I’ve uploaded another piece of music; again under the “Rain Dogs” monicker.
It’s something that I’d kind of done before – but was never 100% satisfied with… It’s called “in transit” and originally the main groove was done in a patch that was basically something like treated white noise. Also the trumpet sound that I used wasn’t the best (although it was very nice).
Now, using Logic 8 and with the help of the software synths like Smapletank and Absynth, I’ve been able to revisit it – and have pulled apart the groove into a number of separate elements of things like dulled metallic hits and strangely EQ’d toms with an extreme ping-ponging left-right delay on them, and found a great muted jazz trumpet patch to work with (and a nice CP80 piano sound) – and as a result I’ve found it relatively easy to go back and strip down and completely reinvent the arrangement.
It’s now totally what I had in my head originally. And that’s a good thing.
The last couple of nights I’ve been doing the annoying bit of trying to sort out the detail of the final mixdown and to master it very carefully without losing the vibe/feel of the whole thing in the process.
I think I’ve done it, and if you want to hear the result, you can download “in transit” here…
Enjoy.
I’ve been working on the music again. Sadly not prepped enough to get on with the actual *proper* Smallcreep work, but still just fitting in sessions to better acquaint myself with Logic 8.
And today that’s resulted in another piece that I’m happy enough to put out for general consumption. It’s a seven minute piano improvisation (with just a couple of overdubs of pre-delayed note washes to fill it out) that’s just very very peaceful; very typical of my improv work really; recorded in almost total darkness, just me playing against the silence – and probably something that might appeal to anyone who likes folks such as Lyle Mays, Keith Jarrett or Mark Hollis. As with the previous tune it’s been given a name derived from the superb Brian Eno / Phil Schmidt tool “Oblique Strategies”, which I’ve had a history of using on many projects – from design to music to writing.
The piece is called “trust in the you of now” and you can download it here…
Enjoy.
Lovers of fine music everywhere are of course furious that me and my mate Rob have decided to “re-form” our band Smallcreep to try and finish up a project that we worked on for about 6 or 7 years and completely gave up on (BACKLASH).
But in setting up my writing equipment again (basically a keyboard, some MIDI modules and my MacBook Pro) I accidentally wrote something today…
I was familiarising myself with Logic 8, which is the software we’ll be using – and just through messing around and getting to know the interface and start seeing how you can play with sounds, MIDI arrangements, software instruments and FX processing etc, in the space of a few hours I wrote what I consider to be a basically “finished” piece of work. It’s kind of ambient industrial jazz – very soundscapey and laid back but a bit dark. There’s the odd fluffed note here and there but I don’t want to lose any of the atmosphere by trying to perfect it.
It’s called “Only A Part, Not The Whole” and you can download the MP3 here…
It’s about 11Mb as it’s almost 5 minutes long, and I’ve saved it down with the best possible sound quality encoding.
(The band is *the rain dogs* which is the name I give for my ‘solo’ work… and I’ve set the ID tags on the song to say it’s from an album called “Music For Pictures 09″ – which I’ll use as a bucket title for any collection of works I build up over the coming months.)
All bodes pretty well for Smallcreep – although the fact that I recovered over *300* song files from the previous session archives suggests we have have our work cut out!
