Nice work! Sounds really nice. Those strings sounds from Felt are very realistic sounding. Wow. What Minimoog emulation are you using? Or is that hardware?
Thanks Chris! Yeah, the Felt stuff is really nice. I tend to use Slate & Ash Landforms most frequently for strings, but the Blisko series is really well done so it was nice to revisit them. For the minimoog, I’m using Moog’s own software emulation. It’s fantastic. It’s AUv3 and available on iPhone and iPad.
I released my first iOS produced album 12 years ago and there was a very small community at that point using iOS apps. It still is amazing to read someone else talking about using this or that app in their work, even though I know iPads have made their way into the toolkits of a good percentage of electronic musicians. Anyway, thanks for sharing your process!
Wow! 12 years. I got into the game about 8 years ago and thought I was cutting edge! Yes, it is remarkable to see how much more capable and powerful the whole ecosystem has become since then.
Yeah, I was the creator of the Apptronica label and magazine. One of the artists on the label was SmiteMatter who had a couple of years on me and made much of his first album on an iPod touch. We were using the general pasteboard to copy single wav files between apps and doing loopback tricks with cheap audio interfaces just to have two apps running at a time. iOS has come so far!
Thanks so much, Jim! I'm probably going to put this up on my Bandcamp page at some point, but for now the YouTube video is where the full-length track is going to live. https://youtu.be/Rhvq3R0HO9Y
Hey, Andrew. Thanks for the shout out! Decades as a jazz musician (woodwinds, not trumpet but whatever…) and that is probably going to be the most widely read thing that ever been out there about me.
You gave me a plenty to think about and no small amount of direction as to how I can address finding my way in the ambient/electronic space. I’ll demure on your estimation of my musical talent and thank you for the compliment, but from where I sit, I’d say we are really talking about experience, approach, and training. Your points about texture are well taken and have made me think hard about orchestration in general. Composers such as Schoenberg (check out Farben from 5 Pieces for Orchestra), Ravel (like everything…), and Ellington (Mood Indigo is a good place to start) while very different all have very deliberate approaches to their choices. They were also limited by the (acoustic) instrumental forces they had at their disposal. One of the things that freezes me is range of choice, even as I start out. Every program has dozens and dozens of sounds to choose from! Your advice to just find something and work on it (bury the lede), simple as it may seem, is in its own way revelatory. (Or really helpful, at the least.) If there is one thing I came away from our lesson with is that much of what we are talking about is finding something - anything! - and getting down to it. It may come out well, it may not. Just do the work. Judge later.
Reading how you treat those recommended products - Slate + Ash Landforms and Felt Instruments Blisko is further illuminating. Having some familiarity with the extended string and wind techniques those programs feature, I have spent a lot of time playing around with how to use them as they would be used “in real life” rather than just to consider how the SOUND can be best exploited in a composition. Weird and inefficient, but I am what I am. And I have not even begun to add the instruments I actually play to the mix. With an array of effects (pedals and VST) I can well see there are some incredible possibilites. That being said, thanks to your advice and example I’ve made some headway since we met and have created a few tracks that seem worth developing.
So THANK YOU. Like all of music, it’s a practice. Away we go.
Nice work! Sounds really nice. Those strings sounds from Felt are very realistic sounding. Wow. What Minimoog emulation are you using? Or is that hardware?
Thanks Chris! Yeah, the Felt stuff is really nice. I tend to use Slate & Ash Landforms most frequently for strings, but the Blisko series is really well done so it was nice to revisit them. For the minimoog, I’m using Moog’s own software emulation. It’s fantastic. It’s AUv3 and available on iPhone and iPad.
Very insightful. Yes on Patterning 3.
Thanks! I’d definitely like to do a deeper dive on patterning 3 sometime.
I released my first iOS produced album 12 years ago and there was a very small community at that point using iOS apps. It still is amazing to read someone else talking about using this or that app in their work, even though I know iPads have made their way into the toolkits of a good percentage of electronic musicians. Anyway, thanks for sharing your process!
Wow! 12 years. I got into the game about 8 years ago and thought I was cutting edge! Yes, it is remarkable to see how much more capable and powerful the whole ecosystem has become since then.
Yeah, I was the creator of the Apptronica label and magazine. One of the artists on the label was SmiteMatter who had a couple of years on me and made much of his first album on an iPod touch. We were using the general pasteboard to copy single wav files between apps and doing loopback tricks with cheap audio interfaces just to have two apps running at a time. iOS has come so far!
The end result is beautiful and amazing. Anywhere I can listen to the whole thing? Thanks so much for the detailed breakdown
Thanks so much, Jim! I'm probably going to put this up on my Bandcamp page at some point, but for now the YouTube video is where the full-length track is going to live. https://youtu.be/Rhvq3R0HO9Y
I love supporting artists on Bandcamp, so please do!
Hey, Andrew. Thanks for the shout out! Decades as a jazz musician (woodwinds, not trumpet but whatever…) and that is probably going to be the most widely read thing that ever been out there about me.
You gave me a plenty to think about and no small amount of direction as to how I can address finding my way in the ambient/electronic space. I’ll demure on your estimation of my musical talent and thank you for the compliment, but from where I sit, I’d say we are really talking about experience, approach, and training. Your points about texture are well taken and have made me think hard about orchestration in general. Composers such as Schoenberg (check out Farben from 5 Pieces for Orchestra), Ravel (like everything…), and Ellington (Mood Indigo is a good place to start) while very different all have very deliberate approaches to their choices. They were also limited by the (acoustic) instrumental forces they had at their disposal. One of the things that freezes me is range of choice, even as I start out. Every program has dozens and dozens of sounds to choose from! Your advice to just find something and work on it (bury the lede), simple as it may seem, is in its own way revelatory. (Or really helpful, at the least.) If there is one thing I came away from our lesson with is that much of what we are talking about is finding something - anything! - and getting down to it. It may come out well, it may not. Just do the work. Judge later.
Reading how you treat those recommended products - Slate + Ash Landforms and Felt Instruments Blisko is further illuminating. Having some familiarity with the extended string and wind techniques those programs feature, I have spent a lot of time playing around with how to use them as they would be used “in real life” rather than just to consider how the SOUND can be best exploited in a composition. Weird and inefficient, but I am what I am. And I have not even begun to add the instruments I actually play to the mix. With an array of effects (pedals and VST) I can well see there are some incredible possibilites. That being said, thanks to your advice and example I’ve made some headway since we met and have created a few tracks that seem worth developing.
So THANK YOU. Like all of music, it’s a practice. Away we go.