The dawn of something new, perhaps?

And once again, for some reason Tumblr ate my queued post. Gotta try to remember what I wrote in the original...

So... yeah. I decided to go with the slow ramp intro instead of the arpeggiated one. Arpeggios have their place, but in this one, I think the slow build at the beginning works better.

I also spent most of the day before I uploaded this to bandcamp watching reviews of the new Korg Wavestate that was just released (and is, of course, far out of my current budget.) But even though I couldn’t afford it for the forseeable future. something about that quadruple layering of different sounds spoke to me. So I took all of the MIDI tracks for the original piece and started playing around... adding subtle ambient extra instruments to each one. Seeing what enhanced what, what help smooth out some of the harsher sounds, what added just a tiny bit of ambiance, or shimmer in right places. I actually chose wavetable based synths rather than straight synths for almost all of them. I ended up going through just about every preset in SampleScience’s Nostromo vst and in the end, only used about 5 of them.

Slow Motion - draft

I just noticed that I hit 5k subscribers sometime overnight. I’m kinda blown away. I wasn’t expecting to get this kind of response in this short time. I’m a little too introverted to really be any good at online engagement and actually reaching out to people. All I’m good at is putting myself out there and seeing who likes what they see. Well, hear mostly for this blog.

Today I delved a little out of the Neon Streets style I’ve been working in mostly to try and do something a little more sound-track/cinematic. I don’t have the space or money for much in the way of actual synthesizers, most everything I do is purely digital. If I label something as analog, it’s because I’m trying to make it sound like older analog synths, not because I actually have the equipment. This was another attempt at trying to capture that sound and feel. There’s a bit of odd mirroring, using purely digital technology, often cheap and free plugins which are the only ones I can afford, to imitate the more analog sounds of earlier sci-fi cyberpunk soundtracks... that were trying to sound more digital and synthetic than most soundtracks of the time.

I did take a little bit of inspiration from my Neon Streets series, and I used two sets of synths for every instrument and layered them together in different ways. One track will fade from one instrument to the other. Another uses filters to slowly lessen the effect of one or both throughout. Some lean more towards the right channel while their counterpart leans towards the left. All in all, I was trying to use what I’ve learned while doing this blog to make something deep and rich, without having the sounds blend together into a muddy mess. And in spite of Acid crashing halfway through the first draft and losing a few minutes of my work (I thought the entire hour or so I’d already put in was lost until I found the backup file it had saved before it glitched up), I think I made something halfway decent by the end.

Scored a near-perfect 1989 Kawai K4 digital synthesizer for a decent price. Decent because there is no audio out of the left channel. Turns out, after probing at it incessantly with a scope and meter, that the volume slider is missing a carbon trace.

Like... it's just completely gone.

Thank god Kawai still has all their legacy manuals scanned and on their website in the support section, including the service manuals.