Foundry

Nice video and track

aye rlly well produced

Nice and clean sounds!

I would love to hear this without the drums and make it more ambient-ish. Kinda like Monolake's Plumbicon Epilogue ;)

Really great! Nice work! I loved the outro and almost wanted to hear that lovely synth thing at the end for longer. Agree with the Monolake comparisons too. Really clean cut and precise beats.

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pretty! drums sound like almost the same pattern as elephant.

Ha, I was re-reading an old thread the other day, and this reminds me of that Aphex Twin interview:

  Quote

 

 

Someone phoned up to ask how we got the quality so good.  I thought "What are they talking about?  It's shit!"

Thank you all for the kind words!  It's curious everyone seems to think it's so polished.  I got distracted while patching and performing it, what with being sandwiched between various tripods (two for lights, one for the camera), trying to not block the camera's view of what I was doing, etc... then I mixed the track and edited the video in one pretty productive morning.  It was a really quick process.  (This was a week after a live gig, days before a synth meetup, meeting a deadline, etc.)  There's a lot of noise on the track, but I left most in as an aesthetic choice.  It sounds a bit like tape hiss until its filter changes frequency, kinda like in Sand Lowe, so I guess the hissing patch was leaking a bit or something.  There's so much I feel I ought to redo (compress the acidline so you can consistently hear it, pingpong delay it post-panning, re-record the whole thing from scratch with actual velocities and without the distraction of filming it, probably make it twice as long so it doesn't stop just as it gets going) but realistically, this might be it for this track...  Still, at least there's a verison out there now!

maybe you should ask a friend to film it for you, and then maybe do some fast rhythmic edits, that would be cool af... or even set a tripod so that it films from above. why the blue light tone overall? including your nails :P

nice sounds yeah, everything sounds damn clean and crispy. i like the progression and where it goes, it's sweet and dark at the same time, afx vibes on the beat no doubt... i wish it continued, it stopped in the best moment, in the peak, felt like a drop, seemed like it was going to explode, but it ended. anyway, awesome show, great job :thumbsup:

I think you are being too hard on yourself. The reality is that you may never be totally satisfied with it but if you are happy with this take then I think that's brilliant!

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  On 2/28/2018 at 7:33 PM, THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON said:

maybe you should ask a friend to film it for you, and then maybe do some fast rhythmic edits, that would be cool af... or even set a tripod so that it films from above. why the blue light tone overall? including your nails :P

nice sounds yeah, everything sounds damn clean and crispy. i like the progression and where it goes, it's sweet and dark at the same time, afx vibes on the beat no doubt... i wish it continued, it stopped in the best moment, in the peak, felt like a drop, seemed like it was going to explode, but it ended. anyway, awesome show, great job :thumbsup:

Ha, I like the optimistic assumption that I have local friends. :)  I don't want to rope my partner into doing too much for me, she does a lot already, when she should focus more on her own projects!  I totally intend to do more rhythmic editing though, yes!  I was going to do that here, but then realised how long it would take to edit, and got a bit lazy...  So you just get the achtung noise shots.  I'm very tempted to get a fish-eye camera and mount it on the wall, so I can just leave it running and forget about it, yeah... but then, on the other hand, I experimented with fun close-ups here and it worked out pretty well, so now I'm not so sure...  (I was also thinking of packing in the excessive lighting rig, but then got a bunch of compliments on it, so I guess that's staying!)

I had this idea for this track that I'd call it Foundry and have orange-and-blue lighting like at the steel mill at the end of Terminator 2, so I'd light myself orange and the synth behind me blue... but it's a really cramped room, and I don't yet have that kind of skillset, so after trying out the orange gels and seeing them clash with the blue ones when both inevitably light up the synth at once, I pared the scope back a bit and just went all blue instead.  But it was a nice idea, and at least the blue adds to the ambience.  And yeah, it's hard to see in the light, but my nail varnish is sparkly blue too, well spotted! :D  (The lighting was so harsh, the yellow and red cables looked identical to me, which didn't help patching, even if the added atmosphere did make it kinda fun.)

Yeah, I have this terrible trope right now of setting out to make a five minute track, then arranging it so it just starts to get going at that mark, then only tacking on another minute or two once I realise what I've done.  I should work harder to let it be a sprawling epic!

  On 3/1/2018 at 11:47 AM, ZoeB said:

I should work harder to let it be a sprawling epic!

I could see that track being a longer piece for sure, or maybe the basis of that patch turning into something that is a 'sprawling epic' type track. Fill us in if so!

  On 2/27/2018 at 6:58 PM, ZoeB said:

wow!

Great, LOVE the bass drum sound. the rhythm of the beats reminds me a bit of a slow version of We Have Arrived TTQ Mix - it doesn't actually sound that much like it, just the way the beats fit together. I'm always trying to get this kind of "whole sounds more than the sum of the parts" sound.

when the 4/4 kick comes in the tracks loses momentum for me, and the beats no longer have this gear-cog thing where they fit together perfectly. not sure if that makes sense to you...

funny, just as I was thinking "it could use something with a 1/16th note rhythm" a new percussion sound came in with a faster rhythm!

and then I was reading through the comments and saw you post the Aphex quote and that second I heard the hiss in the track for the first time! beats still sound great though :)

Thanks! Maybe you heard the hiss subconsciously until then, and it’s what reminded you of the aerosol sample in the We Have Arrived mixes? (It’s also in At the Heart of It All, but that track’s slowed down so it’s harder to spot despite its prominence.)

