As we’ll be releasing our new album on Bandcamp soon, I thought it would be best to put everything in one place rather than spam the other threads. Here’s our latest video ‘4320’ which will be the outro track of the album:
NASA made their archives free-to-use, so we plundered it. Drums are Digitone, synths are MfL Poli, and everything is taken to the butchers via Ableton Live’s Redux plugin. Thanks for listening.
That’s me playing the white keys going further away from each other and back again. An idea I did back on the Analog Keys about a year ago. Poli sounds way better tho!
We’ve just dropped our new album U4EA on Bandcamp. It’s pay what you want, so if you can spare us a cup of coffee, it’d be much appreciated. But if you don’t have anything on you right now, you can download it for free or just stream it. It’s on us! Enjoy
(There’s a lot of Digitone and JU-06A on there, as well as some Octatrack and Model:Cycles, plus some Ableton synths)
I’m going by this (from Wikipedia): “An album may contain as many or as few tracks as required. In the United States, The Recording Academy rules for Grammy Awards state that an album must comprise a minimum total playing time of 15 minutes with at least five distinct tracks or a minimum total playing time of 30 minutes with no minimum track requirement. In the United Kingdom, the criteria for the UK Albums Chart is that a recording counts as an “album” if it either has more than four tracks or lasts more than 25 minutes.”
@craig the volume at the beginning is super low, I had to raise the volume a lot (on my headphones, in an isolated environment) to be able to hear what was actually happening.
Might be designed like this, but maybe not. Just wanted to let you know. ^^
Yours is a pretty little album IMO, with trip-hop vibes
Thanks! In retrospect, the very closed in nature seemed to represent our lockdown experience
She beamed me a huge smile when I showed her that comment. Very kind of you
Sure. In terms of song genesis, we began two of them on guitar (This is… and U4EA) - the toms/mini kicks at the beginning of the first one are actually playing the notes on individual ‘strings’ to form a chord of six drums and the guitar part in U4EA is managed to hell with OT Lo-Fi and Dark Reverb. The Shakes and Puzzlebox were started on my girlfriend’s ukulele, so we kept the arpeggios of that but changed them to a few layers of JU-06A instead – with Digitone doing the high pitched crackle/rushing wind type sound on the former. Use Saison en Enfer was pure Octatrack mangling stuff I had originally made on Digitone, with heavy use of an LFO on the sample pitch for two of the elements. The outro 4320 was originally an idea I made playing just the white keys on an Analog Keys (spreading apart and coming back together again before settling on the main four chords) at around 130bpm, but I replaced everything with Max for Live synths and slowed it right down to 80bpm to fit the other tracks. Here’s all the gear (except guitar and vocals) for each of the tracks:
This is… Digitone for drums and arps, JU-06A provides a background pad later on.
U4EA Model:Cycles for drums and chord stabs, Octatrack for processing guitar.
The Shakes M:C and DN for drums, JU-06A for chords/arps, plus DN for FX
Une Saison en Enfer DN for all sounds inc drums, then Octatrack for processing everything, and a poem (A season in hell) by Arthur Rimbaud
Puzzlebox DN for drums, JU-06A for chords/arps/melodic elements
4320 DN for drums, Max for Live Poli for synths, liberal use of Live’s Redux plugin
All tracks mixed in Live using stock plugins with lots of Saturation and Redux on near enough every channel. Some use of Audio Damage’s Fluid/EOS2, process.audio’s Sugar and WavesFactory Cassette every now and then. All done on DT-770 headphones because I don’t have monitors and then checked on shitty Apple EarPods. We prefer making music for headphones anyway. I think that’s everything