Nude Remix, Session 2

Long week with bits and pieces of work done here and there.

I bailed on driving to Vallejo to buy a second Kimball Caravan organ on Saturday and spent the time instead working on the Nude Remix.

I have now spent about 6 hours total on this project. And I'm ready to stop and get back to the MBO vs. AKS Autopilot project.

I'll be heading back out to the Theosophy center on Thursday for more mayhem and will likely emerge with a CD of sounds in hand.

But I still need to mix nude a bit more. here's a teaser of what's in motion:

Nude Remix Rough #1


Be happy. Goodbye.

Nude Remix, Session 1

We headed up North this weekend with a friend from Germany to show him the mountains, Lassen Volcanic park, a mountain bar, etc.

Nice weekend, nice weather. Still lots of snow, but things are warming up.

Today, we visited Hog Lake Plateau in the foothills, a lake that appears for about 6 months per year, and saw the blossoming spring flowers, a few snakes, and a family of white swans.

In Red Bluff, we stopped by the "chicken lady" to pick up some pastured eggs, and spent some time with the hundreds of heirloom birds, guided by a calico cat who neither seemed bothered by the birds nor seemed to bother them.

We fed a tortilla to the alien eyed goats for good measure.

This all got me itching to work on something and the Radiohead nude remix that's been on the music blogs got the better of me.

Back in the city, with the whole crew asleep, I spent $6 and a good 2 hours cutting up the "stems" and wasn't inspired by anything except for the "string fx etc" stem and vocals. I cut them into a bunch of little chunks. 2 main string loops ended up being basis of the remix. I found one optigan drum beat that fit right in with these and that beat goes without any variation the whole time, supported only by a shaker loop from a MBO session. It has a Ghost Dog vibe.

Pretty simple.

Wistful optigan powered pop. Look for a clip in a few days.

AKS vs MBO Recording Session Vol. 4

Thursday night, I made the weekly trek out to West Oakland and recorded some bits for a new song: Anjuna.

This is a different type of song for MBO. They call it a bit CSN. For sure, it's got a smooth and folksy little vibe about it. It even has female background vocals.

Basically, the main progression is C Maj7 - D over an A pedal tone. I played rhythmic wurli throughout and then worked on a rhodes part with glock on top for the bridge, which created a nice moment.
There're no vocals yet, so let's see what turns it takes over the next week.

Before we recorded, they also played me the current state of Aphid, which I totally dig. They added lots of weird sounds over the last week: ebows, treated musical boxes, weird samples. Aphids. Sweet.

After the session, I kept them up late again, dissecting Anjuna and re-dissecting Aphid for the new parts.

Craig also included some extremely cool textures he created with an 8 string bass through heavy pedal action. These textures go into Autopilot as is. They're perfect.

The project raw file directory is growing, and now I get to paint some sound and tweak. It's starting to get interesting.

AKS vs MBO Recording Session Vol. 3

True to their word, the good folks at optigan.com indeed sent me a free update to the Optigan sampler disc I purchased several years ago.

And it's a great update.

Now, not only do I have WAVs of each of the original samples (which I had to hand edit once I had extracted them from their crappy Akai-formatting wraper), I also have a bunch of new Chamberlin RhythmMate samples, which are extremely cool.

These samples played on strips of tape that fall against tape play heads, much like a Mellotron.

I loaded up a bunch of these into Acid last night and came up with 2 new rhythm tracks. I tend to let things be straight for a while and then start apply subtle effects with envelopes to add some flavor and change up the pace where needed. Again, AutoPilot will apply its own magic as well.

Another cool thing about the Optigan CD is that it has the original artwork from every disc, as well as several brochures in PDF format which are ripping. The Optigan was a real product with marketing dollars behind it and it was marketed to people who weren't musicians.

Push a button!

AKS vs MBO Recording Session Vol. 2

I hung out with MBO last night and got to listen to the progress made on 2 new songs ("James Pain", "Aphid").

Last week, I had recorded some piano, farfisa, and a crazy sounding solo for "James Pain". Last night I heard the final version of that song, vocals and all. Ripping!

Then, we recorded keyboards for "Aphid", a strange but cool anthem-like song about, uh, Aphids. We layed down harmonium and piano passes and tweaked them through a Boomerang. (Boomerangs rule!) Next, we recorded several different parts using the classic MBO palette of piano, glock, celeste.

Good, clean fun.

Then, I made Adam and Craig stay up and we dissected both of these songs for use with the new AutoPilot project. It was midnight by the time I got home, but I couldn't help myself and took some of the vocal tracks and a Boomerang-warped piano file and started experimenting with TimeFreeze. Wow! The results were almost completely removed from the source and resulted in a huge pulsing soundscape. Weird. Awesome.

I need to read the manual and learn how to work with this app, but I can tell right now we're gonna be friends.

AKS vs MBO Recording Session Vol. 1

I kicked off the AKS vs MBO AutoPilot project on Sunday night messing with beats. I created the makings of 2 tracks, both heavily relying on free samples from Goldbaby Productions:

1) Tape 606 Six pack (TR606 recorded to an Ampex 1/2")
2) The Cassette 808 (TR808 recorded onto a cassette)
3) Vinyl Clicks

I built up basic beats straight into Acid and then applied some Audio Damage tweakage (Replicant and Ricochet). I always have to keep myself from tweaking too much, as morphing will occur within AutoPilot as well.

During the evening, I also purchased TimeFreezer, based on hearing game composer Troels Folmann's recent snippet on the Create Digital Music Blog. Basically, it “freezes” samples of sound as an effect or instrument, seamlessly extending moments to create an ambient wash. I was slightly bummed to not be able to download immediately, but that probably kept me from staying up until 2 in the morning.

On Tuesday this week, I'll be out in West Oakland with MBO and will start grabbing raw files from our recent recording sessions.

29 Days becomes 52 Weeks

They're back. Friends Chris and Derek and others couldn't stop at 29 days and are evolving their song-a-day project to a song-a-week project.

Derek has again beat the others to the punch by writing the theme song. These guys just can't be stopped! Kudos.

Check it out.