[LAU] New album out: Modlys/2013 - workflow

[Will Godfrey]

On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 09:16:39 +0100
Atte <atte at youmail.dk> wrote:

> On 12/31/2013 03:59 PM, Dave Phillips wrote:
> 
> > Even though I'm not a Renoise user - not even a heretical one - I would
> > love to read how you create your music with the software. Please
> > consider posting a description here or elsewhere, the more detailed the
> > better.
> 
> Ok, as promised a few (?) words about "how I use renoise" and "my work 
> flow".
> 
> First a little bit about how the tracks started:
> After playing with paulstretch I was struck by the beauty of the sounds 
> produced by it. Actually it's kind of surprising how just about 
> everything sounds beautiful at 1/10 or 1/20 speed. So I started working 
> on an album (entitled båndsløjfe (tape loop)) where the textures would 
> be comprised of stretched material, and with faster stuff like glitches, 
> percussion and drums on top. I stretched all kinds of audio material, 
> chopped it up (using the very handy "slice" feature in renoise) to have 
> smaller building blocks (typically of one or two bars length), and 
> arrange them into a different structure. Most of the time material from 
> different stretched audio were layered to allow me to control the 
> texture individually. Sometimes they were filtered, sometimes with a lfo 
> controlled filter, sometimes ran through a mda vocoder/talkbox as 
> carrier and some rhythmic thing like a percussion loop as modulator. 
> I've been working on/off on this album for about two years, but never 
> finished all the tracks (there were 19). On "2013" the following 5 
> tracks comes from that concept album: "engang", "maria bebudelse", 
> "forfra", "boston undervej" and "13" (the later contains no stretched 
> material, but was meant as a contrast from the rest of the songs).
> 
> A few years ago I was on vacation on Gran Canaria. While on the plane, 
> hanging around the pool and in general relaxing, the other members of 
> the family were reading books or solving cross word puzzles, but I 
> started 19 small sketches, mostly one or two bar loops. The idea was not 
> to finish anything, just play around, some took only 15 minutes or less. 
> I had plans for later finishing the best sketches for an album entitled 
> "Las Palmas" (named after the airport on Gran Canaria). In general I 
> went for instrumental tracks with a dance floor feel without the actual 
> beat. Each sketch were named after something the happened just before or 
> after the sketch was made. "de venter", "du kender titanium", "20", igen 
> igen", "på vej hjem" og "meyer" were selection from that concept album.
> 
> The three meditations were done on commission as meditation tracks.
> 
> About the workflow:
> I almost always start out by going for a mood that I like. Every sound 
> contributes to the mood, but to me the bass drum is especially 
> important. So I spend some time finding a bass drum that fits with the 
> mood. I also like to truncate sounds like hihats or claps to make them 
> more percussive. In general I think every sound or part of a song should 
> be strong, so instead of just throwing random stuff in, I try to find 
> thing that are not "just a sound", something with character. Sometimes 
> (heavy) processing can make a dull sound interesting, but sometimes I 
> just throw it away again if it's too blah. When I have a loop that I 
> like with basis drums and some harmony I often start to think about the 
> structure of the whole track, since I found it very difficult to break 
> out of a loop later, if I work too much on it. In renoise this means 
> that I would copy my pattern so the song takes about 4 minutes, and then 
> start working on an alternate, contrasting part. I also found it 
> important always to remember to leave space when adding parts. It's so 
> easy to overdo each part, which leaves no room for later parts, so I try 
> to imagine how a certain sound would fit with both what is there already 
> and things that could be added later, sometimes I have a pretty clear 
> idea of what those later things could be sometimes I don't. It's also 
> nice to have things, be it sounds, effects, musical ideas that only show 
> up once or maybe twice in the track, this is easier to work with when 
> the structure is more or less in place.
> 
> In renoise you can really "program" the music, by typing in the music on 
> the computer keyboard. This is usually the fastest and most precise way 
> to work, but the music tends to sound very sterile (to my ears) if done 
> this way. I have a small LPK25 that's always hooked up and sits on my 
> desktop, and I try to use it as much as possible (I also have a 88keys 
> weighted yamaha that I hook up if I have the time). I mostly quantize 
> things to have a tight groove, but some parts are non-quantized to add 
> some organic sound the the music.
> 
> Regarding the production: I mix things as I go, since to me that's part 
> of the compositional process. Some things needs effects to work in the 
> mood or in the sound. I rarely use reverb, mostly because the tend to 
> give a washed out and often cheap sound to the track, but admittedly 
> because I don't have that many great sounding reverbs. The ones I use 
> the most are the TAL reverbs, I think their tails sounds the least 
> metallic. Instead I use a lot of delay (especially renoise buildin 
> Multitap Delay with filter on the delays) that in renoise are easy to 
> sync to the tempo. I also use alot of lopass and hipass filters to shape 
> the sound of things. For instance I like to do extreme hipass on hihats 
> of things that should work like hihats, to really lift them above the 
> rest of the track, leaving room in the midrange and lo hiend for other 
> sounds. Prominent melodic sounds (electric pianos, piano, synth sounds, 
> pads, lead sounds) often needs alot of EQ to bring out the body of the 
> sound and make them blend with the mood.
> 
> I like to spread out the work of a track over a long time. Work a little 
> on it, then leave it alone for a while and come back to it. For this 
> purpose I made a renoise hackish tool that renders a track to wav from 
> the commandline. I then have a script "generate_mp3" that renders 
> modified (make style) tracks to an mp3 folder directly on my server, 
> this folder is synced to my android phone with the app "folder sync" so 
> that I always have the latest versions of the tracks with me. So I spend 
> alot of time listening to things away from the computer, for instance 
> while running of driving the car. That works really well for me, if I 
> listen to a track in renoise I tend to jump right in and change 
> something I don't like, but just listening without the ability to change 
> anything gives a much better overview, especially when working on a 
> collection of tracks at the same time.
> 
> Some final words regarding renoise: Brendan Jones commented "you made 
> this with a tracker?"... Well to me renoise is just a tool. I worked 
> with a lot of different programs, my first album was made with floss 
> tools (ardour, muse, specemin, zynaddsubfx, phasex, ams, pd and more). I 
> really believe that for the most part you could make your music in any 
> tool. So why renoise? The most important thing for me is it's extreme 
> stability, it just never crashes. There's nothing that sucks the 
> motivation more out of me than being in flow with a song and having the 
> program crash on me. I might loose work, but even if I do it really 
> breaks the flow, and I really, really hate that. It's also really nice 
> to just load a project and everything is exactly where you left it. I 
> tried the session managers, but I never got into it. Also when using 
> alot of tools, a bug in one program might break the whole chain. So you 
> have to upgrade that piece of software, and now your project might not 
> load. And renoise is very "rounded" compared to the floss tools IMHO. 
> Everything is really well thought of and well tested. So many small 
> things that mean working is simply faster, consistent keyboard 
> shortcuts, fast switching of views, infinite undo on everything 
> including fader moves, support for mouse scroll almost everywhere. And 
> it doesn't hurt that renoise is really light on the CPU. There are 
> things that are more challenging in a tracker, mostly working over the 
> seemingly hard boundaries of patterns and accepting the messy look of 
> realtime midi recordings in the pattern editor.
> 
> I hope that gives an idea about the workflow. Although that was a lot of 
> words, please feel free to ask if there's something specific you'd like 
> to know about :-)

Wow!
Thanks for that. It's fascinating to read how other musicians develop their
ideas. 

-- 
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.