So I’ll start out with an easy subject, which is two new songs that I used as a learning ground for some tricks. I’m mainly trying to get deeper into the genres of the songs in question, as my ultimate goal is to master at least all electronic genres one could imagine of.

The first “experimentation”

…is a drum’n'bass song, heavily inspired by Noisia, Phace, Spor and the likes. So here it is;

A Brand New Chair

As you can hear it’s mostly about drums, drums, and more drums. Unlike most of dnb artists, I craft my beats out of pure one-shots without using any loops or pre-made stuff, which, in my humble opinion, gives me way more room to play with drumfills and beat variations. The piece is also non-mastered, I just dropped a heavy limiter on it, so it has potential for way more punch.

The drums are made out of 3 different bassdrums, probably closer to 10 different snares and a really huge load of hihats and rimshots, so you may or may not be able to imagine how chaotic the beat looks in a tracker and how time-consuming it was to tweak everything to fit together.

The basses are from Researchlabs’ Substancepack (link seems to be down at the moment), which is a truly great pack to use if you don’t have the patience to make your own gritty, wobbling reeces of doom. The samples are only 1~2 seconds long each, so blending the different samples together and making it sound like a consistent bassline can be quite troublesome though.

The ah, so overused vocals are from Voices of Istanbul, which seems to be hard to find nowdays. The vocals can be heard in so many ambient/chillout songs that it’s really sickening, so I’d rather not use them because of that, but this time they fit so well to the bassline that I couldn’t resist the temptation.

Then there’s a bunch of premade sound effects that I had lying around (some made by me, some not) and a bunch of square waves.

With that I managed to make an incredibly hard to make, yet a really simple sounding song. Now say hooray for time well-spent. Though with each drum’n'bass song I manage to wrap up I learn more and more about making really heavy and pounding drums and soundscapes, so it’s all good.
So if you want to make FPS music or breakbeats, or hell, even hiphop beats, get into dnb first; going to lower tempos after perfecting 180+ bpm is a cakewalk, what comes to making interesting drumstuff.

The next piece

…dives into the world of psychedelic trance;

Bleeeee

I apologize for the name, my random title generator broke down. Anyway, I usually have a very hard time working with straight 4/4 trance/dance/house beats as I find the fact that I cannot break the formula with bassdrum tricks extremely annoying. This time around I forced myself to get my hands dirty, which, in the end, was quite alot of fun.

Ok, so the goal of the song was just to get into the sound of psytrance - I mainly wanted to get the drums right and fitting, so there’s not much going on melodically, and I did not bother to tweak the synthstuff enough to make it a killer tune. And again, it’s an unmastered piece with just a limiter on top of the raw mix.

I think I did a pretty decent job at creating the certain kind of groove with the drums that make some psytrance/goa artists really interesting to listen to (Infected Mushroom comes to mind first). I’m not going to put the more traditional trance artists down though; making those pounding 4/4 beats sound good can be a real pain in the arse, especially if you don’t want the end product to sound just plain boring (though I think too many trance artists do the mistake of not paying enough attention to the drumlines, which is a shame).

For a first real trance experimentation Bleeee does what I wanted it to do, I guess. I may go back to it some day and make the synthstuff and arrangement more interesting (both really need more tweaking), but for now I’ll let it collect some dust.

That’s all for today. I’ll try to spank myself into writing those more contentful articles in the near future.

Until then.
-CK

Download links:
Download at fallout3nexus
Czech mirror
Torrent @ Thepiratebay
Digg it
NMA news post

To people asking “what’s wrong with the OST of Fallout 3, I think it was great!” - Yes, I think the OST was good aswell, but it wasn’t good for the Fallout world. Inon Zur is a very skilled composer, but with Fallout 3 they (Bethesda) made the mistake of thinking the whole world as Oblivion with guns, as far as the soundtrack is concerned. It’s just simply not hostile enough; there’s not enough violence or desperation - things that MAKE the whole post-apocalyptic concept so interesting.

So we took the dark ambient/industrial route and hopefully made the game sound more like Fallout 1 & 2, which, in my humble opinion, have one of the greatest original soundtracks ever, rather than Oblivion with guns. However, don’t expect anything that sounds exactly like the earlier titles. We’re talking about a fps and completely different artists here, afterall.

I hope you enjoy the soundtrack and appreciate the effort we’ve put into it.

Cheerio.
-CK

So, I just managed to start on the last battletrack of the Fallout 3 Alternative Soundtrack. That is the last complete track that is needed, so we should be closing in on the release.

Also, I wrapped up another D’n'B song yesterday;

Flats

Cheerio.

Cyanide

Cheers.

On another note, I’m learning to play keyboards again, which is harder than I realized. Just gotta keep on smashing the keys, maybe I’ll produce something melodic some day. At least I can play Song of Storms from Ocarina of Time already. Almost.

Then there’s that Fallout 3 Alternative Soundtrack, which is also going to be released about 3 months late. We’ve got most of stuff wrapped up now. Or should I say Claymore’s got most of the stuff wrapped up, I’ve been more or less slacking the whole time on the administrative side. I’ll see if I can make another combat theme or two during the next few days.

Oh, and tomorrow’s a fun night at the pub. There’s this bar called “PSK Kaupunni” just across the street and they have these Chambre Noir events in there, which means they’re playing dark ambient, noise and industrial the whole night, which is, obviously, beyond awesome.

More coffee and cigarettes. Adios.

The driving force, the motivation to finish every idea I have, is long gone now. Completing my ideas has become more or less superfluous to me now that I don’t desperately seek feedback to my work anymore. The actual composing is the fun part, afterall.

At least I have alot of skeletons of songs waiting for the final touch in my drawer. I know that some day I’ll finish each one of them. Or not.