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 25, 2009
@ 4:46 pm
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This one is much closer to the music that I’ve been listening to (mostly Blue Sky Black Death) than almost anything else I’ve made. I started with the guitar, then added drums and changed from a chord progression to an arpeggio, which definitely gives the whole thing a certain sound. Strangely, I had intended to do something much more string heavy, but somehow the strings ended up coming together last, at around 1 in the morning. There’s definitely some mixing problems here; the whole thing sounds almost like nonsense over my laptop speaker, but it’s pretty hip over headphones or better speakers.


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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.


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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.


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Aug 23, 2009
@ 9:49 pm
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After reviewing the minutes of music I’ve made up until now, I’ve determined that, when I use reason and record, I prefer the songs that started with a pad and then worked up from there. So, I grabbed a bunch more pads and did exactly that today. I got pretty excited when I found one that sounded like what Mogwai used in “Moses? I amn’t,” which I’ve embedded below for reference:

Moses? I Amn’t - Mogwai

I also wanted to try to drop rock-drums in, and of course a live bass, because it’s a lot of fun to play my bass now that I can have other instruments to play it with. I used some heavy effects on the strings, and they sort-of work; really, the whole affair could use a more careful hand mixing, but that’s what later revisions are for.


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Jul 2, 2009
@ 2:07 am
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I love delay. I don’t think this is unusual for people who play rock instruments. For Christmas one year, I got a big multieffects pedal, and even with hundreds of effects patches, I pretty much left it set to delay. And last night, I discovered that record has hell-of delay. It’s kinda like my pedal, only instead of two delays, there are 12. Having so many options was nearly paralyzing… but only nearly; I decided I couldn’t just fool with them all night, found one that had a nice rhythm, and dug in with my bass. About 45 minutes later, this 45 seconds of music was ready. It’s really simply — two variations of a bassline, a steady helping of delay, a nice rock drum loop that I found in reason, and a synth-guitar part that’s actually just three notes run through reason’s arpeggiator. Certainly not my most ambitious, but fun to lay down all the same.


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Jun 28, 2009
@ 3:12 pm
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On Friday, I got my Record beta invite, and last night I fired it up and wrote a song. Record is like reason, only you can record audio from instruments that you plug into your soundcard. So, I grabbed a drum loop, put down an initial synth melody, and then plugged my bass in to see what I could add. And then before I knew it, it was 2AM and I still hadn’t really mixed anything yet, but I had a ton of tracks. I really enjoyed making this one; the more I played, the better each note felt, and I’m pretty happy with the overall sound. Like, so happy that I might have just thrown all my more productive plans out the window in favor of playing my bass more and trying to understand the massive soundboard that record emulates…


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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.