06 - Brute power!

My minibrute has arrived. Have had a few different sessions on it. Has some serious chunkified sounds and very fun to explore. Looking forward to many hours tweaking this puppy. Whilst I was waiting I also hunted down the mini v plugin, an emulation of the 1970 analogue synth the 'minimoog'. Also has some tasty sounds.

To be continued...

05 - Experimentation

So was still undecided, confused, which direction to go. At the moment I have decided to experiment without any real idea of where I am going. Scary but it seems the right way to go at the moment. I am trying different methods, a lot of sound sampling e.g beatboxing, woodwind, harmonica... recording single sounds and then mapping them on the keyboard, then creating rhythmic patterns. I have also been letting loose with the plugin effects in protools, seeing what I can acheive. I am still waiting for my Minibrute, though I have found a vst of the Minimoog which is prooving to be a nice selection of sounds to mess with. To be continued...

04 - New hardware...

So I bought the Arturia Minibrute, waiting for it to arrive. I didn't intend it to happen, or forsee it, it just kinda happened. I was suddenly overwhelmed to have something I could touch and tweak that was'nt software. I woke and realised... "I need a fucking synth!". I knew that old original analogue synths were pricey, though I was shocked to see how pricey. But yeah it seems that they can provide tones that digital plugins just cant quite emulate. So yeah, see how it goes.

I also listened to 'Dark Side of the Moon' and then the next day 'Kid A'.... they both were a tasty ride!

03 - Researching plugins

So more about researching sound, manipulating sounds, new ideas, hardware, software. I don't really know how all this happened, I think it is just a need or a want to have a good overall sound. Create something fresh and unique. After looking into iphone apps, then protools plugins, then I became interested in hardware, something with a lot of knobs, sliders, pads, buttons that I can either run samples through or just tweak existing sounds. After a bit of research I found that all the old analogue stuff is way expensive and so far I can't see anything modern that isn't flashing light sampler loop things. I was also inspired but the ableton push but i'm not sure if thats what I want.

So after not finding the hardware that I wanted I then went back into looking at software plugins... I found a pretty decent synth oscillator which I can run .wav files through and tweak with all sorts of dials etc... I also started the morning experimenting with a rig of hardware that I do have, I ran my iphone with sampler wiz > boss loop station > distortion pedal > wah wah pedal... was interesting, although after a few attempts I found myself returning to the loop 'slicer' effect and was getting a bit repetitive....

Anyways, see what happens...

Peace!

* All started by watching this youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtaI8hqZzi0
I wanted to figure out how he assigned sounds to the pads. Researching this was what triggered the rest of the research.

02 - Listening

Was pretty inspired by a song By and By, heard it on fbi. Fresh sound, sampling, overall good stuff. Have been listening to music pretty closely, not intentionally. I'm finding it hard to listen to music without thinking about my upcoming recording process. I have decided to just keep listening to albums that come to mind. Will post the album covers of which ones I choose.

Also, i've realised for some reason I expect to get everything right the first time. I have to wake up and realise I have a lot to learn and not be afraid to try and fail. I have 34 weeks approx to do this. I just got to let go and just bloody try. Anyways... peace!

01 - In the Beginning....

Have entered this year with a clear idea. The 'clarity' quickly faded after week 1 presentation. After a bit of clarifying I got the green light to go ahead with what I wanted to do. Throughout writing the songs I was getting clues on how the recorded sound would be, though I always had in mind to be more experimental with the whole process. After watching a youtube recently of a guy demonstrating live beats/scratches using an axiom midi keyboard, I was inspired to figure out how he did it. After some unsucessful attempts through protools I had the idea to see what iphone apps were capable of. I found some decent ones with some decent potential and I feel I can incorporate some of them into my work. Then I started researching for protools plugins that have what I need e.g placing samples of my choice and allocating them to the pads so I can play them, with velocity control. I found a couple with good potential.

 Through all this researching I feel it has left me with a new outlook. The thought of now just recording straight guitar songs with a bit of fancy bits here and there isnt exciting to me. A new approach is necassary and I am open to diving into a new realm of sounds/experimenting/bleeping/glitching etc... Peace!