Matt Bowen's minutes of music, photography, et cetera


Posts on: reason


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Nov 16, 2009
@ 2:09 am
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So I wanted to make something like “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio. It didn’t turn out. I should have played the bass with a pick, and probably should have done something different on guitar. I’m honestly not sure if I want make things that fast anyway; I may go back to chilled out music. Also, this one came in at two minutes, which isn’t for the best; however, I got carried away playing my bass and then wasn’t able to chop it up cleanly. But, there’s always next week.


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Nov 8, 2009
@ 1:14 pm
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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.


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Oct 19, 2009
@ 12:31 am
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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


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Oct 12, 2009
@ 12:09 am
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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.


Audio

Sep 27, 2009
@ 9:44 pm
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Record proports to let you use your computer keyboard as a music keyboard, and since it was a pretty day and my portable keyboard broke, I figured I’d try it. Thus, today’s jam. It’s simple and chilled out, and that seems about right for a sunny, fall Sunday.


Audio

Jun 2, 2009
@ 1:17 am
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This one got really gross — the bass is gnarly, the drums are out of time, and the organ is thick. I was fooling around trying to sequence some simple drums and I couldn’t get the to quantize in a way that sounded good, so I just stuck with ‘em out of time. Then, the bass came from playing with LFO late at night to get the distortion to growl. I’m not going to say I’m proud, but I’m not going to throw it away, either.


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May 13, 2009
@ 1:43 am
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This one was ambitious, and I hit some of what I was aiming for. I was trying for something percussive without drums, and I wanted to try to keep things interesting without a lead part. It does those things, mostly, but it still feels like it’s missing something. It’s also actually almost two minutes. I was having so much fun playing with settings on my keyboard and being impressed that the timer came up on the keyboard itself that I misread the counter as saw 01:52 and 0:52. So, this one counts double.


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Apr 13, 2009
@ 3:10 am
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As promised, I sequenced tonight’s drums myself. I finally figured out how people use the synthesizers as drum machines in reason, and although it’ll take some getting used to, the results were immediately interesting. Beyond the drums, this track sounds much simpler than usual; ironically, it uses more instruments, effects, and automation than I have to date. However, I spent a lot of energy on throwing out drum tracks, so when it came time to write melodies, I ended up writing something simple and then duplicating it to try to keep it sonically interesting. I can only hope I achieved the desired effect.


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Mar 14, 2009
@ 2:33 am
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This is the second bit of music I got to do today in reason, the first being some bumper’s for a podcast. It was an absurdly hectic day, so I decided I wanted to write something really relaxed. I definitely got there. This one uses reason again, and I’m starting to feel like there’s a lot more I could be doing in reason, if I take more time to learn it. Hopefully, that happens.


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Mar 10, 2009
@ 1:55 am
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I decided that I wanted something pretty different tonight, so instead of using the Kaossilator, I fired up reason and tried to make a minute of music in under an hour. Happily, it worked — I used a Rex loop for the drums, found a synth for the bass part quickly, and even got some rhythm going. It’s not exactly polished, but I’m certainly not unhappy with it. I didn’t have anything specific in mind tonight other than “not dance music,” but maybe that helped.