Yeah, the house beat was just something I reached for quickly while finishing the track... it’s probably a bit of a cop out... Though the remix I’m working on is now turning into more of a pop song, now I’ve added more chords... This is getting kinda messy, ha! Thanks, I’ll make more effort in future to work out what fits the track best, rather than simply reaching for a quick solution.

Yeah +1 for turning this into a longer epic track.

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  On 3/3/2018 at 9:47 AM, ZoeB said:

Thanks! Maybe you heard the hiss subconsciously until then, and it’s what reminded you of the aerosol sample in the We Have Arrived mixes? (It’s also in At the Heart of It All, but that track’s slowed down so it’s harder to spot despite its prominence.)

 

Yeah, the house beat was just something I reached for quickly while finishing the track... it’s probably a bit of a cop out... Though the remix I’m working on is now turning into more of a pop song, now I’ve added more chords... This is getting kinda messy, ha! Thanks, I’ll make more effort in future to work out what fits the track best, rather than simply reaching for a quick solution.

maybe! it's also the construction of the rhythm that reminded me of We Have Arrived... each sound has a part in the overall rhythm and it's like a puzzle that fits together. Nothing is redundant. I always try to make a beat work like that but it's really hard.

looking forward to hearing the remix!

A second counterpoint melody would really fill it out and add interest (assuming you have an oscillator and sequencer to spare). Nice track.

Nice one Zoe. I've listened to your music for a while and I don't know whether this is the most recent track but you can tell you've been working hard on your craft and levelled up. 

I like the Aphexian snare, kind of reminds me of Classics. If anything I'd like that to be more resonant and noisy but I know it's different tastes. The melodies and sound quality is also really nice, you've got some great gear there. Would love to hear you make something really dirty/nasty with that setup. 

Nice work. Great synthesizer sounds. The melodies in the finale are also good. Well done.

  On 3/6/2018 at 12:03 AM, Alan Ord said:

Nice one Zoe. I've listened to your music for a while and I don't know whether this is the most recent track but you can tell you've been working hard on your craft and levelled up. 

 

I like the Aphexian snare, kind of reminds me of Classics. If anything I'd like that to be more resonant and noisy but I know it's different tastes. The melodies and sound quality is also really nice, you've got some great gear there. Would love to hear you make something really dirty/nasty with that setup. 

Thanks!  I had it lying around in Reason as a half-finished idea since last year, and last month I decided to dust it off, finish it, and record it.  So compositionally it spans a while (and is arguably a bit of a cop out, not having different sections that are distinct enough that you wouldn't want to hear them simultaneously), but the patching's all new, as is the mixing.

I love resonant snares!  Yeah, I need to work on my snare patching.  They're amongst the hardest parts to get right for me.  I've only just started to get the hang of making cymbals using ring mod.  I'm still just combining my simple kick drum patch (up an octave) with a noise burst for my snares.  I'll have to read up more on the theory of how snares work, and see if I can make something a bit more elaborate.  (This kind of thinking is how I ended up with so many VCAs and EGs, especially when you start throwing velocity sensitivity into the mix!)

In terms of nasty tracks, there's this oldish release, and

It seems from your pictures that you're an old-school modular purist (do you have a loyalty card with Doepfer?), but if you don't mind the odd 'exotic' interloper in you racks, then there are a few units that really take snares to the next level. One example being: http://www.hexinverter.net/mutant-snare , a company part owned by Venetian Snares coincidentally. 

Thanks for the recommendation!  I used to have a few of the Analogue Solutions 808 clone modules, then sold them off and got Tiptop ones instead...  (Less versatile, but smaller and neater, and they accept 5 V triggers.)  Trying to get those right has been kind of humorously difficult for me, when you consider that I hardly ever use them anyway, because making my own drum sounds from scratch is almost always more rewarding...

For sure: props for the purists who keep it simple, and build from the ground up. Using some of the more complex modules can feel like cheating (and is not a good way to learn about synthesis). I have gone in the other direction, largely due to limited rack space, but I often wonder what I'm missing in terms of sound design and control.

Maybe I should invest in a second Doepfer rack  

  On 3/2/2018 at 11:29 PM, zoid said:

when the 4/4 kick comes in the tracks loses momentum for me, and the beats no longer have this gear-cog thing where they fit together perfectly. not sure if that makes sense to you...

This was an absolutely fantastic piece of advice, thank you so much!  I ended up totally reworking the second half of the track so it's true to the rhythm that's already established at the start.  And while I was changing things, I added accents to everything so it's actually got a bare minimum dynamic range of expression for every part now (which meant re-patching and re-recording absolutely everything), added more chords for the second part...  And added a vocal, and a bunch of other stuff...  It's a song now.

I'm not sure if any of you would approve of it anymore, it's kind of simultaneously more accessible now as well as a more layered hodgepodge of everything...  But I'm pretty proud of

Here's a SoundCloud link for the new version, for anyone who finds that easier to play: