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 :-)

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)

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…

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….

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)
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• 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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yay, here it is! the legendary meatbucket-song! listen to it here.

this was not only the first song i did for the album and the one that took most of the time but also the song that i had the most fun with – and the worst croakiness… well, it is of course inspired by Tom Waits but you already heard that, right? it honors me that some people said my song would sound like one of his – some even said it would sound worse…and that’s an even bigger honor. thank you!

because this was the first tune for this album i made a mistake with it. the album was supposed to be done in 28 days and i spent about a week on this one song before i noticed, that i never could finish in time if i went on this way. the song is not at all complicated and even the single parts were tracked in no time but i ‘wasted’ lots and lots of time with creating the right instruments and with the automation of the volume- and panorama-levels. take the handclaps for instance: there’s a lot of work in them. i took a handclap sample that sounded real to me, but it was only about two or three pairs of hands clapping – not enough for what i had in mind. just doubling the same sample a few times didn’t sound real anymore, so i created a whole new sample out of dozens of the original one but with as many variations in pitch and pan-position as possible. this is not as easy as it sounds because some pitches just didn’t work – i couldn’t find a logical pattern in this so it was mostly trial-and-error-strategy and took a long time because i really cared about each one of the sample-parts. and the coolest thing was to put a variation to the time the different claps occur. if you listen closely you can hear that all the claps sound more or less unique. sometimes all of them are simultaneously sometimes there are a few too early or too late ones, exactly as it would be in reality – when some morons are not able to stay in time but clap anyway. i love those claps but wonder if i spent too much time on them. i guess nobody notices this detail anyway – it’s just handclaps for god’s sake! hopefully they at least create the vibes i wanted them to. see? i even spend way too much time writing about them!

the next thing i think turned out really interesting, although you probably haven’t noticed as well, is the bassdrum which is the first sound of the song and the last one as well. what happens with this one is that it gets louder, stronger and more intense throughout the whole 8 minutes of the song. but you can only really hear it if you compare the beginning and the end of the tune. in between it just draws no attention to itself. again, hopefully this also creates great vibes.

then there’s a bunch of other instruments that play the same licks over and over again. the bass, that kind of holds it all together, a kalimba-sound, a harp. later there’s some celli and some tremolo-strings to create a little tension when the wife comes down the stairs… i automated the volume levels of all of them so they rise from nothing to a certain degree and then fall down again but all of them in different ways, so it doesn’t sound like some computer did this. sometimes the bass is loudest, sometimes the kalimba etc. – pretty random. and i didn’t play the lick for each instrument just once and then copy-and-pasted it again and again, i played them all for about 5 minutes because that was the duration of the song in the first place. it got longer with the lyrics and the whole automation stuff, so i took a variety of licks (i picked each one of them – not just a sequence!) and pasted them to have the increased length covered. i learned that those details are very important to make it sound real…

that’s about it. oops, how could i forget the vocals :-) hmmm, there’s not much to tell about them. i just tried to sound dirty and went a little over the top with it. dig the breathing and slurping noises…

by the way, the reason why my voice sounds broken and strange on “taking the blame” is that i recorded it directly after the meatbucket. there was just no way to really sing after what i did to my voice before. note to myself: change the order of songs appropriately in the future…

i command you to check this out!

ok, time for the next episode. the seventh song of the album, which i called “the lover”. this is a really simple song, just two guitars and vocals. one guitar playing the bassnotes and the other one the chords – only three by the way. again, no real instruments, i used guitar samples with a tremolo effect. if i was to do this again, i’d record a real guitar – although it sounds quite real to me… anyway, i wanted to do everything except the vocals with the laptop only as kind of an experiment, so i used samples for everything.

the interesting part were the vocals. i should have mixed it a little different, i realized afterwards, because the words are hard to understand. this is the result of something i never did before, so it was new to me and i improvised. the reason for this was i wanted it to sound as close and soft as possible which brought up a variety of problems. first of all, if it should sound close, you need to turn the microphone up – way up. just having a normal setting and go further away from it might work live but for recording this ain’t good enough. why? because the words are not the only noise you make. there’s breathing for instance, even the air that comes out with the words has a certain sound and then there’s the little sounds that appear when you open or close your mouth. now, the recording can only sound really intimate when those sounds are there. if someone talks softly into your ear, those sounds are there as well – so to keep it real, you need them. cranking up the mic, though, can really freak you out because a large diaphragm tube condenser mic is quite a monster – those things pick up everything! when you’re recording that way you need silence, perfect silence. you might even want to think about the clothes you’re wearing, that’s why i recorded nekkid – and shaved :-) just kiding……or am i……

