Nutcase Ghost -- Ambient with a Bite

[TechLo]

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default ... dID=732634

Notes for the song “Nutcase Ghost”

As a semi-professional American football handicapper (http://www.thesportscruncher.blogspot.com) /semi-professional poker player/semi-professional stay-at-home dad/semi-semi-professional musician, a decision must always be made as to what hat to wear when an hour or two of free time presents itself. Now that the football season is over I decided to also take a break from poker for a while and work on some new music, as I haven’t finished anything sing earlier last year.

Computer-based music making often starts, stalls in, and ends with listening to a kick drum pound your ears into oblivion while you mess around other elements which in my case usually involves creating intricate-for-my-skill-level templates in Kontakt/Kore2/Sonar/Ableton Live which will supposedly provide a head start for working on numerous songs. I can spend countless hours messing around with/quasi-designing new ways of interacting with the music-making process while not actually making music. Scores of plug-ins often lead to a lack of producing musical scores. I don’t mind, generally, as the technology and production side of thing are often just as fun and rewarding to understand than actual music production.

After 3 weeks of said noodling about, though, I’d decided enough was enough and I needed to finish a song just for the sake of doing so to get the ball rolling. Common wisdom in the computer music world says that limiting your palette of tools usually leads to increased productivity, so I decided to have a go of it, making perhaps an entire album’s worth of songs (eventually) with just a handful of plug-ins. The paralysis of too many choices can be overwhelming in the studio. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the past designing programs in Excel to automate through randomization many of the decisions that go into making a song. The “Concrete Strategies”, as I call the program, is still a work in progress and something I may return to in time. For this song I didn’t use any randomization for composition.

I started with the letter “A” for considering which plug-ins to use. “(Waldorf) Attack” for drums? Yes, please. I’ve had this drum synth for almost 8 years, and it’s a real beut. Okay, all the drums will be designed from scratch in “Attack”. For synths – “Absynth”, from Native Instruments. I’ve used it in the past, but would welcome the chance to get to know this very deep synth better. All basses, synths, pads etc. would have to originate in Absynth. Moving on to effects – “Analogic Filter Box” from Reaktor 5 would be the only sound manipulator I’d use other than the built-in delay in “Attack” (I love the delay in Attack for instant grooviness on drum hits) as well as using “Absynth’s” internal effects, which can also be used on outside material by routing audio directly into Absynth. And that’s it, 3 plug-ins for the heavy lifting in a track.

I also decided that I would work quickly with programming and composition because for me the magic moment in music making is when you’ve just mixed 3 or so elements together in a track and it’s actually starting to sound like more than the sum of it’s parts – the birth of the song, if you will. Once you get to that stage working with the piece is a lot more enjoyable. As an avid reader of magazines like Computer Music and MusicTech, the desire to have quality production values (professional sounding mixes) and an increasing knowledge of how to do so are of great interest to me. There is, however, a necessary balance that must be found between constantly worrying over EQ frequencies and compression ratios and just actually making music. In my simplification quest I decided to not worry to much about the production side of things until I had some major song building blocks in place.

For this song I started by designing a kick in Attack using a sine wave oscillator for a mellower tone as this would be a down-tempo ambient piece. I was unable to resist the urge to rough up my beats, however, as I just love the sound of doing so, but at least the kick started life as a simple creature before I corrupted it. I then made a plinky sound, a noisy sound, and a hi-hat sound, and that was that. All the drums in the track are from the same 4 original sounds. The opening, minimal drums in the tune were a one-take-only 8 bar loop with input quantization applied. Simple to the point of simple-mindedness, they’re just setting the table for the loop that has been run through “Analogic Filter Box” that then runs through most of the rest of the song.

That drum loop was really the first major element I did for the song. I had the loop going then fired up “Analogic Filter Box” in Reaktor. I hadn’t use the AFB much before so I was looking forward to seeing what it could do. In terms of basic filtering it’s behind the curve in terms of sound-quality and ease of manipulation when compared to the Frantic filter that I have, yet it has a couple of features that Frantic doesn’t have – FM manipulation of the filter and some wicked-beyond-belief distortion. I dialed in some distortion and set the LFO to slowly sweep the cutoff and bounced down 32 bars of the drum loop. I EQed some of the resulting harshness in the mid to upper frequencies, but the loop still has a lot of bite, maybe too much for some people’s taste, lol.

