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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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• song no. 5 (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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