but turning up the mic wasn’t enough for me, i wanted more. the only possible way was to get even closer to the mic. next problem: usually there’s a pop-killer (i think that’s the right word….) between the mic and your mouth, a round thingy to prevent pop noises that occur when too much air hits the mic hard. light a match and sing a ‘p’-word (not phuck…) into the flame to know what i mean. those airstrikes cause little sound-explosions and can ruin a track in no time. getting closer to the mic meant to get rid of the pop-killer. i virtually touched the mic with my lips which makes it almost impossible to get something useful out of it (not talking about live here!) and the fact that the mic was cranked up made it even impossiblyer…..uhm….more impossible……or…less possible…..or…..uhm……you get the idea.

all that forced me to sing not only more cairful but also softer than i ever did before. there’s a thin line between really soft singing and whispering and to make it sound somehow even is a real challenge. singing out loud is a lot easier than doing it really, really soft. by the way, it’s the same with drums. tell your drummer to play a groove as soft as a whisper (or try it yourself) – it’s freaking hard to groove at such a low volume, when the sticks can only be an inch away from the drum…

in the end i’m not sure if it was worth the trouble, because i still don’t know if it’s even possible to get a decent recording with this. although i was very careful, it still doesn’t sound quite as even as i wanted it too. and it was a lot harder to deal with it in the mix than it is with ‘normal’ vocals. so it sounds like either a bad singer or a bad recording – i guess there is such a thing as ‘too real’. it seems there is kind of a threshold and from that point on ‘more real’ results in ‘less good’… i’m gonna spend some time in the future to figure that one out…

anyway i really love that song for its intimacy, even if it shows what could have been better.

p.s. i should mention that the feeling i wanted to create with this was inspired by Nancy Sinatra‘s “Bang Bang” and the title tune from Twin Peaks.

yeah, that’s right. i’m finally starting to give detailed descriptions of evey single song you can find on “corner” (listen + download it right here). i’m cheating a little, though – because i’m gonna be late for a fotoshoot (not as hip as it sounds…) and spent way too much time on pimping the new site-design. so i’m starting with the last song of the album, which is just kind of an outro – only one minute long. this is my chance to keep my word AND be off the hook early enough to keep my appointment, both at the same time. it’s unbelievable how well coordinated i am once again :-)

there’s not that much to say about “rest”, but it is part of the album – so here we go. this melody came to me when i first started working on the album. if i remember correctly it was the second or third idea i had at all. it’s nothing special i suppose but for some reason this melody got to me somehow. being a trekkie, i immediately thought about the episode where Picard lives an imaginary life under the influence of some alien probe and afterwards he has this flute and the melody he remembers. by the way, i really dig that melody…

although the two melodies have nothing really in common, i wondered how it might sound when played with a flute. i was blown away by its simple beauty and wanted to make a whole song out of it. you know, the really hard stuff with string sections coming in and so forth. but it didn’t work out because with everything i tried to ‘epand’ this melody, so the listener would get more out of it, i just failed miserably. i then thought about playing it with a violin and this too sounded very nice, especially because a violin could play it really soft at the beginning but give it a lot more power later. i tried to combine flute and violin and it sucked. i tried to play them one after another and it sucked. i tried to play the violin and in the second round provide kind of a carpet with a cello…..and it sucked. all that got me close to say ‘away with it, i’m doing something else!’

now i’m glad i kept it. with all this experimenting i lost track of what was important (you might find this sentence more often in future entries…), the music. it doesn’t matter if it’s a 43 minute tune involving all instruments one can possibly imagine or if it is a 30-second melody played by one flute. if it’s good, it’s good – easy as that. it’s always about what the song/the moment needs. and if it needs such simplicity – so be it.

hehehe, by the way, i just found a sweet pic of Picard and Riker – embedding…..done!

