked the project, removed the vocals, and went back to the drawing board.

We’ll see what comes of it within the next few days.  I’ve since gone back to my original lyrics and have started rewriting them yet again.  But I think it’s for the best, as they’re taking on a much more cyberpunk feel that’s closer to what I originally imagined for them.

If you’ve been following Partition 36 on Facebook or Twitter (and if you don’t, you should), then you’ve probably read that I finished a new track recently.  It started out as an experiment with FM synthesis to create a slappy bass sound similar to what I used to hear in Sega Genesis games growing up.  Unfortunately the experiment itself failed, but I still managed to pull a new song out of it called “Midnight Highway”.

The song has a strong soundtrack-like flavor to it and, to me, sounds reminiscent of the track “Face Toward The Horizon” off of my last album.  During production I had a heck of a time finding a good bass sound to use for it.  In the end I found that a subtle yet deep sound worked best for what I had in mind, and so programmed one into my Moog Modular V software.  I also had a hard time deciding whether I should keep the chorus effect on the main melody, but ended up sticking with it in the end.

During production it had the file name of “Whoa 80s” due to the use of a bell sound that sounds an awful lot like something off the classic Roland D-50 synthesizer.  But as it got closer to being finished I decided to change this to its current title based on an image I saw in my head.  I could almost picture Priss, a character from my favorite anime, Bubblegum Crisis, riding her motorcycle on a highway late at night.  As she stops for a rest and looks out over the light laden city of Mega Tokyo.  Although the style of my song is quite different from the soundtrack in the anime, they still share some of the same timbres.  Thus, I decided to name it “Midnight Highway” based on this image.

I’ve attached a short clip of the song to this post, so please check it out!  I’d love to hear what everyone thinks of it.

Looks like my last album, Inside The Beat, got a review!  It was written my a friend of mine and posted on her blog.

Be sure to click the link above and check it out!