Atomic Candy Nightmare

technobeatv2 guitar

2010-04-18T03:11:00.009+01:00

I'm starting a project with a friend of mine doing some electronic music. We're aiming for some techno/industrial that reminds us of the music we listened to while growing up playing video games. Not necessarily 8-bit influenced, mind you. We also played a lot of pc games with that "kitchy" techno that we came to love.

I'll be mostly playing guitar, something I don't do that often :D As you'll be able to tell, I was aiming for a mix between the video game feel while still keeping it rocking:

In case you're wondering, the electronic stuff (everything except the guitar) was done in FL Studio, which seems to me a good choice for all the Windows users out there (ok, Mac users as well) :p
We don't even have a name for the "band" yet but I'll let you know as soon as things come up!

Equipo Atómico Maradona Megamix

2010-01-30T18:56:00.014Z

I was invited to do a 90s djset in a local concert as part of my djing corporation "Equipo Atómico Maradona Megamix", and I made some jingles to play between songs, to take the whole experience to another level.

edit: they where all done in Garageband and some use the samples provided by the program.
edit 2: I must have lost my mind somewhere cause I totally forgot to tell you about the sampler I made with the Max patches I've been posting here. I used that sampler to play this jingles in between songs. Download it here.

Here they are!
(didn't use a player this time cause there's just to many of them)

Compilation of the last posts

2010-01-30T18:51:00.006Z

Deleted all the previous posts and compiled the last versions of all the Max objects here:

Download: rzkmetro v0.2.zip
Download: rzkplay v0.2.zip
Download: rzkfolderBP v0.1.zip
Download: rzkhiBP v0.1.zip

I've been sooo busy, but I'll be back to experimenting pretty soon! :D

Sex Is Overrated

2009-07-07T10:44:00.009+01:00

Yeah, sex really is overrated, but that isn't the point of this post. First of all, it's been a while since I last posted. Actually I stopped when classes started, but to be fair that's not what's been keeping me from posting.

I've been writing stuff for my new band, been working on another possible band and another possible solo project. I'll post about all of this when the time comes. In addition I have also been invited by Step Back! (good friends of mine) to temp for their bass player in two Spanish gigs (Leon and Vigo). And man, did we rock...

For now let's get back to this blog. This song has been waiting to be posted since May:

Nothing really experimental here: just some drums and steel pans I recorded with Reason. And the real reason why I wrote this song was to try to record in the bathroom. I'm not kidding, I always loved the natural reverb when I was singing in the shower :p so I decided to record both the vocals and the cavaquinho solo there.

And, yes, about the cavaquinho, it's my new toy. My girlfriend gave it to me on my birthday (yeah, I know, she's the best :D).

Almost forgot, I created a myspace account and I'll be posting the songs there. Just another way to get to people...

Once again, I'd love to listen (read) your comments, so please don't hold back!

Pure Data

2009-01-07T16:17:00.007Z

I'm just writing this post to tell you I recently downloaded Pure Data. It's supposed to be a kind of open-source Max from the same creator, Miller Puckette, although still in development. If this open source software follows the behavior of other open source versions of famous software it will someday be even better than Max itself thanks to all the developers around the world.

Right now I'm still learning the basics and let me tell you that it is pretty hard to find decent tutorials on the internet. If you know any website with step by step tutorials or code examples I'd be most thankful.

Please share anything useful in the comments!

After-Xmas Carroll

2009-01-02T15:10:00.015Z

First of all, hope you had a good holiday. Keeping the spirit of the season, I wrote this little song the day after Christmas. Every musician should write his own xmas song at one point, so here's mine:

Cold, uh? For the song itself, nothing fancy. That synth that's pretending to be the bass, the one that sounds like tv static, is one of my all time favorites. Added some nice 8bit sounding melody too, plus a synth-choir with some overdrive to make the ending more powerful. I was aiming for that contrast between cold-minimal verse with just vocals and beat to a simple-yet-epic-sounding ending with the choir.