…or decisions if you like. until maybe a year ago, i never really thought about those. when i listened to something i liked, it was always about the ‘how’ – how did the artist do this or that, how did he/she make it sound the way it did. i never really thought about the ‘why’.

now when i started to work on “corner”, i already knew about the importance of choices but never made them myself with this in mind. i usually did what i thought sounded cool and was done with it. i should add though tht there never were that many choices before. what i did in those years was mostly the usual band lineup, sometimes an unplugged duo or trio but switching to doing almost everything with software changed it all. suddenly i had choices, more than i could deal with. instead of just being able to choose exactly where to place the four drummics (because there were only four mics and only one drumset and only one room etc…), now it’s more like which of the dozens of drumkits should i use or should i combine two of them…or more? should i use closed mics? or ambient mics? or both? and how should i mix them? which shape do i want the room to have and how large and so on…. one can easily get lost in the sheer amount of possibilities – very easily.

well, you could just browse, right? you want some drums, so you just go through the drumsound-archive and pick the one you like best. sounds easy enough – and it is……if you’re able and willing to spend the next two weeks 24/7 browsing. and that’s just the drums! and even if you’d go through with this, chances are, it sounds like crap once the other instruments are in place. of course, no poblem, just pick another drumset – AAARRRGH !!!

so with this unbelievable amount of choices comes a certain responsibility. you should know what you’re doing aka where you want to go with it and that’s not as easy as it sounds. at least for me because i mostly do not know what i’m doing….mostly. don’t get me wrong, it’s cool to not know where the journey will lead you, this is the perfect way to be creative BUT the challenge is being able to react to whatever your creativity tells you – and fast. if your little mr hyde wants to hear some wahwah sound at exactly this point, you have to know how to get it – before too much thinking throws you out of the zone (or the flow). and if there’s no wahwah available, how to fake it (or build one yourself if you’re using Reason – sorry ’bout that but i’m kind of a fan…). i guess this is where the term artist comes into play. how do you want it to sound? and why do you want it to sound like that? what kind of reaction do you want to create? these are the kind of questions that begin to matter and not only because answering them will narrow the possibilities down to a manageable amount…

in the end it’s more than just picking a few sounds and throwing them together somehow because it will sound good automatically. yeah, that’s a bummer – i thought it would work that way too :-( but on the other hand: that’s what separates the men from the boys.

what i used to create the album “corner”:

• one of those rather new aluminium Macbooks
• an E-MU Tracker Pre usb 2.0 audio interface
• Cubase LE 4
• Reason 4
• Reason Drumkits 2.0 Refill
• Peff‘s Vintage RDK Combis v1.1 Refill
• a T-Bone SCT800 large diaphragm tube mic
• a CME M-Key usb keyboard
• some cables
• some old headphones & the pa in our rehearsal room for monitoring (yeah, i know…)
• lots and lots of buttercookies, fruitjuice, gummibears
• a really cool looking baseball cap

that’s it.

although the last two points were the top priorities in this – their direct influence on the project can hardly be measured or described. i’ll go with the word: vibes!

the audio interface, the microphone, Cubase and the cables were used to record the vocals only. and the rest did the rest. so apart from tracking the vocals, everything was done with Reason 4 exclusively. in my opinion one hell of a programm and without any doubt one of the best inventions since frozen pizza! here’s to the folks at Propellerhead.

i will upgrade some of my gear in the near future – there will be some nearfield monitors and better midi controllers to streamline the workflow. but for this head-over-heels-project the above mentioned gearlist was absolutely sufficient. and even if there will be some changes, the list won’t get much longer. it’s a lot more fun to make do with what you have (and especially learn to really use the things already there) – MacGyver rocks!!!

• corner on bandcamp
• corner on reverbnation
• corner on soundcloud

i just uploaded the album to the rpm jukebox as well, but they haven’t lanched it yet – the link will follow.

you can listen to the full album in 128 bit mp3 quality at bandcamp and reverbnation. you can listen to five of the eight songs in original cd quality at soundcloud. you can download the full album in 128 bit mp3 quality at bandcamp for free or you can download it in a variety of better qualities for whatever YOU want to pay (min. 90 cents per song or $5 for the whole album – hey, even i need to pay for hookers and booze!) also at bandcamp.

i disabled the cd-quality-download at soundcloud after it was available for over a week, because i think the people who read this blog and are interested in what i do should have the advantage of getting those files for free. if you haven’t downloaded them yet but would like to, drop me a line. you’ll get the chance to download the 3 other songs and complete the album in cd quality for free as soon as soundcloud lets me upload them, might take a few weeks though…

tomorrow i’ll continue unveiling the mysteries surrounding this creation, so stay tuned…

maybe this is the right time to come out of the closet: no instruments were harmed during the creation of this album! oh, except my voice of course :-) but seriously, apart from the vocals, there was not a single real instrument involved. everything you can hear is based on samples. BOOO!

