While in bed. This might be a reason to spring for an iPad 2.

Enjoy: www.cocporn.com/Data/Sites/1/audio/5MinuteWalk/fiveminutewalk.m4a

Vocals need be be pulled down, of course. Didn't really get into mixing it down.

Write about Vocal Riding with Reaper, as explained here: http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=45810&highlight=volume_pan

...and roughly setting up the project.

Inspiration

I want to talk a little bit about the inspiration for the track I'm working on, to hopefully clarify some of the choices made during the production of the song. Some years ago I was smitten by a fantastic track by the Italian pop/dance-band "Planet Funk" called "Inside All The People".  Having listened to them quite a lot since then, I thought I'd try to make something influenced by them. Creating something that sounds exactly like Planet Funk will no doubt be an extremely tall order; in my opinion they quite consistently have an absolutely stunning sound. This will not stop me from trying to get "that sound".

Tracks to listen to as a reference point are "Inside All The People" (the Kid Crème mix is available on Spotify) and "Come Alive" which is available on iTunes. Common for the tracks is a clean yet interesting sound, slightly distorted guitars, a dance-ish beat but a real song with verse, chorus and brigde, processed (male) vocals and quite heavy ducking.

The goal

The goal for this entry and week is to get the information currently in the Yamaha ES-8 imported into Propellerhead Record. Ideally, both audio and MIDI-data.

The Yamaha ES-8

The ES-8 is an "old" workstation from Yahama with a nice sound set and an onboard 16-track sequencer. I sometimes use it when I'm too lazy to power up a DAW, although I hope this will change as I am now the proud owner of Propellerheads' Record.

The Yamaha currently holds the slim beginnings of a song spread over 3 "patterns" of 4 bars each, the main verse-pattern being made from 7 tracks. In the past I've been too lazy to bounce these stems separately down to the DAW, but as this is a "real" project we'll have to do it "right".

Getting the stems

Bouncing stems in Reaper is fairly simple, just create an audio track to go with the MIDI-track, arm the audio track and set the input to external and wait while it plays through. The main job in that workflow was to get the MIDI-data from the ES-8 transferred to Reaper, but you could usually do that with a simple playthrough arming the MIDI-tracks and recording from separate MIDI-channels.

Unfortunately for me, it seems like Propellerheads Record, while having MIDI-in, has no meaningful MIDI-out, which means that I could get the MIDI-tracks from the ES-8 with little or no problems, but getting Record to play it back on the ES-8 is currently impossible.

There are a number of shortcomings already showing in Record, some of which are:

• No MIDI-out (which is painful now)
• No VST-support (which will be painful when I want to use u-he Zebra 2.5, ACE or Uhbik)
• No option to Record audio when in ReWire slave-mode

I'm sure I'll find more as I go along. Hopefully, I'll find that there isn't really a shortcoming in the software, but in my knowledge of it.

The process

I thought about bouncing the MIDI down to Reaper and having Reaper playing the song back to the ES while Record was recording. This would mean that I needed to start Record up separately from Reaper, so that it didn't go into rewire mode. Thinking about it, however, this seems like an extremely cumbersome process, and I'm not in any kind of mood to manually adjust any audio lag, not today.

There is a gap in my knowledge; I'm not sure how to set the sequencer on the ES-8 up to run in "slave" mode. I'm not even sure if it's possible. So what I'll do is set Reaper up to record from the 8 first MIDI-channels and just press the play button at the right time. Having gotten the MIDI over to Reaper, I'll just bounce the audio to Reaper and export it for Record.

This workflow truly sucks. Exporting separate stems was painful enough without having to juggle the audio between programs aswell.

The audio signal

The signal flows from the ES-8 which is an analog workstations, through a hella-old Samson mixer to a Roland SonicCell into the computer.

Listen to my submission here:

http://www.indabamusic.com/#!/submissions/show/39087

I've joined Indaba Music as a "Pro"-member. I got the deal at 50% off, paying a measly $25 for a one year membership. I really like the layout of the site, even though it seems a little "heavy" at times. One thing that really makes it interesting for me, is the fact that they have a shitload of remix competitions. I've recently entered one, and will post the link to my submission to it when it's done (shouldn't be too long), but with the variety of genres and artists, it's really tempting to keep joining these competitions. Some of the competition has really nice quality stems aswell, such as Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy" and John Legend and The Roots' "Shine". Also; the prizes! HEHEH!

