audiotthoughts on music

WOW, has it already been one year? unbelievable!

i just received an email from the rpm-challenge folks asking me to sign up for 2010. and i gladly did right on the spot! for those of you who haven’t heard of it, the challenge is to record an album in 28 days – just because you can. that means you have to come up with ideas, write the whole stuff, record and mix it all within the month of february. there’s nothing to gain except self-respect and huge amounts of fun :-) and you could cheat of course by just recording stuff you already have etc. but you would only cheat yourself.

this thing really is a race against yourself, the real question is: are you able to get up and just do this? no excuses.

after writing and recording my own stuff for many years but never finishing anything because of never-being-satisfieditis, last year’s rpm-challenge changed this for me. as many of you know, that’s where my first album corner came from. so i can tell from my own experience, if you ever needed a kickstart – this is it!

once again, i have no idea what i’ll do this time. since the work on my 2nd album is already in progress – and one song’s already released (“wipe it clean”, in the blue player to the upper right…), i thought about doing something completely different. but that’s about all i’ve figured out so far. and i’ll try not to think about it for the next 14 days, so it’ll be completely fresh once february kicks off……not to mention that i’ll jump around in wild panic because i’ll have no idea whatsoever how to do this. FUN !!!

so go ahead and sign up right here and tell everyone about it! and, if you tell me, i’m gonna write about it – giving you the exposure you always wanted right here on this ridiculously famous site :-)

now here’s what i call a good press. and i have to post this right now before there will be any reviews by the guest judges. so this is about the song i sent to the people’s music awards – which won week 10 as the best off-the-beaten-track-song and therefore is in the next round now.

so here’s what the guys over there wrote about it:

“If Tom Waits fell off the wagon and went on a three month bender before recording his next album it would probably sound like audiot!

Welding the classic rock of Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath and art school sensibilities, audiot has come up with a top notch track that is certainly way off the beaten track!”

how cool is that?

by the way, the guest-judges-round should start soon. i really wonder what they’ll say about it… and after that, if i got it right, the people (that’s you) can vote again.

gosh, i really hope i can finish the new album soon – it’s gonna be even more weird and sick…

woohoo! here it is. finally. about time. bankjob. yay!

the first song of the album “corner” and the one that plays by default when you click the play-button on the blue player to the upper right. and the one that made it to no.14 on the reverbnation-german-rock-charts – maybe i mentioned that already :-)

the funny thing about this tune is, it was never meant to be a real song, more like an intermezzo or something – if at all. i messed around trying to get a dirty but still defined sound that should go through the whole album. that was even before i started on any other song. just trying to figure out how the album should sound in general.  so i picked a drumset from the “vintage RDK”-refill (check out Peff’s website if you’re into Reason) and fell in love with the sound of the toms. messing around a little more, i came up with this tom-based drumbeat and recorded that for about 45 seconds. it sounds quite wacky if you listen to it closely – sometimes even off, but that’s what’s giving it this great feel and me the inspiration for the bassline, which is simply going up from one ‘c’ to the next and then down again – with very few variations. played with a cool acoustic bass-sound that matched the drums quite nicely, doubled by a saxophone and tripled by a harmonica. then i had the idea for this breathing sound on the ‘1′ and the ‘2&’ – i did this with a flute-sound transposed way down – giving the whole groove lots of drive. i was quite surprised how big a difference that flute makes. if you could listen to bass-sax-harmonica only, you would probably faint or throw up or maybe both. this is a timing-freak’s nightmare, sounds just horrible!

then there’s the saxophone playing this little melody at the beginning and the end. actually it does sound very real by itself – as a saxophone-player i was truly amazed. but i didn’t manage to get this very real sound into the final mix. for some reason it doesn’t sound that real to me anymore. i guess something else is stealing a few frequencies away – i didn’t find it though, so this was the best i could do.

as soon as i was done with this 45-second-piece, i knew this had to be a full song. so i came up with the break-part to make room for the voice. it would have been difficult to include vocals during the soundmess-section and those breaks seemed an appropriate and easy to do solution. so i played the drums for the rest of the song including the badass ending, played the other stuff as well – let’s be honest, it’s all just repeating itself over and over and over again, but it’s played NOT copy-and-pasted. and was done really quick. throughout this whole process, i thought about some old action-movie with cool car chases and gangsters and such. so it turned out to be a short briefing of the gang right before the job – lyricswise….