well, it’s not that simple. everyhing was played alright, but on a midi-controller. so even if it consists of samples, it still was actually played by a human being and recorded – including flaws. i didn’t select a pencil tool to just draw event-lines all over the place and then ‘randomize’ them with kind of a human-factor-function (which is no problem with today’s software).

now, why does this make a difference? why draw the line there? lots of musicians think it’s completely off limits to use samples, others believe there are no limits at all and let the software do all the work – if no one knows about it, who cares? again, why does it make a difference? until recently i was one of those guys who thought of samples as cheating, only what was played and recorded the old fashioned way counted. but two things changed this opinion of mine. first, it’s virtually impossible for the independent ‘guerrilla’ musician to get a professional sound out of a – let’s say – drumkit. and by professional i mean Colaiuta-like. because you do not only need a decent drumset, professional mics and a high-end signal chain, you also need a professional room to record it in – not to mention all the know how to deal with funny little things like Pandora’s-phase-orgy-box. it’s not coincidence that sound-engineer is a full-time job, as is drummer. so doing it all alone requires some dirty tricks. period. and i’m not even talking about the ability to play (and proper record) all instruments that are involved – in this case: drums, saxophones, trumpets, french horns, trombones and other plumbing devices, harmonicas, flutes, an orchestral string section, percussions of all kinds, guitars, basses, all sorts of mallet-instruments, synthesizers, organs, accordeons and other things i can’t remember right now. and, by the way, one would need to have all those instruments…….and quite a storage facility as well.

and second, it’s still one hell of a challenge to make those samples sound real. even with the best drumsamples available, the knowledge of how to actually play the drums is as important as it is for the real instrument. you have to know about accents, about which hand/foot is playing what and when and so forth. otherwise it will sound artificial and boring – as it does in countless recordings. yes, software has come a long way towards sounding real, but a program is only a tool. if you don’t know how to use it, you’re gonna hurt yourself – and others.

so no matter how much cheating is involved, there’s still a big difference between an artist and a pencil-tool-pusher. and i guess it will stay that way…

but, as i mentioned, the approach was quite stupid. isn’t that cute? but it’s wrong! (small joke for the insiders, hehehe). Because i just did the usual. instead of just doing it, i started planning – again. don’t get me wrong, there came some cool ideas with the foolishly-trying-to-work-out-all-the-details-phase. one of them was quite tough to get rid off. it was about making a concept album about the butcher who kills people and sells their meat to the public (not really inventive, i know that). and there are actually 5 songs on the album that were related to that idea. first of all, ‘A Bucket Full Of Meat’ of course, then ‘Catching Up’ which is about the butcher on the hunt, killing a guy but missing his girlfriend which led to ‘The Chase’. She runs into a building, enter the song ‘In The Elevator’. But in the end he gets her as well – ‘Rest’. i still think this was a pretty cool idea, but i got caught up in way too many details about making up a decent storyline and appropriate music that i finally abandoned the idea.

so i started working on ‘A Bucket Full Of Meat’ and some of the other tunes on the side as idea-collectors. more than a week later i still hadn’t finished a single song! i was way too busy doing automations and correcting subtle details etc. to get something done. that’s when even i understood that this way i could never finish in time. in a moment like that, my usual thought would have been ‘so what, it’ll take a little longer then.’ case closed. but this time, and i owe the rpm-folks a huge thank you for that, there was no way of just not doing it. i had signed up for the challenge and i wrote about it in lots of emails, on this site here, in forums and on twitter. making this public simply was like shutting the door behind me, the only way out was to go through with it. and only seconds later i hated myself for doing so :-) but now it was done.

so i was in a really uncomfortable position – not only was i forced to create something, i was forced to do it fast and with flaws. UGH! it’s always the fight inside of oneself, right? looking back it was a very smart move to blackmail myself like that because it kind of broke a blockade. now i wasn’t only able to finish this, i also feel the strong urge to make another album, starting in march – as soon as i dealt with some website issues. but i say it again: i will start a new album in march and finish it in april.guaranteed! there! i did it again! ………………. DAMMIT !!!

now with no possible excuses for failing and with no more roadblocks ahead, i could finally get to work…