This is a song that really asked for a decent voice. I dream one day I will have a group of musicians under my command muhahaHAHAHAHAHAah *gasp* sorry..

Everything except the voice was done on Reason 4. If you are a musician, have a mac and never tried Reason, you don't know what you're missing. Then you ask, "don't you need a midi keyboard to play with Reason?", well, you do, unless you use MidiKeys to turn your normal computer keys into a virtual keyboard. I also have seen many people using Max/MSP to the same effect (as well as all the other wonderful things Max/MSP does), but I'm yet to get my hands on that piece of software.

Actually, the response time of Reason to my input is not perfect: it's a split second since I press the key until the sound actually comes out. This means that if I have something really really fast to play, the sound will not keep up. I believe this is a limitation of MidiKeys, not Reason. I am yet to try a real midi keyboard to see if it solves the problem.

The "recording" process went something like this: I chose some midi synths as my instruments, played some lines with my keyboard then edited the midi to give the notes an absolutely perfect timing. When all the loops where done, I muted all of them except one at a time and exported the result as an ".aif".

Garageband was still used as the tracker, that is, where I put the sound loops exported from Reason in order. I also recorded the voice there. Why did I use Garageband if Reason can be used as a tracker as well? Simplicity: I just love how rearranging recorded pieces feels so easy on Garageband. Plus, in the former is way easier to record and control the effects to add on the recording.

And that's all for now. Hope you have a great 2009!

This Painting Makes Me Never Want to See You Again

2008-12-22T15:03:00.031Z

This song was the catalyst. I had had this project on my mind for quite a long time but I soooo lazy that I kept postponing it. I was playing Football Manager 2009 that night and it came to my mind why I kept playing that game when I could be doing something constructive.

So here it is! I started writing the song at 2:00AM and I recorded as I went along. It was 5:00AM when I was finished.

The writing is not very good as you can hear. I just scrapped this two chord sequences (F#m, E, A and C, Am, F, C) and they sounded good together, specially the transition between them. The same with the lyrics, I just wrote them as I went along. I'm not much of a singer but this time I really have to apologize. My throat hadn't recovered from my last cold so it failed me when I try to hit some high notes.

The recording was the real focus here. My main goal with this song was testing the quality of my macbook mic (!) when capturing distorted guitar sounds. Though this little fella is great for voice, it sucks ass for guitars. This time it kinda worked cause I really wanted that filthy garage sound, but I really have to get a decent mic for more ambitious sounding guitars (and I'm yet to try the bass).

Though everything other that the guitar sound was done in Garageband (the recording, arranging, sound bank drum track, voice equalization), I used Audio Hijack for the mp3, cause I don't like the mp3 compression I get with the former.

My favorite thing about this song is that little solo near the end. Using the same distortion as before (just a little tweak to bring up the bass) I added a duo phaser modulation. Hear that strange feedback? I had my effects pedal output connected to the pc speakers instead of an amp, so I used one of the speakers to control that feedback by bringing it close to the pickups with my left hand as I tapped the melody with my right hand. I took a picture so you could understand what I mean:

Notice my left hand holding the speaker near the PUs

That's it for my first post! Comments are very much appreciated!

Why?

2008-12-21T22:20:00.004Z

As an amateur musician, I never had proper music training, I have learned everything I know by trial and error (sometimes just trial, most of the times just error :p) with the help of our good ol' friend the internet.

I recently started recording music on my macbook. I don't use professional software of hardware, just some guitars, small amps, the macbook mic and some digital midi synths. The main reason for this blog is keeping a traveler's journal of my experiments, whether I'm just playing with some effects or dumping some song I wrote in a lazy afternoon.

So why make this public? So anyone can comment, express their likeness or hatred (or apathy) for something I have done, share their own experiences, say how they would have done it, so hopefully I can learn a thing or two about music.

Feel free to comment! Every word you spend your time writing me will be read and taken into account.