although the single parts of this song are, well, not really demanding :-) and poorly played without any correction whatsoever – it has this killing feel and it still blows me away every single time i listen to it. unbelievable – and i think rather incidental than on purpose but who cares?

oops, come to think of it, there was a correction. i had to clean up the snare-rolls at the end of the verse-sections because the midi-controller didn’t react as fast and precisely as i wanted it to….

that’s it! now you know all the dirty details about the creation of “corner”. i’m sorry if i destroyed your vision of me being a creative soundgod, i’m just stumbling around making weird noise that weird people seem to find….weird. yes, i guess that about sums it up :-)

and i’ll prove this to you. as you may know, the next album is in the making….

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• no harm done… (audiot.eu)

yay! one small step for me and absolutely no step for anyone else. you decide if it’s a step for art…..and if yes, in which direction :-)

while the work on this site or better: the collecting of information regarding those little troubles i talked about still eats up my time, i got the news that “bankjob” is now no. 15 of the german reverbnation rock charts. by the way, it’s #14.188 in rock globally and #62.939 across all genres globally. although i have no idea why, this ROCKS !!! so a huge thank you to you guys and don’t stop now (with whatever it is you’re doing…), there’s only 62.938 steps to go! YOU CAN DO IT!

by the way, i have the feeling this site might be too much about me. if that’s the case, i apologize. i’ll try to include more other things – it was supposed to be a site about thoughts on music in general in the first place. on the other hand, it’s my site and i guess i should keep you informed about what’s happening – and the statistics are going through the roof this month, so maybe it’s just me feeling weird about being on display…

hold on, we’re almost there… this one’s about “catching up” – the 2nd song on “corner” (listen to it in the cool blue player to the right at the top of the sidebar).

this was of course inspired by Tom Waits, like a few others on the album as well. there’s this dark soundmess crawling forward, with almost no change throughout the whole song, and a distorted voice just telling this little story. the idea was not complicated at all, but putting it into practice was a somewhat more demanding task. again all sample based (except vocals) but there’s lots of them, about 5 different bassdrums – 3 normal ones and 2 orchestral ones (whatever those are called…), a complete drumkit, a few additional toms, two different kalimbas, xylophones, pan flutes, a bassoon, a synth-sound called ‘plucking teeth’. then a distortion device applied to some of the above mentioned instruments as well as the vocals.

there is a lot of automation going on in this tune, the faders move all the time, even if just little bits. when i started with that song, i figured this should be the easiest one because, hey, how hard can it be to create a soundmess? little did i know :-)  making a mess is a lot more difficult than i thought. for one, it’s against everything i ever learned and therefore well outside my field of expertise. no matter what i did, it sounded kind of organised, unbelievable. and it still is not as messy as i wanted it to be – i’m working on it… another reason is, everything about good music-software is designed to make a good sounding recording, from well sounding samples to the different processes you can use to shape the sound. of course, you can always go over the top with the settings but this often sounds just crappy instead of dirty, messy or raw. i plan to record some of the instruments i’ll use in the future myself to combine them with the sampled ones in order to get a somewhat messier sound, but for this album it was out of the question because there was very little time. and you can’t just set up any microphone anywhere, play your instrument and count on the recording to sound the way you want it to. chances are, again, it will just suck and not sound badass-like…

so instead of just throwing something together and guessing it would sound really bad (the good ‘bad’) automatically, it took a lot of experimenting and learning how to achieve such a sound. and that’s quite complex, because our brain is ridiculously skilled in recognising patterns of all kinds and that’s usually a good thing. but patterns are just the opposite of  a mess, meaning if you want to create a mess, you’ll have to work hard getting rid of any patterns along the way. ok, you may want to leave a few of them in there to have a rhythm of some kind for instance but anything else could easily become a problem.

