Trackers! A new way of thinking about music! For me, as a classically trained musician, my main purpose in studying electronic music is to make music from a new perspective.
Now, while I use scores and notes in my daily work as a choral conductor and arranger of choral music, I use piano-rolls when working with FLStudio. But FLStudio has, just like Finale, a horizontal workflow. Trackers, OTOH, work with vertical rows and with hexadecimal note-entries.
I have Buzz Machines, Madtracker and Renoise installed on My Computer, but until now they seemed very arcane to me. I thought I’d prefer Buzz Machines, because it is modular, like EnergyXT, and completely free. But: starting with #128, Computer Music publishes a monthly workshop “Totally Trackers”, working with Renoise. So now I’m getting the hang of it: here is a small and casual result, just to keep track of my own progress.
Another great monthly workshop I follow in CM – if time permits - is Scot Solida’s “Synth Esentials”. In #132 he explains how to make a plucked string patch in Oxe FM Synth, a great free VST plug-in. Great; until now I always used only the presets of my synths, but of course that’s not where a synth is made for.
In the meantime, I’m working on another project in FLStudio, but that’s not finished yet.
My opus 9 is inspired by Image Line’s Ogun synth, my newest addition to my VST collection.
I tinkered with the sounds and made two chord patterns, one in A minor and one in C major.
I also used the new synth Sawer, and some old friends, FLKeys, BooBass and Sytrus (for the guitar strumming at the end).
Now, the melody may seem a bit shallow, but thinking about it, it seems quite similar to some tunes written by the hero of my youth, Rick van der Linden, keyboard player of the Dutch group “Ekseption”. However, I’m now satisfied with the result, I invented everything myself, including the rhythm, and worked harder on the mix.
So here it is: my opus nine. Maybe I still haven’t reached the status of a mature composer, but I’ll keep trying.
Exceptional Synths [3:13m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download
It took quite a long time for me to make a new piece of electronic music. Learning new programs (Renoise, Finale), and too busy with earning €€€ are the main reasons for the delay, but last week I felt it itching again, so turned back to FLStudio and started with a simple beat. Then I tried the Sytrus synth and scanning the presets for a useful sound I found the “Gandalf” preset. That’s synchronicity, because this week my interest for Tolkiens work had a small revival.
So I created an ambient soundscape with some strange chords without any tonal relationship. Then I recycled the pattern in FL’s chord editor and arpeggiate tool. This – although simple – is a quite new technique for me, but it worked. Of course I wanted to try some more new features: I entered the chord sequence in Band-in-a-Box and let the soloist random-generate a solo melody. I copied the pattern and imported it in FL, with a Poizone (one of my favourite synths) preset.
Finally I turned to Tolkiens own reading (in Elvish) of his small poem “A Elbereth Gilthoniel” that I used earlier for other learning purposes. I chopped it up in 8 little parts and let the samples run via the OhMyGod Vocoder. You have to know it’s there to hear it.
Hm, not completely satisfied again; but I think you have to get easy on yourself when learning, I’m already thinking about my new masterpiece. This is it for now, and this blog is after all only for archiving my own learning process.
Gandalf - Opus 8 [6:09m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download
This month’s issue of Computer Music is really awesome! The magazine is worth the money not only for the content, but – most of all – for the goodies. Every month a new piece of software, usually a VST plugin. This month it is the Genesis. It’s a beast.:-)
Here you see it loaded in Energy XT, a DAW I’m still not fully comfortable with – but I keep trying. The other great synth – although I had to download it from the Web myself – is Robin Schmidt’s Straightliner, with a very cyberpunk-like GUI:
So I felt inspired – again – to make some music now with these two Sound Machines. On may 28th I fired up FLStudio and loaded the plugins. I baptized my opus 7-to-be “Genesis”, but I was not very lucky. First of all, it was difficult to find the sounds I wanted to hear, secondly the Straightliner took a lot of the CPU of my three-years old notebook, so FLStudio crashed after 20 bars or so, thirdly: I was working on another project as well, and last but not least: maybe I was not as inspired as I thought I was.
Four times I started over again, naming my “Unvollendete” simply “untitled.flp”. Today I did it. The best part is for the Genesis with the “Go-Techno”"preset, but there is also a very small melodic line for the Straightliner. No samples are used, everything derived from my own imagination 
My new piece. It’s called “Up and down” because first of all, after my eruption of inspiration, my inspiration went down and I had to struggle to finish my opus 6, which was built on a Rennaissance-like ostinato. Although I like my own Chord sequence, it was difficult to finish it, so I quit.
I’m not ashamed for my own failures, so here it is, however, it is not finished – and I doubt if It ever will be.
After two weeks of hating myself for not producing anything, I decided to take another viewpoint: I fiddled in Bram Bos’Tuareg 2.5, a program with some interesting synthesizer-features. After building eight up-and-down running themes with Tuareg’s Halo and Amber synthesizers, I exported them as samples and imported them in FLStudio.
Now I had a start and it was not difficult at all to compose the rest of the tracks, using some samples and the Sytrus and Poizone synths.
Of course, again, how long can you sustain a good idea? The beginning sounds very promising, but it is still difficult for me to keep the attention of the listener, at least to keep my own attention.
Whatever, my opus 6 is ready for the world.
After finishing my “Melancholy” – tune, I was filled with inspiration to make another one. This time it would be a more up-tempo work, so I chose “trance” as my genre – BPM 140.
Not that I ever attended a house party, but the project was, after two projects with only samples, and two projects with only own recorded MIDI, to make a “hybrid” piece with samples ánd own work.
So I used the Trance-template in FLStudio to get the project started and I loaded some samples from Computer Music # 120 DVD, which was entirely devoted to Trance, to get inspired – which was hardly necessary. With FL’s great synths Sytrus and Toxic I recorded some simple loops of my own.
The only weak spot is the rather unexpected reprise of the main theme after the breakdown – but after hearing it a few times you hardly notice it.
Probably I should invest a little more time to make the arrangement better fitting, and of course I should invest some time in the mix. But hey, most great composers destroy their first ten or eleven works, because they think these works are premature “after” they have’ve grown into real composers. So I still see my work as an exercise.
Enhanced Trance: better than the real thing? I wouldn’t pretend that; I think of it as “Trance without Hands” – there is still a lot to improve, but I think this is a piece of work that I still will be proud of after a few years.
Enhanced Trance [2:12m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download
