Recording Journal- Week six

I have been back in audio mode for about 4 days. I have chosen 15 tracks thus far to fill out the album. This makes it about 82min-but when I pull the tracks together to make the LP seamless I will take up this extra time. Preliminary track listing is:

R010R - The.End.Of.All.Reason
1• the writers cage
2• acculturation problem
3• suicide pact
4• dead pulsar
5• escape
6• DIST-embodied [featuring Christopher Jon of I, Parasite]
7• brilliant decline
8• untitled nine
9• abstraction algorithm
10• trust in decay
11• untitled ten
12• idiom
13• shadow of a doubt
14• en-force
15• our collapsed star

I am currently replacing some sounds and doing pre-mixes for en-force, escape, and suicide pact because they were written with some older synths and I wanted to bring the Virus B and some Reaktor ideas into the equation. Nothing has finished vocals yet, I still have rough placements set on the songs, which is why I have not uploaded any clips yet. I may just have to upload some instrumentals in the meantime, I just avoid doing that because I feel vocals and lyrics add so much more to a track. If anyone wants to drop some feedback on this, I would appreciate it.

Also keep in mind- the artwork I am posting in this blog are just ideas. I am not going to post the actual artwork-also I cannot do this effectively because the package will have textures that cannot be produced digitally, just like Gradual Destabilization did. There will be a great contrast in the final package though, because of my growing love of stark vector imagery and my ongoing fascination with photo-manipulation. The CD and package will be worthwhile to own and examine, and it will fit the music perfectly. Again it will be another limited edition printing, hand designed with a digital press and screen printing from Sire Press.

Recording Journal: week 2

I am migrating tracks now. This has to be done because I upgraded some of the instruments and FX I have been using throughout the past 2 years. Some of these tracks were written with Battery 1 and some of them were even on Cubase 3.1. In fact I just upgraded to SX last year and I have only written a couple R010R tracks since the upgrade. Mostly it has been remixes and special tracks for compilations.

Now I am working with NI Battery 2 [I really do not like 3] and I am moving a lot of softsynths over to the impOSCar and Reaktor. Luckily though, I did know to drop down the real instruments to WAVs whenever I completed a track. So I do not have to go searching for real synth patches anywhere. In fact my biggest dilemma right no is migrating drum kits to Battery. I did not save the drum kits for each track and now I have to spend 20-30 min tracking down every individual WAV file-through my vast collection of 100 drumkits :/ A real pain in the ass. I am kicking myself for not thinking ahead.

Today I refinished the very first track [The Writers Cage] and the very last track [Our Collapsed Star] both working titles. I am very excited because I got to start using the Battery 3 drum kits [even though I only like the Battery 2 unit]. Also I have been able to change some of the weaker synth sounds I had saved, to some of the bad ass new Virus B patches. Thanks again to Chris [I, Parasite] for selling this beast to me. I was borrowing a Virus C [from AiB] when I wrote "Gradual Destabilization", I really did not like how smooth and clean it sounded. I was also fond of the dirtier and powerful Virus B. So now it is my backbone real synth alongside the KORG MS2k.

Then I have my noise beast! Early on in R010R, I used a Nord 2 specifically for noise. Then when I heard the 4ms Noise Swash [again thanks to Chris-IP] I knew I had a replacement for my noise needs. Now I am having a great time adding total noise to these tracks. It really makes an incredible impact. I will put up some new demo tracks soon. I just need to test some of the mixes for accuracy...