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Early hard disk in Glasgow →
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Why don’t more people start their own business? Normal people are pessimists. They often see no reason to try something new. Most of the time they’re right. What they don’t realize is that being wrong 99% of the time is just fine. You only need to be right once.
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Uncle Sam kicked out of Canada: “An empty house is better than such a tenant as that.”
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Life is a bit like a long call option: It has a beginning and an expiration date, even though we don’t know when that might be. It may be a long- or a short-term contract. It has theoretically unlimited potential. But time decay eats away at it, day after day, and often potential is wasted.
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Creating thumping bass lines
Use the adjective that you prefer: thumping, rumbling, or just plain FAT. If you listen to electronic music, especially of the danceable variety, you probably enjoy the sensation of the clean, fat bass sounds vibrating in your auditory canal. But as a music producer, how do you create this?
First thing’s first, get good monitor speakers or headphones — i.e., something with a flat frequency response so you can well, monitor, what you are doing. (They are called monitors for a reason!) Typical consumer headphones that emphasize the lower frequencies are just going to fool you into thinking you’re making great thumping sounds, when in reality they might be quite puny.
Now on to the tip… It’s mostly an art, rather than a science, but here’s a good starting point:
- Start with a square or triangle wave.
- Filter out as much of the harmonics as you can using a low-pass filter. You should end up with something close to a sine wave, but not quite. (Or else we would have just used a sine wave!)
- Change the amplitude envelope so that you get a fast (sharp) attack and a slow (long) sustain. If you want to get fancy, add a very short blip/peak at the beginning of the curve.
- Using an equalizer (or other full spectrum filter), boost the low frequencies, but cut away all frequencies below 20 Hz (you can’t hear them anyway, and they’re not good for your speakers at high volumes)
- Experiment…
The next thing thing you need to know is something called “ducking” (no quacking involved), but that’s for another day. Google it. In essence: You don’t want your bass line playing at the same time as your kick.
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A call for submissions: Any audio recording made during Toronto’s Nuit Blanche
It’s unlikely that I was the only one periodically taking out my iPhone to acoustically sample small slices of Nuit Blanche last night. When looking over your digital loot from last night, if you find some recordings, would you care to share them with me? It would be a nice bonus if you can recall what general area (or zone, i.e. A/B/C) you were in when the recording was made. Also, include your name if you want to be credited. I’m going to attempt to make a quasi-musical compilation of everything I receive and release it online. Subscribe to my mailing list or follow me on Twitter to be notified.
[2010.12 Update: This project idea is cancelled due to lack of interest. To try again at some future event, with better publicity and more advance notice…]
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Darkstar - Gold. Track from the new album North, to be released soon at www.Hyperdub.com
Quiz: Are those MR or CT scans? -
PVT (formerly known as PIVOT) will be releasing their new album “Church With No Magic” in a few weeks. They’ve made the MP3 of the track “Window” available for free here: http://pvtpvt.net/window
This is a very nice combination of electronic tools (Novation LaunchPad, a MIDI keyboard, and wonder what software DAW… likely Ableton Live) and analog performance (including human voice, which of course is inherently analog). This is just an example of where live music is heading in the future.
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Luca Ricci - Seven [BADmusic Remix] →
Just for fun, I decided to throw my hat in the ring and submit a ”minimal” remix of Luca Ricci’s upcoming release “Seven” (referring to the so-called seven deadly sins). [Listen here]
One shouldn’t expect too much from a remix competition as one never really knows what type of sound the label is looking for. Even worse, some artists/labels even use remix competitions to get ideas for “original” tracks they haven’t even created yet. That being said, they are good ways to exercise your musical creativity and focus on completing a full track (a common habit for any musician, especially those in electronic music, is to have a large of number of bits of songs, little riffs, etc., waiting to be finished at a later date). A good way to evaluate a worthwhile remix contest is to examine the prizes; in my opinion the best prizes are not gear, nor sample packs, or even money, but co-releases on the upcoming EP or album. In the end, it’s about getting your music heard after all!
Happy remixing…