The first one I've entered is "All for You" from Ace of Base. You can see the remix details here: http://www.indabamusic.com/#!/opportunities/ace-of-base-all-for-you

I'll try and enter these as often as possible, as long as I like the material. Aiming for an "honorable mention" or higher.

I'll be using Reaper, of course, as the main DAW.

A promise to you: If I win any of these competitions, I'll make the RPP (Reaper project files) available for download. (You will of course have to own the plugins to be able to play the project back.)

I do watch a lot of TV, although I download most of it, which obviously allows me to watch multiple episodes back-to-back and in the order I prefer.

I cruised through all three seasons of Breaking Bad in about two weeks. That's 7 + 13 + 13 episodes at approximately 45 minutes each. Adds up to about 25 hours of TV. The show is absolutely fantastic tho. Slow and tense, the way I like it. I dragged a little in the middle of season three, but the finale was awesome. Can't wait to catch the next season in the summer. Highly recommended.

Another show I really like is Eastbound & Down. In the second season, Kenny is in Mexico, and is a total jackass, as always. That's why we like him. Highly recommended. Make sure you watch the first season first. Absolute hilarity.

Any shows I need to watch?

HEHEHEH, what a hopeless pun.

Whatever...

I'm currently busy, very busy. And I've somehow limited myself in ways that bother me, so I'll just try to break out of these chains immediately. I need to blog, because blogging helps me manifest. If I can put my partial goals down on "paper", I more easily get the feeling that it's accomplished. I like to write, so I can produce to write about it. Also, I like to write about totally random stuff, so you'll get some of that too. And, as you can see, I totally love going meta and writing about what I like writing about.

My two current projects are music and the development of an application for the iPhone which I cannot currently tell you the exact nature of, but I will in the future. I'm really excited about it, and I think you will be too.

I'm trying to streamline the work flow in my music endeavors. I've upgraded my OS to 64-bit, and I run Reaper as my main DAW. I've purchased the Maschine from Native Instruments, and a slew of new and exciting plugins. I hope to be able to set it up so that I can work with my Motif ES-8, which I love for its hands on controls and expressiveness, into Maschine/Reaper for further processing. I also want to be able to take the Maschine controller from my desktop computer to bed and use with my Mac Book Pro. I like lying around.

Because my workspace is too crowded, I've sprung for some floor stands for my monitors. Hopefully that will allow me to raise the monitors to ear level and make room on my desk, which currently holds the monitors, a V-Synth, dual head 23" and 24" monitors, keyboard, mouse and Maschine controller. Not the best working environment. I can feel myself struggling mentally coming up with reasons not to produce when the environment looks like that.

Some cool new plugins are the Slate Digital VCC (virtual console collection, emulates analog mixing consoles), iZotope Nectar (vocal processor, really like it for the presets, haven't had time to work with it too much yet), Sugar Bytes WOW filter (great and simple modulation controls). Also, I've got Native Instruments' Komplete 7 "in the mail", looking forward to see what I can do with that.

I'm kind of stuck when it comes to actual progress on the tracks. I know Hello Girls needs a retracking of the vocals. Before I do that, I need the iKlip from IK Multimedia. It's a simple but genius little thingie:

It basically allows me to clip the iPad onto the microphone stand. With this setup, I can control Reaper using the new AC-7 Core:

I do currently have some configuration issues, but nothing I can't work out.

In other awesome slacker news, KORG has relesed the iMS-20, which is an emulation of the old MS-20. I just recently sold my KORG Electribe R MkII because I felt the iElectribe does most those things for me, and I'm unlikely to ever hook the hardware up. Feel like I sold it too cheap, it was sold in matter of minutes.

Also, I got Pixelmator for Mac OS X. It was, to me, a no brainer deal. At $59,-, it does a small subset of what Photoshop does, but the things it actually does, I find it almost does better. I miss adjustmentlayers and some other basics, but it's totally workable without, and at that price I can't complain. It's just another step in my efforts to go "legit" with software licenses, and Adobe, while they do have the best tools, are just too expensive to me. Not going to get into a long discussion about software pricing, I'm just saying.

