Hey friends,
I hope you’ve been well. Let me brief you on what’s up with myself.
I’m now three weeks into my course at Berklee Online and I’m learning tons of great information. I had to design a kick drum from scratch using Native Instrument’s Massive and that was hard, but a really cool experiment. Then I went ahead and designed an organ sound for something to do. I’m familiarizing myself with all the control in Massive. It’s a super deep program so it’ll take a while before I fully harness it’s ability. If you’d like to download my kick drum I made, click here. You will require Massive to open that file. Aside from designed kick drums, I’m also learning lots about sampling. I never really got into (external) sampling because I had such an extensive library of samples already but it’s pretty neat what you can do with recycled audio. It’s probably not a practice I’ll have a lot of use for in Poly Gecko but it’s a great lesson to learn nonetheless.
Aside from that, I’m working on a few new tunes. The Frost, Atoms, Arcade @ Midnight and Escapable. Atoms is going to be the coolest song I have so far I think. I’ve started to figure out exactly how to marry organic instruments and inorganic sounds. I want to share it so bad, but I want to make it presentable first and there’s much more work to be done. My friend and graphic designer James and nearly done our remodelling of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song. And it is almost nothing like the original. We dropped the tempo, but most notably dropped that driving bass line. We’ll be done recording parts by this Monday and then the mixing process shall start. Expect to see it in November sometime.
Also expect to finally see my remix of Joel Freck’s Take My Hand finished. Finally. Finally. Finally. I keep going back on it and making minor adjustments, but at some point it’s going to be released and it should be now. When I asked a friend if it sounded done, he quoted Leonardo Di Vinci by saying, “art is never finished; only abandoned”. And that’s exactly what I needed to hear.
What am I listening to currently? Well…
- Do Androids Dream by Andrew Bayer // This EP is just so deep, rich and well-produced. I must have listened to Tomorrow Boys roughly 100 times this last few weeks and I’m not remotely tired of it. I think this would be considered Trance music and if it is, it’s without doubt the very best Trance I’ve heard.
- In Rolling Waves by The Naked and Famous // Much like their previous album, Passive Me Aggressive You, this album is so dynamic. It can go from single piano notes, to a tsunami of guitars and drums. Often times when a mix is intentionally overdriven I have a hard time liking it, but this group and Sleigh Bells are the only two groups I’ve heard pull it off. Kudos to the engineers.
- Caracal by Disclosure // These two are rapidly becoming one of my favourite groups. Their combination of pop and techno and fat basses is #winning. Also, any group that features Lorde on a track gets an automatic A+ in my books. Their new stage setup is so cool, too. They each have a giant oval of a desk with synths, drums, guitars, software, etc and they actually play electronic music live instead of pressing play and walking away like a lot of other acts. Check out their performance at iTunes Festival from September because it’s the greatest.
Come party with me at Purity Ring at HPX next Saturday,
Ryan