I recently finished and uploaded these tracks from this past winter.

 

I started getting back into electronic music production around November and mostly wrote these in December and did the bulk of the production in January.

I wasn’t going to post them as I didn’t think they turned out that great, but I figured it’s better to get into the habit of finishing tracks and posting regardless of the outcome. So I put them on Soundcloud and a couple of them got a decent number of likes and a couple reposts just from the algorithm.

I think 3 of the 4 songs have guitar parts recorded and I plan to continue to keep the guitar element going forward as much as possible. As well, for the most part the harmony is fairly interesting, in particular, I think Aqua Meridian has cool chord progression with some subtle interesting key changes, and the B section is a nice compliment to it.

The last tune has some tunes open triad inversion stuff which has a nice vibe to it. I’ve been working on those voicings on guitar quite a bit the past while, and they are a great way to get some mileage out of simple major scales and chords. They are also great for voice leading to modulate to different keys.

Beats wise, there’s a few things that i found interesting and worked out decently, though there’s a few aspects I think could be improved upon in the future.

Anways, working on some new tracks now! 🙂

Sumer – KasparTORN // Psudaform Remix

I had the opportunity to remix this great track Sumer by Estonian musician and Chapman Stick player KasparTORN.

I’ve always found remixes a bit awkward, though I found the progressive rock leanings were sort of familiar territory, and as well, it’s always fun to mess around with some altered time signatures.

The original is in 5/4, though I made a breakdown that is in 4/4, and then the outro is in 9/4. Bitwig seemed to handle mapping the time signatures quite well, and compositionally is probably a bit better than Reaper for working on ideas in the clip view with different time signatures before have to commit them to a timeline.

I put together this little auto-mute device in Bitwig to cut the sound if the audio gets too loud. I was experimenting with some feedback loops the other day and at one point got blasted with some pretty loud sounds by accident, so I can throw this on the master and with will cut the sound immediately if it gets above 0db.

It’s fairly simple, it just tracks the amplitude and compares the input level to a 0db signal, and if it gets above 0, it creates a 1 value. The 1 is then flipped to a 0 with a NOT module and the amplitude of the original signal is multiplied by it. So basically as long as the amplitude is below 0db the signal passes through, and if it gets above 0db, the signal gets cutoff.

It’s nice to have the logo/icon all finished up. I’m still having a little trouble getting the masking on the vector file to line up perfectly with the circle, but it’s good enough for now. It already took me a solid 3 hours in Inkscape learning how to get the basics for a decent export.

Anyway, I think it’s looking good and now I can use it across all my profiles and sites. As well, I have the wordmark too which I think looks quite good, though I haven’t exported it yet so I won’t post it for now.

I put together a basic monochrome color pallet with an accent, so I’m going to run with that for now. I’ll spend some more time on the graphics in the future, though for now I’m glad to just have a working icon and I can dial things in more as I go.

I’m interested to see how I can use the icon for some audio processing. I’m going to do some experiments as I’m pretty sure I can use it as a wavetable for syntheses and also as a wavetable for lfo’s and for the wavetable filter – which should be really cool.

So I think that will be pretty cool to explore. I’ll do a post with some examples and experiments for sure. I have an idea the the left side semi-circle will be not so great for a filter or wavetable, but I think if I interpolate the lines with the semi-circle, I can get some pretty interesting waveforms and wavetables.

So I’ve written about 4 versions of the songs now based on this ascending Major 7th chord. The original was written for solo violin and was just a little study. Then I wrote an extended version for guitar, flute and violin for a performance when I was teaching in Saskatoon.

Last fall when I was playing at the open mics I revamped it and did a whole different middle section.

And then this winter I was messing around with the melody and wrote a different version and then put it together in Bitwig.

So I’m getting started transcribing some of the orchestral music I wrote between 2019-2022. I’d like to put some of it onto guitar for Psudaform tracks, or as well take it from orchestral instrumentation and put it into synthesizers. I had a short track I did that for a couple months ago for an experiment and I thought it turned out pretty cool.

I think this next one could be cool to check out. It’s based on moving fifths around and is in a 5 meter. I’ll export the midi and put it in Guitar Pro and transcribe it for guitar.

Going forward, for the time being, the website will be primarily a blog. I think this is a good direction where I can post ideas, experiments and will be an interesting way to document my progress.