As I speak to you I’m in the middle of the production.. well, lets get to talking about it.

The first thing I want to note is that It’s very awesome working with 2 24″ HD monitors… though I dare say I still find myself wishing I had more space!!!..  but that said it does feel pretty incredible to have this much space going on. For music production it really means you’re able to.. manage more at once.. which has big ramifications.. which I seem to be putting to the test in this project.

So I think I kind of gave the clues to where I’d likely be going in a recent blog post.. that I’m trying to integrate a kind of free jamming process into my electronic music process.. 

Latter:

I suppose the best way I can describe the experience of it is.. well there’s a lot of dimensions to it really.

It’s an adventure

I don’t really understand certain things about our world.. one of the things I have the hardest time with is “sucky artists.” I particularly hate “sucky artists” whom are more successful then I am.. from a commercial perspective. My definition of sucky is “he” (or she) “whom doesn’t do anything interesting.” You know the type? Takes a safe and well trotted path? If all I was interested in was… making sure I made the rent.. you know what? I wouldn’t be a freaking artist! I mean.. ok, its more complicated then all this.. but I simply mean the artist who’s work is derivative.. which translates into 90% of everything Hollywood produces.. and most of the stuff I hear on the radio.

From the perspective of an artist.. or speaking as one.. the well trotted path is just freaking boring.. you know? I wanna go out there and do something new, something exciting.. that’s just who I am, that’s just how I’m wired.. and its tuff to imagine it being any other way. All of which is not to say that I don’t have my lazy days.. just.. I don’t know.

So I guess what I’m trying to do creatively is take this freaking crazy mad ass jump..

Ok, lets back off from this and look at the economic dimension of my plot at this junction in our story.

If all goes well.. which is a very low bar in many respects.. I could maintain my unemployed, working on my own kinda thing, sorta status.. for a long long time. Things might not go that well.. but this is at least the out look as of this moment.

So what this means with respect to my art is.. I don’t have to make bank tomorrow, which means I can aim high. There is a shorter term outlook where in I have to make bank.. but that’s another story for another time.. we’re talking big picture here. And to all this I should maybe add that I can do all this provided I do my best to live on the cheap.. 

Ok.. so.. 

My studio is turning into a freaking monster of a studio. The sound work I’m now engaged in is.. so many orders of magnitude beyond anything I’ve had to work with before… and I’m still really just in the early days of exploring the possibilities of it. 

After my recent shopping spree, I’ve landed in a place where I’m now semi inclined not to spend too much more money.. Which is odd seeing as I was planing on spending a couple grand more, prior to the spree. I may still buy one more piece of software, and I might eventually get all the stuff I had planned on.. but I’m feeling like.. well its just not real pressing at this moment.

One of the surprisingly big deals is ReCycle

ReCycle, on the surface, doesn’t really sound all that exciting… but it does have the effect of radically shifting how I think about working with Reason..

Here’s what you do: You load an audio file into ReCycle and you slice it up.. you then take that sliced up file, which is now a loop.. and you load it into Reason. Now.. with the REX player.. you can play the individual slices.. and sorta do interesting things with that loop.

Why is this exciting?

One of my issues was “how do I work with vocals.” This is a bit of a problem if you can’t actually sing. At this point I can change the pitches of the vocals.. and do other funky things.. process them.. but.. if they are a basic audio file.. you can fracture them.. play them glitched up.. Fubared.. and something about the creative process of it.. the work flow.. the whatever.. makes it kinda incredible.

A few latter:

At my current stage of thinking.. well.. instrumentals are kind of abstract… what are they about? Popularity wise.. instrumentals tend not to be as popular as songs with actual lyrics in them. You know, singing and all that? So bringing lyrics / singing / etc.. to my music.. is on the to do list.. and I’m now in early stages of exploring what I can do along these lines.

Using ReCycle and Rex files.. its a bit like Picasso’s cubism..  where we are taking an image and fracturing it. We then have control of the fractures.. we can think of the fractures compositionally.. What goes on inside of a fracture can be treated as a texture / timber.. its more about orchestration then counterpoint.. 

This also leads us into certain historical threads in music.. since the dawn of equal temperament.. our music has gone in a direction of being about pitches.. and the relationship of pitches.. as a pose to being about the timber. The dawning of electronic music has had the effect of increasing the importance of the timber.. So my use of ReCycle now brings my work into this somewhat lost thread.

Later still:

I’ve dug a little deeper into this project… It’s an experiment, so it doesn’t really matter.. or, I’m sorta willing to just kind of take it where ever.. and um, there’s interesting things emerging.. so lets back out of the subject of ReCycle here…

Earlier in this production it was all about mixing.. and the mixing was no easy task… perhaps made more complex by my spirit. It involved a lot of automation of levels, EQ, and effect sends..  trying to wrestle with things enough so they might not be too muddy.. I’m not sure that this was ever exactly achieved.. eventually the notion came that this automation had to be thought of as.. not just about making certain elements clear.. but also as a compositional thing.. so that we could have contrasts / evolutions between various sections… a sense that we were moving through space.. 

A day or two latter

Well for a limited time you can hear the fruits of this project in a recent post…  my last post actually. After that you won’t be able to get the individual track for a while..  act now, and all that. I do plan on posting it as a part of a podcast in the next week or so.. so it’ll be there to hear.. and on that note, let me post this entry.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Guitar, Music Production, Reason and ReCycle, The New Project, musical composition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.