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

On 12/31/2013 03:59 PM, Dave Phillips wrote: 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 :-)