as i mentioned, i’m just getting into this mess-making-thing and the song didn’t turn out the way i wanted it in the first place, because it is somehow based on patterns – but on the other hand, i like it. it would seem i need to create more mess-tunes in the future – a lot more….

hehehe, and once again i uploaded the album to one more site, added a button to the sidebar – i know it’s not exactly where it should be, i simply don’t know how to put it in the center, but at least it works – and added the link to the “other audiot stuff” section. this time it’s last.fm and if you know any other artist whos music is similar to mine (…) then please feel free to make the connection over there. and as always: tell others about it :-)

and another one :-)

in case you don’t know what i’m talking about, or maybe even what “corner” is, you might want to consider crawling into a lake and die – but on the other hand, you could just hit the play-button on the nice blue player to the right at the top of the sidebar. and in this case, skip to the third song, called “in the elevator”, because that’s what this post is about…

there’s not much to say about this song. it was completely improvised (pretty much like the 5th song “taking the blame”), based on a song i did about ten years ago i guess. when i first got my hands on the Reason 1.0 software (go here to find out about their present stuff – and no, i’m not getting paid by them, i’m just a fan of their software), i messed around a little, trying to figure out what this software could do. after a while i came up with this little piece of drumloops, synthbass, vibraphone and organ and i still like the feel of it. i already posted the tune in one of my first entries when this blog went online – you can listen to it here.

anyway, for the album i wanted to do something similar, some kind of elevator music – and, because of the concept-album-idea, i thought it would be cool to have the woman run from the butcher and ending up in an elevator where suddenly the wild chase is interrupted by really cool and relaxing elevator-music. you know, like in the Blues Brothers movie – great scene!

you already know about the playing live with a midi-keyboard thing etc…… so i’ll spare you this. i started with recording the bassline, just out of thin air – if i remember correctly, i didn’t even use a click. just pushed the record button and played away for a few minutes. then i wanted to have just fingersnaps as beat, but decided against that because i already had the handclaps-and-fingersnaps-thing going in the meatbucket song. so i played some hihat-chicks instead, nothing fancy, just the offbeat and one or two times i let it ring – that’s it for the drums.

again i wanted to have a vibraphone part and then an organ take over for the melody, so i played the vibraphone for the whole tune with the intention of keeping the best part and throwing away the rest. and that same thing i wanted to do with the organ. but this didn’t work to well, i don’t know why, it just didn’t sound good. so i left the whole vibraphone take in there and played a second organ part to support the vibraphone, throwing away the first one. i then mixed it in at a really low volume, you can rather feel than actually hear it. and in the end, to have more layers of sound, i added two different, rather complex synth-sounds, somewhat alien-ufo-like and again mixed them in at low volume. the thing with those two sounds is, i used two sound-modulators of a software synth with two different and randomized waveforms to control the pan-positions of the two sounds, meaning they’re changing their place in the stereo field all the time, completely unpredictable – and different from each other. that should give the whole piece some kind of floating feel.

and that’s all, just two instruments jamming along and a few others to support them…

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• playing bass… (audiot.eu)
• about choices… (audiot.eu)
• song no. 5 (audiot.eu)

this is just a short note that i threw in one of the “corner-songs” (bankjob) to compete with real music in the People’s Music Awards. i just thought it might be one more site i should be on, just one more step in the neverending journey of putting oneself on the map. don’t be ridiculous (although i do appreciate the gesture)! there is no chance i’m gonna get any votes, simply because i’m the worst social-networker ever – and that’s what it’s all about, right?

but it’s something i did with my music, so this note belongs here. i’m not even sure how this whole voting-thing works, but maybe i’ll find out (just to be able to vote for myself :-)  ). when i read through my sign-up-notification-mail, it sounds rather complicated to me, but they wrote i should tell you to go there an check it out. so go there and check it out :-)

you can find my profile page through the link above (i don’t even remember setting one up…) and i’ll add it to the links here on the site as well under “other audiot stuff”…

getting back to business. ok, this is about the 4th song of the album “corner”. you can listen to it (and the rest of the album as well) on the little player at the top of the sidebar to the right. the song is called “the chase”. as you may remember, this album started off as kind of a concept album about the butcher who goes out hunting etc. – during the song “catching up” (description follows…), he follows a couple, kills the guy but the woman escapes. he is then trying to hunt her down, which brings us to “the chase”, where it’s about running – pure and simple.

