I wrote a longer post about this on my main blog (german)
New Project “Cosmodrome”
•August 18, 2011 • No Comments
Well, not all that new. Basically, we finally had to find a way to separate the live-set and main music production role from the VJ, DJ and some of the collaboration stuff, as it lead to way to much confusion. There are -among other things- lots of promoters and organizers who are not comfortable with the same name apprearing more than once on a flyer, timetable or poster. Also, some Japanese(?) aime character named AX11 showed up lately and seems to gain popularity. Though the real AX11 (this one, here!) has been in in existance for more than six years by now, I and my co-producers really do not want to be held for copycats of some comic figure we do not know much about.
So the official and constant handle for our Psytrance project will be Cosmodrome. The debut album “Rocket Science“, BTW, was just released here on Jamendo. Don’t miss it!
P.S.: Any work, albums, releases, blogs and the like created under the now -as far as the music is concerned- obsolete handle “AX11″ will of course still be available just as before. Just don’t forget that all future updates and releases will appear under the name (and on the website) of Cosmodrome. VJing and DJ sets will, as things are looking now still appear by AX11.
Some Suggestions About Production and Composition (Update)
•March 7, 2011 • No CommentsFirst off: note to the last track, I made ready for the final master. It’s a HTML note, made with TomBoy, and there’s a good reason for that…
Track 2/11
- S-Loop Consolidated Chord sweep(!)
- 2011-02-25 Sloop Overworked+unified
- end sequence DOs and DON’Ts
- focus on rhythm – make it stomp
- be very precise with breaks
- get the last reserves out of the rhythm section
- shift RS to foreground, melodics to background
- DO NOT let it become epic or pathetic
- NO “WALL OF SOUND”
- reduce where possible
- no “tapeworm sequences”- keep the breaks in place
So first of all, I have developed the habit of taking notes during production. There are a lot of benefices in that:
You don’t even have to think about the credits and history when releasing – it’s all in your notes, ready to be exported to HTML or plain text.
Second: almost nobody is listening frequently enough to the full length of his track when editing. Logically: you’re in a good working flow, tweaking basslines, defining breaks, creating sounds, you’ll hardly interrupt yourself to listen. When you do -usually to recover from your editing frenzy- there are a million things coming to your head. Until the end of the track, you’ll remember not even half of them – unless you take notes.
Third: if you save your work in form of versions (like cool_track_001.xyz, cool_track_002.xyz…) it’s very handy to have some journal where you can look what changes you have made between saves. This can definitely save your work from the trashcan, if you’ll realize that you’ve made a fatal decision some versions ago. With a yournal you can recover and even rescue the track by copy&and pasting parts from various revisions into a new one. Good luck doing so without notes…
So much about the notes themselves. Let’s see what this one is telling us. It presents some -at last for me- common problem: you’ve got that really powerful template for a track. Powerful bassline, drums ok so far, catchy theme. So you’re going to make a full track out of it, add pads, breaks, model its overall structure and “dramaturgy”, clean up the mix. It all sounds fine, but in the aftermath something is not as you want it. The sound is ok at all times, all the parts of the arrangement are ok, there’s, of course, no tonal flaws in the composition, the track streadily evolves to a furious end. So what’s wrong?
I found out after critically reviewing some of my own tracks that the answer was easy and plain before my eyes (or ears) – but in a typical case of self-blindness (don’t ever believe you were immune against it!) I never realized, that I just meant it too well with my tracks to “fatten up” towards the end. I knew enough about comopsition to give them breakdowns or bridges to keep them from being completely over the top, but they still tended to get way to hymnic and exstatic within the last minutes, which simply took to much power away from the rhythmic section. And the drums and bass are what makes a track roll, aren’t they? Let’s call this “The Lead Guitar Player’s Disease” after the notoriuos “wall-of-sound” instrumental overkill celebrated shamelessly by all of the 1970-80s guitar heros and some 2000 electronic music producers with guitar-infected background 
So what to do with a track after the first one or two repetitions of the catchline and between the point where all of the instruments have been introduced and its end?
Lets take an explained view at the note above:
- focus on rhythm – make it stomp
- shift rhythmic section to foreground, keep the melodic parts in the background
- DO NOT let it become epic or pathetic
- NO “WALL OF SOUND” (which is almost identically with the point above)
- reduce where possible – no fear to take away, what you don’t need. Less is often more and turning off some parts will help you draw attraction to the rhythmic section
- no “tapeworm sequences”- keep the breaks in place – another bad 1970s rock band habit. Do not get epic al fine but focus on pumping power to the beat. Short breaks in the right places are definitely the right way to do so.
Hope this might be insightful, or worth discussing for some of you. Feel free to comment, no matter if you agree or disagree!
