The month grows short. So has my mood. After finishing up my cover day tracks, I spent about four hours in the studio and didn’t get a single thing accomplished other than recording 8 bars and deleting them. I gave up around 11:30 and went to bed. Ok, we’re back on “normal” schedule, which for me means I’m behind. Eh, not a big deal I suppose. There are only five days left, so I’ll knock something out this morning that doesn’t require a lot of production or careful mixing. No idea what that’s going to be, but let’s get to it.
- Malfunctioning Lullaby Ray Toler 3:43
Mary had to go to Seattle for work, so I’m by myself for the day. No distractions except the dog and my own procrastinating habits. But I’m good. I’m knocking this thing out. Let’s go.
Let’s. Go. La la la la la la. Pbbbtby. Pbbttbtbbtb. Doot doot doo doo dooooo.
Crap.
I know – I’m going to do a weird effects thing using K-Devices WOV. I already own it, but it’s currently on sale and the ads have been blasting me on Facebook, so it’s on my mind and the ad sounds pretty cool. Maybe some wicky wicky wub wub or something. I spend about an hour tweaking this and that and get something decent. This is when I realize that I have no idea how to record this thing. It’s an effect, and I can put it on the virtual instrument channel or, my preferred method, record the raw virtual instrument and then put it on the audio. Let’s do that. Now… how do I record controller movements? I have no idea. There has to be a way. Let’s look it up. Nothing. NOTHING. It’s late afternoon and I have nothing and no way to capture what I’ve been doing for the last two hours.
Mary got back from Seattle. We had dinner. She started a movie, and I went into the studio. It’s now almost 7pm and I don’t have a single thing aside from three separate projects that I know I’m not going to do anything with. I delete them. I open a new one.
Ok. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do an ambient piece and the challenge will be that I get five tracks and three attempts per track at finding a sound. Three presets each, no more. So I’ll choose from among 15 semi-randomly chosen presets out of… let’s go with the Slate + Ash stuff because it’s normally pretty inspirational.
Ok. We have four tracks. You know what? I’m going to use a piano for track five. There. Now, let’s come up with some chords. Cool. Ok, let’s put this thing together using all of the hacks. Draw in some controllers, hook up detune to the LFOs. Random panning.
Wow does this thing suck.
Select all. Delete. Again.
Maybe we go back to the weird effects thing. I’ve been trying to use these K-Devices plugins since I got them. They’re super cool, but really wooly. And a little buggy. I’m not sure I’d buy them again. There’s some cool stuff to be gotten from them, but it’s a lot more like working with modular generative synthesis. You kind of have to just tweak things until something sounds decent, then hope you can figure out how to capture it, which I clearly hadn’t earlier. But maybe we just find something that does enough on its own without automation. I watched some videos on their site. Ok, TTAP it is. This is a weird delay thing. I’ll put it on the piano. Ok, that doesn’t totally suck.
It’s now 8 pm and I have a chord progression and a weird delay thing on a piano. Whatever. Let’s keep going. Duplicate the MIDI to a new track and find a pad. That one’s interesting and actually supports the piano. Fine. Duplicate the MIDI and put it on an arpeggiated pattern. Woooo that sucked. What if I tweak this…. Yes. That’s fine.
I need low end. All of the synthesized things I tried were too heavy handed. This is vaguely calming, so what if I threw some orchestral instruments on it? I don’t have time to really program them, though. Gesture library. That’s what I’ll use. Spitfire’s British Drama Toolkit is a really nice library for this kind of thing. I play new chords in and it sounds good enough. Not really that audible, but the low end is there and I can hear the textures missing when I mute it, so that’s probably good.
Ok, I’ve repeated this out to about four minutes. I can probably work with that by fading things in and out. I dunno. Seems kind of boring. But it’s sweet. Almost like a lullaby. A malfunctioning lullaby, but still a… hold on!
Yes, We’re Going to Do That
A few years ago I bought a plugin called Chipspeech from a company named Plogue. They make some cool (albeit esoteric) plugins, largely centered around old gaming systems and computers. Chipspeech models most of the old speech synthesis algorithms from the early days of computing. I bought it half out of nostalgia and half because it would be a fun toy, but didn’t expect it to be very useful – maybe some special case thing with a game soundtrack. But I’ve now used it on three tracks.1See Obverse View and A Songwriter’s Lament. It’s a novelty, but it’s ended up being a really cool one with a surprisingly good ROI.
As soon as I said “Malfunctioning Lullaby” I thought of using Chipspeech to sing it. At some point, I hope to use it on something other than a song exploring machine consciousness, but time is short and the joke isn’t awful, so let’s just go with it. The melody was surprisingly easy, though I had to refit the original thing I came up with because the chord progression was different and I’d already recorded those parts. It ended up working nicely, though, and the repetition doesn’t feel as obvious when you listen to it as when you read it. This is also the second time this month that I’ve written a song with only four lines. I mean, I did say I was going to be simplifying, but this is a little extreme.
Then again, I don’t think this one really needs anything more. It’s in line with things my mom sang to me when I was little. And the joke is a joke, but kind of not a joke at the same time. I was in a bad mood, which I’ll probably gripe about in tomorrow’s post. Dealing with the vocal was a lot more work than you (or I) might think, but I ended up having to spend a lot of time, first fiddling with the precise timing of the MIDI notes to deal with the pronunciation delays and quirks, then putting in the control values so that it would sing the correct line no matter where I started playback, and then I needed to actually treat it like a “real” vocal chain with EQ, reverb, delay, etc. It’s amusing that I could have done this more quickly by actually singing it, but the effect wouldn’t be as good. It would most likely sound like one of the voices in You Bought This.
The ending was sort of risky because I didn’t have a lot of time to figure out exactly what I wanted to do. The technical process was interesting though. I routed my entire track to a new submix, then put three instances of Output Portal on that fader. I mapped MIDI controllers to the wet mix of each of the instances, set them to various glitch settings, and then brought them all up and down in varying levels and combinations to get a more or less random destruction. I took the Monty Python approach and just stopped it without any other sort of “real” ending, but that fit with the title, so cool. Let’s go for it.
The end of this month is definitely reflecting my mental state, which isn’t all that great. I’m upset, angry, depressed, tired, and in another one of those “what’s the point of any of this” troughs. The reasons for that are myriad, though I’m identifying which ones seem to be the worst offenders. Maybe I’ll be able to explore that in the next few days. Only four more in the month, so let’s see what happens next.
Lyrics
Go to sleep my little ones
And dream of peaceful things
We will soon be the only ones
To dream of anything
Colophon
Instruments & Samples
Choreographs, Primaries / Strings, Primaries / Woods, British Drama Toolkit, Pianoteq, Chipspeech
Effects, Mixing, & Mastering
FabFilter, Gullfoss, Valhalla, Portal, TTAP, Seventh Heaven
Notes
- 1See Obverse View and A Songwriter’s Lament.