although “a bucket full of meat” was the first song i really worked on, and the first one to be finished for that matter, “the chase” was the first idea i had and the song i started with. i worked on that one until the first couple of ideas were gone and then the meatbucket caught my attention for quite a while…

you might have noticed that this one is mostly about sound – it’s not complicated songwriting, no different parts (at least not really), no changes in harmonics or anything like that. it’s meant to picture the last part of that hunt when it’s simply about running – apart from that section in the middle, where i imagined her hiding somewhere and him stopping to look around, then spotting her and the running continues…

i couldn’t help adding a whole lot of horns to this tune. i did that with having 70’s action movies in mind, or maybe tv-shows like “Streets Of San Francisco”. Have you ever heard the titletune of that show? unreal!

there are some new and modern sounds, the synths that carry the “melody” (it’s only 3 notes…) or the sreaming feedback synth, and then there’s a lot of old sounding stuff. for example the organs that play along with the synths or the drums. because there were no vocals involved, this song was completely done in Reason 4, using the included factory sound bank for everything except the drums. those were given this really cool sound with the DrumKits 2.0 Refill and the additional Vintage-RDK-Refill provided by Kurt Kurasaki to make the drums sound like in an old recording. by the way, the vinyl-noise you can hear all over the album as background is also from this Refill, with a few adjustments i made.

again, all this was played live by me using a cheap midi keyboard. i played the drumbeat for about 3, maybe 3,5 minutes and later had to prolong it by using some pieces again, because the song got a little longer due to the extensive horn-thing. the percussion-part was done with loops (9 different ones – it wasn’t easy to make them sound good together…), i have to admit – i did think about playing all of that too but there simply wasn’t enough time left before the end of the challenge.

i really dig hose plumbers. there is a trumpet section, a standard trombone section, a crescendo trombone section, then a crescendo french horn section and a glissando french horn section. some of them doubled, tripled or even quadrupled – fattening this whole thing up – and don’t they sound freakingly real? well, at least they do to me.

and after the big finale, there’s the drums again with all those so-called fruit-of-the-looms-fills (i just counted 30 of them throughout the song…) sophisticated artwork? surely not. diversified stroke of genius? HAHAHAHAHA, what did you have for breakfast? but was it effective? you bet!

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• no harm done… (audiot.eu)

wow, those were some ridiculously busy days, but before i talk about it, i’m gonna give you a description of the fifth tune from the album corner…just because i can :-)

this song is called “taking the blame” and it sounds like that as well. the interesting thing about this tune is, it was almost completely improvised. the whole thing took about 30 minutes. i tracked a bassline (again played live with a midi-controller using a nice sample-based sound from the reason factory soundbank), then laid down some drums (same method as above, sounds from the reason drumkits 2.0 refill) and some vibraphone (same again). this took about 15 minutes, all first takes – no cutting, copying, pasting or anything like that. then i exported this mixture as an audiofile, imported it in cubase le4 and recorded the vocals to it. for the vocals i wrote down three lines of lyrics, then pressed record and again improvised something. again, this was only one unedited take, which i imported in reason again to apply some dynamics processing, a bit of reverb and do a mixdown. that’s it.

now, my voice sounds quite damaged and…well….weird on this one. the reason for that is quite simple and shows off the perfectly well-coordinated strategy i applied to the whole album: trial and error! long may it live! i did the vocals for song no. 6 right before this one, so there was just no more voice left to do anything even related to singing. but hey, it’s about embracing the flaws, right? so i left it that way. and i’m really glad i did – now. it took a while to get used to it, though :-)

another funny thing about this song is, i tried to do a song similar to one i heard before and it really went wrong. the song i’m talking about is called “18 with a bullet” (at least i think so) and can be found on the soundtrack to “lock, stock & 2 smoking barrels”. i haven’t heard that song in years, so mine turned out completely different – but anyway, that’s were the inspiration came from…

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