It pleases me greatly to violently rip the tablecloth off of two steaming hot electronic compositions which are now available for your aural enjoyment. They’re sort of polar opposites; one is very long, deeply complex, and took maybe a year to complete, and the other is under 4 minutes, and took maybe 4-5 evenings tops. Still, I’m proud of them both for different reasons.
Sorry mobile viewers or RSS readers, you’ll actually have to view the site in a desktop browser in order to listen. Hit the play button between the spinning reels on the menu above and skip to tracks 2 and 4. If you don’t see it, navigate here and you should get it.Track 2 in the player is called “To Feel Good” and it’s a composition created over the course of many months of collaboration with my awesome friend Vincent. We used Reason and some Carl Sagan quotes from Cosmos to make this epic, meandering jam that refuses to quit. Out of everything I’ve ever done with Reason, this one may just take the award for longest and most complex composition.
I’m seriously, really delighted with the outcome and proud of “To Feel Good”. Vince made excellent, large contributions here, and together I think we made something colossal! Definitely check it out. Obviously it’s the apple of my eye, so I’ll just stop hyping it up and let you listen.
Track 4 is entitled “Bullshit Prickly Pear Soda” and it’s the first morsel of sounds worth sharing from the new Impulse 61! As much for my own sake as anything else, here is some reflection on the compositional process for BPPS, which reveals my typical production workflow as well as some new benefits from having the Impulse around:
It started as a jam between myself and my buddy Luke who had come to visit. We used the drum pads to tagteam this beat, taking several passes to add elements one by one. That’s actually a pretty nice way to create a beat, since it gives you time to listen and you can be thoughtful about how what you’re adding fits into the existing rhythms. Second, Luke added the bassline. He was like “I don’t know what to play!” and I told him “just play anything man, it’ll sound cool!” Aaaaaand success.
The third element was the synth which is introduced over the bassline, countering the space it fills. I ended up varying the last part of it just to keep things mixed up, much later in production. The fourth element was the nintendo-sounding square wave synth, which only interjects at the end of each loop. This element filled the remainer of empty space left by the main synth and the bassline. The more I listen, the more electronic compositions I find employ such framework: use sparse elements and have each one fill its own individual space, with no overlap. It’s a good formula.
The very last thing that got added was the thick, constant 16ths rave-sounding synth that comes in last. Up to this point, everything was composed while just looping the same 4 bars over and over. The vast majority of my Reason compositions follow that formula; looping a phrase and adding elements on top, then arranging it all later. Arranging pretty much just consists of copying and pasting in various combinations until you’ve got a buildup, a plateau, a breakdown, maybe a B-section (this jam’s got one, which I added later), then a return to the A and a wind-down. Add some cymbol crashes and maybe some buildup sounds and bam, done.
Having the impulse handy, I then did a few extra passes through the entire tune, automating various knobs and sliders as it played back. I was fairly shocked by just how much that adds. And sure, you can do that with the mouse, or “draw it” in reason, but the human element of twisting knobs adds something that mouse sort of… filters out. I definitely plan to do more of that going forward. This is only trial # 001!
File these under “yesss”.
Tags: Impulse 61, Music, Reason, Sagan Appreciation, Site Update, yesss