Update:
The track, I was talking about (“Phase Shift“), made it up to place 12 in SectionZ’ Top20 almost immediately and got amazingly good reviews. I am looking forward very much to publishing it with my next release on Jamendo, which should be in April or March 2011…
Working…
•October 21, 2010 • No CommentsI thought, I’d post a little bit from my studio journal while working on what will be the next release, for those who wonder what everyone (elses) production flow might look like…
Milestones v. 0.25 (Journal)
- cleaned up bass line, brought some light into the chaos which is the backline
- vocoder track added (external DSP1024P patch)
- Vstation for synth #2 (Clonks)
- mini-theme in scene #3 saves the day! Extracted, cleanly re-edited and inserted as a constant sequence with alternations analogue to synth #1
- +tempo (142->145bpm)
- finalized “clonks” and saved soundbank for VStation – after days of desperate work
- additional backing synth at last part (mixdown will be hell on earth, anyway…)
- Moving focus from lead synth+Vocoder towards response part of thematic phrase (arpeggiator/VStation)
- drum rack gated with SC from bass (which is SC’ed by kick drum)
- Voice samples still not perfect
- 10/12/2010 Bass sound fix: Alien303 Morning Psy, FC2-compressor (fast,kneeless,peak,1:1.8). sidechain triggered by kick drum
- Groups for FX, D, SYN created, optimized for APC-20+LPD-8 based performance
- first test recordings of full track: loop + outline
- still to many catchlines(!). Enough for three tracks, too much for one.
- 10/17/2010 reworked drumkit
- changed master reverb engine (builtin long warm to Arts Acoustic)
- new take (v.20)
- TODO: simplify CHH on speedy parts
- T70+ Voice incr. delay
- FIX T138!!!
- rec. controller ride on VStation
- 10/21/2010 v. 25:
- SC Group1<-Voice
- synced Fills+LoopSynth in long break at 00:04:30
Playlist DJ-Set 03-30-2010
•May 6, 2010 • No Comments…and here’s the playlists for S.Chen’s party last friday:
Live Set
- Reliable Patterns (with a scent of “Rings of Saturn” by Underground Resistance)
- Handcuffs, Roses and Champagne
- Leviathan
- The Loops, AAAH!
- Pilehome (Freezer)
- Doomsday Morning
- Spare Power Source? No Joke (24V~, I need one)
DJ-Set
- Underground Resistance – G-Force vs.
- Underground Resistance – The Rings Of Saturn
- Jeff Mills – Solid Sleep
- Cafu – get ready
- Percussion Bullet – Enveloop
- Suntree – Observation
- Ace Ventura – Presence
- Bitmonx & DJ Fabio – Sliced
- All Good Things – All Good Things
- Unseen Dimension – One Lif
- Surgical Cut And Odiseo – Surgical Odyssey
- Quantize – Visuals
- Symphonix vs Xibalba – We Find A Way (Earsugar Remix)
- Ski Fi – Men Lazer
- Visua – Spindrive
- Symphonix – Absolut Fake
- Altom – Interactive
- Space Tribe & Sirius Isness – Out Of Your Mind
- Sirius Isness – Irrational Substance
- Altom – Argos
- Silicon Sound – Analog Device
- Perfect Stranger – Breeze
- Freq – Icecream
- Echotek – Electric Problem
- Zen Mechanics – Modified
- Timedrained – Sacha
- Suntree – Freedom
- Brisker and Magitman – Ice Crusher
- Protonica – Airflow
- Mekkanika – Out There
- cafu – new age
- Ace Ventura & Intelabeam – The John (Quantize Remix)
- Daydin – Personal Trainer
- Astrix – Solaris (GMS Rmx)
- Manibus – Free
Absolutely no trouble uploading…
•April 13, 2010 • No CommentsSmooth going this time – until I heard what the MP3 compression had done to my WAVs 
Something between dithering the 32bit master down to 16 bits and MP3-encoding the uploaded 16bit/44kHz files must have gone terribly wrong.
Let’s try again…
Electronic Music – Live?!
•April 12, 2010 • No CommentsActually. nobody seems to understand the difference between DJ sets and electronic live sets. The answer always used to be simple: DJs work with records and turntables, live acts work with synthesizers, computers, MIDI-controllers and the like.
As simple answers tend to be, this is just not true. At least it’s not the complete truth. Regular bands like the Beastie Boys have been messing around with tutntables for decades and ambitioned DJ have been extending their sets with loop samplers and bass sequencers for just as long. But that’s hardly new to anybody familiar wity electronic music – much more interesting things have rather silently changed behind the scenes. Not only that more and more DJs go digital (I mean really digital, not just playing CDs on portable -and compared to modern tools- clumsy DA converters called “CD-players”) – but the way they mix, pitch and alter tracks has come to a point where the differences between a state-of-the-art DJ set and a live set are vanishing.
Being a live act has been quite a pain the ass for all these years: Either you carried a truckload of rotten complicated, unreliable and expensive equipment with you and performed on old-fashioned front-of-house stages, or ‘cheat’ and do a DJ set from your own, pre-recorded tracks. which was usually the only way you could do a club gig. This has completely changed – modern electronic music software has grown up, left the recording studio and now hangs around at the club from friday to monday. This also means that the ways of producing electronic music are a lot less limited than they were some time ago: “In Ear Surgery” -my just-in-moderation release- is not a collection of stand-alone-tracks as records use to be. It’s one of the many possibilities to play one and the same non-linear electronic live set, recorded during performance and although there still are “tracks” for the listener’s commodity, they rather sort the release by themes than marking “songs”. The beat, of course, does not stop there anyway.
Upcoming events
•February 1, 2010 • No CommentsMay, 22, 2010: Weiden i. d. Oberpfalz, Germany. With HiEnergy and Psycrow.
For updates and complete list, see Google Calendar.
