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…

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.

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…