audiot

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…

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….

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’m not sure if it was too much Sin City or too much Tom Waits but the first idea i had for a song was messy, bloody and disgusting. suddenly the title popped up in my head: ‘A Bucket Full Of Meat’ which turned out to become the sixth song of the album. inspired by an episode of 2 Stupid Dogs and one of Coupling i now had a title. yay, a title! i was almost done!

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…