Next step, bass. I loaded up Absynth and selected a bass preset to maybe get a ballpark starting position for a sound, as Absynth can take a little bit more work for sound design than other synths because of it’s envelope-heavy structure. Well, the bass preset was grooving pretty with my drum loop, so I just used the preset, it doesn’t get any simpler than that! I messed around with some chord progressions at this point but ended up scrapping them all, just having the bass play the same note for the entire track.

The low pad that drones in every 16 bars, that was actually just a one note deal I bounced down while sifting through for categorization purposes some Reaktor 5 user patches. I’d loaded up an ensemble called “MadPad,” played a note through it, and this was the first thing that came out. Padalicious, though I guess it was cheating as it wasn’t made only with Attack, Absynth, or Analogic Filter Box, lol.

All of the other synth parts came from the one bar part that you hear in the track. I made a waveform in Absynth by drawing in some descending odd harmonics somewhere between the range of a square and triangle wave, I reckon, than added some low-level even harmonics. All of the sound variations were made using a combination of delays in Absynth and FM filtering and distortion in Analogic Filter Box.

When it came to mixing, I quickly discovered that the bottom of the kick and the bass shared the exact same frequency range. Sound the newb alarm, lol. Taking the as-is approach I’d started, I simply filtered out a lot of the bottom end of the bass, which didn’t end up sounding too horrible, as it was a patch with a lot of harmonic content. When it’s all said and done, I don’t love how the bass ended up sounding, and may be a little loud in the first mix I’ve done.

All EQing was done with the Voxengo GlissEQ, as it does sound better to my ears than than the EQs that ship with your DAW. I also used the Voxengo Marquis compressor as heavily filtered sounds tend to need a lot of level-balancing compression. The bass and the soloed kick I also ran through Ozone 4, which I’d just purchased as an upgrade for a birthday present for myself. I did some quick and mostly ignorant mid/side processing just because I now could, lol.

For reverb I used the “Standard” reverb ensemble from the Reaktor 5 user library for close ambience (it’s a nice sounding reverb plug with fairly low cpu usage). I almost used another instance of “Standard” for the mid-distance reverb but ending up going with a dark-plate convolution preset from the “Perfect Space” plug-in that comes with Sonar producer (though I was indeed making the track in Live). Large/Hall reverb was done with the very nice sounding “Native Yardstick” reverb Reaktor 5 user ensemble.

I had 16 bar break in the middle of the song where the main resonant drum loop dropped out, but I didn’t like how it was sounding, so after bouncing the entire track to a stereo file I cut out the 16 bars and ran it through the Analogic Filter Box again gradually fading in the wet level, as well as a little bit of other automation. Swirly goodness, though it gets a bit heavy when the filter closes to it’s lowest point, lol. Oh well, I wasn’t going to labor over it, I certainly hadn’t labored much over anything else.

Then it was stuffed through the newly acquired Ozone 4 for mastering. I EQd out a little of the bottom end as the track has quite a bit of thump from the kick for being ostensibly an “ambient” track, lol. A little multi-band compression, a little harmonic sweetening, and then a little mucking about with the stereo imaging including some multi-band delay on the upper two bands. If your sounds are sounding a little too statically placed in the stereo field for your liking Ozone is great for quickly goofing up your sound in potentially pleasing ways. Some light loudness maximizing and a bounce to wave.

All in all, I think it’s a pleasant enough track. Not sure how I’d categorize it. Kind of ambient with maybe a bit of a Boards of Canada (no disrespect, lol) feel to it. Nothing earth-shattering, but this kind of music isn’t meant to be, but I think it has some interesting elements and I was glad to finish a track without laboring too much during the creative or mixing processes. I’m sure you fellow computer musicians can relate to the somewhat Herculean task that composing, mixing, and mastering a track completely by yourself can sometimes feel like.

Oh, and the title? I thought maybe I’d use a ghost motif for all the songs of the Attack, Absynth, Analogic Filter Box project. In Excel I made a little program to randomly select page number/locations in the dictionary for words, biographical names or geographical names, and “nutcase” was the first word I randomly selected.

[djgroovy]

Nice one. I heard it through the lousy laptop speakers so i won't say anything about the mix, but it sounds interesting.
Nice to read about the process too, it's true about having too many options.

[polyslax]

Nice track TechLo, I enjoyed it. Yes, it does have a hint of minimal BOC. Keep up the good work... shouldn't be too hard with football being over and all.