At the start of 2020 I made a resolution to record 52 songs during the year, just for the fuck of it. I used to play music all the time, and between about 2003 and 2011 I played live two or three times a week, every week, in one or other of 3 different bands as well as by myself. Then I had a kid with someone who turned out to be an abusive sociopath (oops) and that basically hurt so much that I just stopped playing completely, even drums.
Fast forward to 2019 and I had started to heal and even write the odd lyric again. I decided to buy a portastudio .. turns out that word really means something nowadays!
So to get to the point, me and my Zoom R24 are happily engaged and have so far this year produced 47 offspring. Some is brand new, some is remakes of old material, but I'm happy to have rediscovered the music I lost inside for so long.
I may not make it to 52 songs because of an unexpected (but excellent) turn of events that has left me with much less spare time than I've had for most of the year .. but I think I will reach 50.
This was one from May. It was done in collaboration with my old band Commie Faggots in response to that 'clap for the carers' shite during Lockdown Alef.
Feel free to dig through the music but I may well post again later because I'm quite pleased with this year's work...
...and I know I've been away a while, life's been really hard. But at least I have my music back.
Cheers etc x
(Apologies for using Reverbnation, I see most links on this thread are Soundcloud but I have too much music to keep it there. SC has a 'total' limit on uploads, whereas RN has an 8Mb limit per song. My songs are usually 3-4 mins long, but there are a lot of them, so RN works better for me)
Anyway. Clap for the working class!
anti-fantasy by mojo pixy | ReverbNation
anti-fantasy, a Alternative album by mojo pixy on ReverbNationwww.reverbnation.com
Would love to hear what peeps think of this?
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You mean more fills?Sounds good. But I kinda want the drums louder and more of a real kit funk sounding thing to carry it all. Batter bing, batter, splish, sploshy sorta thing.
Do bear in mind that it's not mixed because I have no fucking clue how to mix. If anyone can point me to an education on that, i'd be grateful. Youtube is full of contradictory clips ("don't forge to smash that like button")
Thanks for listening
Thanks for listening.I listened to your tunes, it was clear they weren't finished (I mean, when is anything 'finished'? at some point you just have to draw a line and say 'enough' - especially IMO with abstract-ish electronica) but there are some nice ideas and you should definitely do more, and post more here!
To be honest, there are as many ways to mix a tune as there are people who try. In the end I think the only real guide is your ears - can you hear everything, are sounds separated across the L-R and front-back 'space', is the bass full, will the trebles give listeners a headache? Do the sounds clash, or work together? (IMO sometimes you need two 'voices' playing the same thing, then mix them together into something your module doesn't have). Essentially: what do you want your music to sound like?
I do recommend using actual live drumming loops, sometimes really low in the mix, or EQ'd to oblivion - but even at that level they add a certain 'humanity' to quantized beats. You can also chop them to pieces with a sampler and use them as a 'kit' for real drum sounds.
Finally, mastering is important. You can just sign up to use Landr if you want (it works pretty well), but again, the options are many and varied (as are the costs!)
(Personal note: I recently remastered (in part using Landr fwiw) some electronic music I made 20-odd years ago and it actually sounds pretty good, considering it's all been compressed down to 128kbps at some time...)
Thanks for listening.
About half the tunes on there are finished, compositionally (until I decide to tinker). It's just they need mixing. Tbh there's probably way too much going on in those, most have around 20 arts in total.
My goal is to write about an album's worth of stuff, then mix it, then stick it on bandcamp or something. If i'm very lucky I might get a couple of quid if I say pay what you want/£1. But that's a ways off and probably pie in the sky
I'm going to need some decent cans to mix though, which I don't currently have. I'm just using my desktop headphones which I know driop some high frequencies. What you listen to is probably more shrill than it ought to be!
As for loops. I'm more into using analog synths as percussion sources right now. I have a decent linn drum vst called Djinndrum. I also have the Korg M1 vst but actually I use that a lot less than I thought. I'm not big on using real drums. I actually think if you're going to do percussion electronically it's best to keep it simple and not try emulating real drums. YMMV of course.
Thanks for taking the time to listen. Soundcloud is weird; there are lots of people who message you wanting you to submit your track to them. Presumably there's money to be made there for them.
PS: nice track!
ThanksReal Drums may not be quite what I meant, I would include any percussion - the point is some 'rhythmic component' in the mix which is actually played by a person. It can be pencils on a table really when all that's wanted is a groove, but sometimes it's easier to just play it (or sample it) than to spend ages tweaking Shuffle on a machine to get the best swing. But anyway that's going to depend on what effect you want; some electronic music doesn't benefit from a 'human' feel at all.
Blending sounds or spacing them by using EQ / reverb, placing them L-R / front-back or keeping them central, getting the relative volumes right in the overall sound - that's all mixing is. Then, mastering is something to do once the mix is right - but there are perfectly good free options for that, so it's not a headache even if it sounds arcane.
It's all great for getting no sleep
thank you .. an awful lot ofdrugshard work went into that .. music
Here's a little song I wrote to go with an existing folk whistle tune:
It's very silly
More terrifying music from films that shouldn't exist that aren't called Scanners.
(I'm not actually a fan of horror movies at all, but Scanners is a good film that definitely should exist. Gideon Black was an NPC created for an RPG I ran in the beforetimes)