Matt Bowen's minutes of music, photography, et cetera
Posts on: music
This track is more like my stuff I had been doing in reason and record. It was fun to put together, but I don’t feel like it really gels as a song; several of the parts make me happy, but they just don’t play together correctly. But, maybe I’ll be able to reuse some of the ideas.
It’s a full song! Not just a minute of music, but nearly six minutes of music, with multiple verses and everything.
The lyrics veer surprisingly (if you know me well) close to praise music, but that’s not the intention; they’re inspired by a visionary art installation, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, which is a 180-piece collection of objects made for the second coming by WWII veteran James Hampton. Hampton spent 14 years making the throne room out of old furniture, cardboard, craft paper, and foil; it’s really quite moving — if you’re in DC, go to the American Art museum in Chinatown and give it a look. We wanted to be respectful, so I wrote from what I hope is an empathetic position.
The music was put together in Ableton Live, using Absynth, Battery, and Guitar Rig from Native Instruments’s Komplete 6; AAS’s String Studio; me on guitar and bass; and my regular mystery vocalist. The mix is not perfect, but it’s as close as I’m going to get it any time soon; I figure I’m going to be revisiting several of these later once I have a large collection of songs anyway. I hope people enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed writing it; it has pretty much made my last few weeks to work on it.
This is supposed to be a minute of music, but it’s more like four minutes. I decided that this would be a good weekend to try my hand at learning Ableton Live, and I spent a ton of time making tracks of learning how to make music in Live. Unfortunately, all that time led to me making something much longer than one minute. The quality is middling, but I learned a ton.
This one’s a milestone; there’s a vocal track. It follows the same basic construction of other minutes of music: it started with bass (me on my Schecter, slightly distorted) and drums (mostly a loop, but I did add the crash cymbals myself), then I added the lead synth and real guitar. But then, I had one verse of lyrics I’d written, and I convinced «name redacted to protect the innocent» to sing them over the instrumentation. The vocal tracking took about an hour from warmup to mixdown, which seemed pretty good, considering this is the first time I’ve recorded vocals for one of these. Now, hopefully there will be more to come.
I think this one will become a longer song. It started out with me fiddling around, looking for instruments for next week’s minute of music, and ended up getting little additions all weekend until it was written. I’m not entirely sure of the arrangement, and I think the individual parts would need to be reworked a bit if vocals were going to land on top, but I think that’d probably be a fun afternoon or two anyway. I’m thinking of trying to keep better track of my instruments and effects, so here’s a rundown:
- Recorded using Record + Reason
- Intro synth/pad is Swello, in Reason’s thor, which is part of the reason factory sound bank
- The first drums are Rok12 Cross CL, in reason’s Dr:rex, from the Jason McGerr Sessions, with Drum Factory as an insert, from the Reason+Record FX refill
- The faster drums are Brk17 Break AM, in reason’s Dr:rex, from Jason McGerr Sessions, with Drum Factory as an insert, from the Reason+Record FX refill
- The weird rhythmic wash thing is a pattern of my own on the Velo XFade Rust Kit, from Ambient Drums, in reason’s combinator. As an insert path, it has Circles, from the Reason+Record FX refill
- The bass is from my own four string active, with Dark Stack from Record’s built in patches as an insert
- The rhythm guitar is on my girlfriend’s fender, with Amped Reverb from Record’s built in patches as an insert
- The lead guitar is the same guitar, with the Tea in Sahara insert patch from Record’s built in patches
I had a series of aphex twin ambient works running through my head most of the day, and so this is much more electronic than usual.There’s nothing fancy here, but I did play everything but the drums through — if things loop, it’s because I played those notes a few times in a row. I was mostly just having fun playing and decide not to loop.
On a meta-level, I’ve been thinking about changing my approach. I’m doing alright putting together about one minute of music every two weeks, which I’m OK with (I’d rather be more frequent, but somehow that never works out). The trick is, I still spend the same amount of time on the music, and it’s still almost always done on a Sunday night. The goal of the project at this point is to force me to think more about music every day, but every two weeks seems too infrequent for that.
When I do sit down to make something, it turns out, I spend about half my time just going through synths and instruments and picking an overall tone, then another quarter paging through drum loops looking for something with a vibe I like.This leaves not much time for the actual music making — loops, arpeggiators, quantization, and midi speed things up substantially, but all the same, I feel like I should be spending more time playing instruments than auditioning them.
So, I am going to try to split up my creation process, setting up the song file one week and then actually working on the music the next week. I’m not sure how this will work, but I think it’s worth a try; I’m trying to find a good balance between time spent and focus created, and I think I’ve gone a little light on time spent.
Updated: Uploaded a new version of the music file after listening on my laptop speakers and realizing I needed to change the engineering a little.
As I was playing last night, I ran across a very straightforward drum beat in the patterns section that I could control near the bottom of the Kaossilator’s pad. Once that was down, I wanted a bassline, but it ended up sounding a bit sinister. However, once the organ-thing came in, the song perked quite a bit up, which was good — I’m in a very good mood tonight, and there’s no need to write moody music when I’m not moody myself.
I experimented today with sequencing the drums entirely by hand, and going for a bit more complexity in the by hand pattern (not using the gate arpeggiator there). Again, it’s a bit busy, but I was pretty happy overall with the sound tonight.
I was trying to be more minimal today, but that didn’t really come through. What did, however, was something sinister. I’m also past 90 seconds, but that’s balanced out by the more abitious live looping.