I also got me the Kinect. It's just one of those things. It's currently standing in the corner, hasn't been used for some days. You know how it is, it's sort of an effort to just turn it on. Currently working with a two XBOX-setup in my livingroom, the slim for hardcore gaming (Borderlands mainly), and the old white thing for Kinect, carefully placed in a part of the livingroom where I actually have the space to jump around. None of the current games are really that good, Kinect Adventures is just plain bad; it's beyond me how they can release that piece of crap with all the devices. Ah, the laaaag. I do enjoy Kinect Sports, Fitness Evolved and Dance Central, however.

Anyway, music wise, this is where I'm at:

Hello Girls. It needs to be retracked and remixed. The current mix was done with Propellerheads' Record, but those guys have lost my goodwill, so I don't even have it installed anymore. I guess I should just sell the software; I'm unlikely to ever use it again. Unless, of course, I upgrade it to 1.5 for KONG.

I'm working on another song called Temptation, you can hear it here:

It's highly influenced by "I remember" by Deadmau5, tracked and mixed in Reaper. Need to retrack vocals and mix it using VCC, as I'm currently unable to install the Nomad Factory British Bundle (which was used on the above version). I've tested with VCC, and it seems to be able to deliver the same kind of "grit" with the Brit-emulation. I really like the track myself, I don't think it needs much more than a good cleaning up of the vocals, tracking another verse (and writing the lyrics for it, of course), and doing the mixdown/mastering. It's minimal instrumentally, and gets all its tension from Reaper routing. The two synths used are Camel Audio Alchemy (most of the track), and Image Line Harmless (towards the end, doubling the Alchemy-part).

I also have a bunch of small stuff as a result of the Maschine and getting the ES-8 back online. Seems to be a lot of tracking needed before any serious mixdown can start, but hopefully the Maschine will supercharge me in the department.

So yeah, that's a quick rundown of things and their status. I hope to be able to fill this blog with more content more frequently.

Inspired by this thread over at the Reaper forums, I decided to take my new plugins for a spin.

This mix was done using Reaper, of course, and the following new plugins:

• Virtual Console Collection, Beta 2
• Sugar Bytes WOW
• iZotope Nectar

As well as my old plugins; iZotope Alloy and iZotope Ozone.

Have a listen and tell me what you think:

For those interested, here is the RPP-file: Strange Faces.RPP

EDIT: I went over and automated the volume for vocals and drum groups in the intro, as there are some unwanted stray sounds. Also, I used the denoiser from RX2 to remove the background hiss on the masterbus.

I noticed a lot of distortion on the vocals when starting to master the song, especially on any speakers which are not my monitors. This obviously pissed me off a little, monitoring conditions are not all that good. So I went on the #reaper channel to hang out and discuss all my miseries, and I got help from one of the regulars there, who volunteered to do a mastering job on the track. He thought the problems with the vocals was the microphone, with a 95 % certainty. So I obviously sprung for a new microphone, and decided I could afford the Sontronics STC-2, priced at a modest 1995,- NOK (approximately USD 330). Turns out the shop I was ordering from was sold out, and offered me a Sontronics Orpheus for the same price! The regular price for the Orpheus is a whopping 4795,- (USD 800), so I naturally said YES.

So I'm now the proud owner of this extremely sexy thing:

Everyone knows looks can be deceiving, what does it sound like? I'm not the world's best vocalist, but this is the Orpheus connected to the M-Audio FastTrack Ultra 8R (dry):

...and with some compressing and a modest (?) reverb, courtesy of Ubhik-A...:

...and totaly dry and soloed...

I'm pretty sure I can no longer blame it on the mic. Backing pad is Camel Audio Alchemy. I'm hoping to get started on retracking Hello Girls this weekend.

Oh, and yes! The song is "Empty Space", a love song for a dumb chick. Here are the current lyrics:

Empty Space

There's a place
Between the back of your head and your face
Empty space
Fascinating

Without grace
You seem to not even try these days
Empty gaze
Just a plaything

And you, you
Still you're what I'm drawn to
You, you
I just don't know what to do

A fast pace
Participating in this race
Second place
Contemplating

BTW, I'm not sure what the humming sound is, but I'm pretty sure the mic is picking up the fans on my DAW cabinet.

Another master. The distortion on the vocals have been drastically reduced, the main stab bass is run through a Line 6 amp modeller.