So I’m stuck at home, sick as anything with bronchitis.  But the good thing is that I get more time to work on my music.  This happened when I was working on Inside The Beat, and I remember making a lot of progress in between playing GTA4 and laying down.  Today was unusual in that I managed to complete an entire song in less than 24 hours.  This is really rare for me, but I’m attributing it to some new software and my more experimental approach to music lately.

I’ve also been organizing my tracks differently in Sonar lately.  Like with the drums, I’ve been splitting things up so that individual elements are on separate midi tracks.  So for example, I might have a track for high hats, one for the crash, one for other sounds, and one for the kick/snare beat.  Each track still points to a single instance of Battery (my drum machine software), but this lets me chose what elements I want to combine as I move blocks around.  I’ve also been doing this with MIDI control messages for synths, where I’ll make a separate MIDI track for drawing controller envelopes, while the note data remains in the original one.

The song I wrote today was heavily inspired by a group called Autechre.  They do cool experimental and IDM stuff where they mess with beats, rhythms, pitch, and just about anything else.  My song mainly drew from their unusual song structure and rhythms.  It also draws on some of my usual Kraftwerk influence.

To create the drum track I used this really interesting sequencer/sound generator in Reaktor called Newschool.  I say “interesting” because that’s just about the best way you can describe it.  The thing uses Conway’s Game of Life to drive its sequencer, which feeds into a tone generator that uses sine waves in conjunction with multiple forms of modulation.  So basically it’s a groove box designed around a simulated artificial organism.  Crazy sounding, isn’t it?  Here’s a screenshot:

So the grid on the left is where you draw the initial starting cells for the automaton.  When you run the thing, the cells follow the rules for Conway’s Game of Life and evolve over time, which is what you see in the grid on the right.  The Offset and Length control how many cycles the automaton goes through before looping back through (assuming it’s set to loop and not go on forever).  You can also change the step quantization (here set to a 16th note) to change how often the automaton cycles.

The tone generator is below.  The left side is where you set parameters for the eight voices like pitch and whatnot, as well as some modulation.  The right side has additional modulation options to really play with the sound.  Both sides can be controlled by their own independent LFOs.

So how does it make sound?  Well, see how the right grid has all those colored dots?  Those correspond to the voices below.  I’m not sure exactly how it figures out when to trigger a voice, but I think when a cell becomes active on a dot in a given cycle, it has a certain chance of triggering the voice, which I think is controlled with the “sens” knob (short for “Sensitivity”, I’m guessing).

Anyway, I used a custom patch in Newschool to create a drum track in my new song, which I then layered with some additional sounds from Battery to fill it all out.  To keep things sounding interesting I added some filter and other effects to both sets of drums, as well as a transient shaper on the Newschool drums to increase their bite.

I’m not sure the song is totally finished yet.  Usually what I do is I finish a song, do an initial test in my car (which has some pretty decent subwoofers), go a few days without listening to it, then test it again on a few different speaker systems.  This helps me determine if the song needs any change to its structure, or if there’s any mixing/mastering problems with it.

Now to decide on a title…

The first version of “Occupy” didn’t turn out quite as well as I had hoped it would.  Something about its mix was bothering me.  Later on I finally nailed down the main problem areas and decided to rework the song to get it closer to how I originally envisioned it.  This is the result of my work ^_^

There honestly isn’t too much that’s different aside from a few swapped out background parts and some additional sounds added for ornamentation.  The biggest change is in the mixdown, which was completely redone from scratch using a different technique than before.  Things now sound more balanced and the rhythm section feels more driving, at least to my ears.

Anyways, enjoy!  Please reblog this to share it!  The lyrics are still available in my previous post.

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.

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.

Well, after taking a week off, I’m back at working on music.  Sadly the short break didn’t bring any new ideas to the songs I was working.  However…

It did bring an idea for another new song, which is actually about 1/3 finished already.  Well, it’s not a totally new song.  I took a fragment of one I had started a few weeks ago that wasn’t going anywhere, gutted it, and turned it into something else.  This is something I do often…

Anyway, this all started with me playing around with FM synthesis, which I understand the theory behind but still have a hard time putting it into practice.  There’s a really good introduction video here, but to sum it up the idea is that you take two sound waves (usually sines) and have one modulate the other.  This is similar in concept to an LFO, except that the modulator’s frequency actually goes up into the audible sound range.

Each pair is known as an “operator”, at least in Yamaha’s parlance.  Giving each modulator and carrier (the wave being modulated) a volume envelope lets a sound change timbre over time, effectively replacing the need for a filter with its own envelope.  By layering multiple operators together you then get all sorts of dynamic sounds.  Need an example to listen to?  Check out this video, which shows off the legendary Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, and prepare to be immediately transported back into the 80s.

Getting back, the reason I started playing with FM synthesis tonight is because I wanted to create a slappy bass sound, sorta like what I used to hear in video games on my Sega Genesis.  Unfortunately I never got Reaktor’s FM4 module to sound like I was wanting, so I instead came up with a quick bass in Moog Modular V.  But this worked out in the end since it actually went really well with the other parts I have going, which include some FM-sounding bells.  The result is something that sounds sort of like the start of Die Hard Arcade’s snow level with some Escape From New York thrown in.

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure some of this came from all the J-Pop and anime soundtracks I’ve been listening to for the past two weeks…