Not sure where this one came from. It just sorta wrote itself, and I was along for the ride. Anyway, I find it soothing. The fast solos are me in real time. Just thought I’d throw that out there. 🙂
I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it.
A trippy, trancy, hypnotic piece. Ned does a bit of rapping in this one, so don’t miss it! It’s OK, it’s heavily processed and sounds nothing like him, but he did make the effort…
The bulk of this was done on the microKorg with the MS-20, but the haunting sweepers in the background are all Alchemy, heavily processed. The vocoder is straight microKorg, then I pushed it through a super secret VST for some grunge (it was too clean coming directly from the Korg).
To badly paraphrase several movies, “We don’t need no stinking Time Signature!” This one kind of got out of hand, and I let it. The groove was there after a few hours, but I’ve spent days trying to play the solo in.
The drums are all programmed by hand (not played in – clicking squares in the MIDI grid… I can’t play drums.) The solo “instrument” is a stack of every real synth in my arsenal, meaning my Kawai K3 and K5, the trusty microKorg, and Korg MS-20.
Not a commentary, just a musical observation. A rather simple trance piece with a rubber bass I finally am able to create. It’s a combination of 3 synthesizers (2 real, 1 virtual). You’ll hear what I mean. Have a listen, and and enjoy responsibly!
I cut up the first 30 minutes of the Best. Movie. Ever., “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Across the Eighth Dimension“. Peter Weller and John Lithgow’s best work (just ask me, I’ll tell you!), it was scored by Michael Boddiker, I had never thought of sampling it until I listened to the Trance channel on whatever music service I use at work. I realized that people sample EVERYTHING. I ceased feeling guilty and started cutting. I posted this a few minutes ago to YouTube.
Blue Blazers will recognize quite a few sounds from the movie, and I have another one in the works. I haven’t even sampled past the first 30 minutes, so I look forward to remixing some more Buckaroo.
After working for 2 days to recover Caleb’s computer, my studio machine bricked out. Motherboard. So not a total brick, but an annoying Frankenstein teardown and reassembly.
Anyway, this song has needed a video for awhile. I produced this on my little LG tablet to see if I could. Not terrible, I think. Minimal atmospheric trance. Enjoy!
I was working with some samples from the brilliant visionary comedian, Bill Hicks (this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgzQuE1pR1w).
I started giggling when I put a Ride Cymbal together with Bill’s quote “It’s just a ride”. That turned into what I believe is a respectful remix of the “It’s just a ride” speech (I don’t call it a “bit” because it’s much more important than that.) This version is loud and colorful, and I’d like to think Bill would have enjoyed it.
Have a listen, but do go and listen to Mr. Hicks, who left us much too early (February 26, 1994) due to pancreatic cancer.
His wisdom and views changed my life and my world view. It’s important.
My favorite softsynth (CamelSpace Alchemy) has (had?) a flute (“Lakota”) that is beautiful and hypnotic. This piece is a bit of tribal trance combined with synthetic pad textures layered with the flute. The percussion is Ableton, the pads are from the microKORG and Alchemy.
A short synthetic excursion to the most likely place in our solar system to have life (besides Earth): Europa. Jupiter’s moon (one of many) is slightly smaller than our
Europa
moon, and is made of silica and water ice. It’s also believed that the atmosphere consists primarily of good old oxygen. Not a lot of it, because it’s too small to have much gravity, but oxygen and water seem to serve the needs of life on Earth pretty well…
The images are courtesy of NASA (used under the Creative Commons license).