It’s about the time I started updating this thing on a more regular basis. I’ve been working on some articles about music producing and all stuff involved, but it’s been quite hard to get back into writing, mainly because I’m a one big self-critic, and not having English as my native tongue doesn’t really help.
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;
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;
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
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Hi, CK. Since TIS seems to be more down than up these days and I didn’t manage to download your latest stuff, it’s nice to see your page updated :-) Fallout 3 alt. soundtrack has 658 finished downloads from the CZ mirror btw.
Here’s a small fraction of my imagination for you to listen to. You can play the songs just by clicking on them. If you want to have a more complete view into my mind, download my discography from The Pirate Bay.
I am Sampo Närhi, a Finnish homo sapiens sapiens. I was raised into a family of musicians and other artists. Needless to say I’m a bit peculiar. I also am one of those people who drink too much coffee, stay up too late and never can find a pen when it’s needed. This, I believe, is quite common among artists.
I spend my days by drinking too much coffee while staring blankly at my computer screen, waiting for revelations - ideas for new songs. Those occur very rarely nowdays unless I have a project to concentrate my thoughts on.
Electronic music is my forte, which of breakbeat, drum’n’bass, ambient and industrial are the closest to my heart. Despite that, I like to think myself as a very versatile composer, since I have the means and the experience to work on almost anything. I also have a fetish for ethnic percussions and post-apocalyptic stuff.
I believe mood is what makes and defines music. It doesn’t have to be complex to be awesome, it doesn’t have to have a clear structure with many different parts to be good. All music really needs is a carefully crafted atmosphere that makes the listener really feel something.
Want to collaborate? Got a project that needs music? Want to sell me dramamine? Just feel an urge to say hello? Just drop me a mail and I'll get back in touch with you asap.
You can find me or my music also from various other places.