2012/2/11 Jeremy Jongepier <jeremy(a)autostatic.com>
Remixing Leigh's (Pneuman) track is simply taking
me too long and the
baby's due next week so I'm just releasing this remix. It's not finished
though but I will probably never finish it, for the moment I have enough of
all the quirks of the software I'm using.
Here's the remix, hope you like it. Actually it's not really a remix but
basically a complete new song.
http://downloads.autostatic.**com/music/pneuman-move_along_**
dj_autostatic_remix.ogg<http://downloads.autostatic.com/music/pneuman-mo…
sounds prety f#%&ing good to me !!
So sorry Leigh that I probably won't finish it but
it just doesn't work.
Every time I wanted to work on this the track sounded differently again
(probably because of some rogue plug-ins, I suspect some of the Calf ones),
or the session didn't start up because JACK doesn't like some apps loading
simultaneously or too quickly one after another and there were also some
stupid actions on my side like deleting complete tracks or buses of which I
thought I didn't need them anymore resulting in a complete mess. Next
project I will make a backup of my Qtractor session every single time I
have worked on it.
Ok, what did I do? Well, I tried remixing one of Leigh Dyer's (Pneuman)
tracks, namely Move Along.
http://electronaut.**linuxgamers.net/~lsd/music/**
releases/movealong/movealong.**ogg<http://electronaut.linuxgamers.net/~l…
My goal was to create a nice dance-able electro tune out of it. So I had
to speed everything up quite a lot (from about 85 to 125BPM I reckon) but
Rubberband did the job marvelously. It even changed the vocal samples in
such a way that they just sounded very inspiring so it was really fun to
find the right sounds that could go with the vocals. And I wanted to alter
the melody in some parts so enter Zita-AT1 from Fons. With this track I
learned all the ins and outs of this great tool and ended up with vocal
parts that Fons will probably despise but hey, it IS an autotuner after
all! So thanks Fons! Amazing tool, especially when you feed it MIDI stuff,
it does wonders then.
Next I added a vocoder to the vocals for the chorus, the MDA one which I
like best compared to the other ones available. I wanted to try the TAL one
but somehow my setup doesn't like Juce based plug-ins. I'm having a faint
hunch that those plug-ins aren't real-time safe which may sound weird but
they seem to work better with a generic kernel. On a real-time kernel they
lock up my system within half an hour.
All the samples were fed into Qtractor by Hydrogen. Hydrogen is a great
sampler but the 0.9.5 version I used is so unreliable. One of the main
reasons I don't pursue this remix is Hydrogen. Reordering, adding or
deleting instruments, ah ah, don't even try, very often Hydrogen stalled
then and if it did work the JACK graph wasn't updated properly. And because
of this behavior and trying to troubleshoot it I had moments when I
thought, wtf am I doing? I want to make music, not filing bugreports or
troubleshooting my own system.
i _SO_ know the feeling :-(
still, thanks so much for your bug reports, and if it is any comfort : the
jack port renaming issues *should* be fixed in the next 0.9.6beta, and we
really are working on making hydrogen 0.9.6 the most stable release ever.
so by the time your newborn sleeps trough the night, and you have regained
full consciousness there will be a reborn 0.9.6 waiting for you ;-)
One day my session didn't start up anymore. It
really took me too long to
find out I had to raise the number of available JACK ports. Default is 256
but this project uses way more ports than that.
Qtractor... Yeah, I cursed at that one every once in a while too. But that
was also because of the other apps I used that just don't work that well
with Qtractor, specifically seq24. I really need to ditch seq24 and start
looking at alternatives like HarmonySEQ. seq24 is dead and staying with
JACK 0.118.x just because of seq24 is just plain silly. But Qtractor proved
itself again, dozens of tracks, dozens of plug-ins, no biggie. Automation
is still a tad fiddly but if I find a good way to express what the actual
issues are I'm sure Rui will improve it faster than you expect.
Plug-ins, well, for softsynths I used some zynaddsubfx DSSI's and the MDA
JX10 VST, a lot of compressors (SC3, SC4, linuxDSP Pro-Dynamics, Invada
stereo compressor), the obligatory Calf Vintage Delay for the crash, Calf
Saturator for the vocals and drums in the chorus, a lot of different
reverbs, the MDA vocoder VST for the chorus and a distortion somewhere, I
think for the MDA JX10. And I worked a lot with inserts for the vocals (to
feed them into Zita-AT1) and the bass synth (sidechain compression).
Besides the plug-ins I used Zita-AT1 (two instances, Zita-AT1 doesn't like
getting fed overlapping samples so I split those between the two
instances), Yoshimi (in some cases the zynaddsubfx DSSI and Yoshimi sounded
differently), Hydrogen, seq24 and Zita-DPL1 as the limiter on the Master
bus.
Sample-wise I used a lot of Leigh's original stems, like the crash, the
piano, the vocals, a kick here and there and some bass parts. For the
chorus I used some samples from a Sequential Circuits DrumTrax samplepack.
I got the kick from some blog,
http://www.boyinaband.com/.
Like I said, the track isn't finished. The chorus lacks energy because of
unbalanced levels and missing stuff in the lower regions, some of the
samples click because they are being processed in real-time by Hydrogen and
I wanted to use some cutoff filtering in the bridge but had such a hard
time setting it up in Qtractor that I dropped that idea. And the mix is too
dry and needs more compression, it's just too tame.
So, time to move along. I probably won't be making any music for some
weeks, my girlfriend is 39 weeks pregnant so I'll become dad again very
soon. Also I have a different busier job for which I also try to study a
bit at home. Luckily it's fascinating stuff (Asterisk & Kamailio, so VoIP
telephony with SIP) and being the only one at that company with a solid
Linux background is very gratifying also, but also very demanding. But new
stems are coming my way, next project will be a remix of a The Cut/Up track
(
http://www.reverbnation.com/**thecutup<http://www.reverbnation.com/thecu…)p>).
And I'm also working on some acoustic stuff, so something completely
different. Despite our little family growing I do hope to release more
stuff in 2012.
i hope so too !
grtz
Thijs
Best,
Jeremy
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