Tag: DAW

I brought some of the raw ingredients, Fanu baked and iced the Cakes or should I say Biscuits ?

Featured ~ lwhiled ~ Leave a comment

April 22 marks the release day of a collaboration between myself and the Finnish breaks maestro Fanu titled Biscuits and Breakbeats. The collaboration started way back in the summer last year after a conversation on the mutual appreciation of the body of work of Luke Vibert, especially his Plug output. The conversation was started after turning in my Drama/Nonsense EP for a mix and mastering polish session by Fanu.

He wanted to do a remix of Drama. I wasn’t  going to turn down an offer like that. The conversation quickly moved on to maybe a collaboration EP? Why not I, and thought we would get round to it someday based on my sporadic output of tunage.

The catalyst was a conversation, where I was trying to demonstrate the concept of new-old breaks/phrases made up of matched (Key or timing etc) samples from various sample packs and fuse it all together to make it sound like a record was being sampled rather than a bunch of samples. The idea would be to chop up the fused sample like the MPC heads would.

I’m not sure he was that convinced but I left my audio examples in a folder for Fanu as he would say to chew on it 🙂

From that came Earl’s Brew, Groove is the Source and Rounds. Drama is pretty self explanatory and that leaves Shaken By The Seas. Originally a sketch of a track titled “The Sun”. The track was expanded out to Shaken By The Seas. The name comes from an eventful ferry crossing back in December last year that tested the hardest resolve of many men. The beats in the second half of the track represent the power of the seas that night 🙂

The tracks were all constructed in the best DAW ever: Bitwig and I even managed to get Fanu to use Redux by Renoise on a few tracks.

What’s with the EP title? That came from the shared enjoyment of a good cup of tea and Fanu’s new discovery of the pure joy that is Marks & Spencer’s Chocolate Digestives! Better than McVities IMHO.

The EP will be out on all streaming platforms and Bandcamp on Lightless Recordings. If you can’t wait, you can subscribe to Fanu’s Bandcamp subscribers page and get it right away.

Bandcamp early access

https://fanu.bandcamp.com/subscribe

Pre orders can be found at 

Boomkat

https://boomkat.com/products/biscuits-and-breakbeats

BeatPort

https://www.beatport.com/release/biscuits-and-breakbeats/3683522

90’s breaks programming in Bitwig

~ lwhiled ~ 3 Comments

I have always been a fan of 90’s jungle and drum and bass. You can emulate some of the techniques in Bitwig with pretty much stock plug-ins.

Prepare the break

1. Set your project tempo
2 Grab your break. For this demo I’ll use a break from the Blu Mar Ten sample pack.
3 I personally use these settings for the crispest settings. I also boost the gain just in case the next stage drops the volume.

Slices

4 Make sure the break is in time and next right-click on the clip and select slice to drum machine.

BeatMakers

Note make sure that you select Slice at Beat Maker so it will create 1 slice and 32-bit to stop any dither.

The sampler setup

1 First trick is to get the velocity to control the filter.

Sampler

In the modulators section add an Expressions module and set it to modulate the cutoff filter on the pad sampler. Next set the Velocity sensitivity to Zero. This will allow you to use the note velocity to control the cutoff without losing any volume.

2 Set up your start points. Once happy with filter thresholds duplicate the first drum pad for each sample start point for break.

startpoint

Since the break is in time with the tempo project you should have little issue with timing.

Below is an example of a basic patternmidi

3. The poor man’s delay. I must give props to this You Tube video for this tip.

PoormansDelay

Find a suitable hit you want to add the pseudo delay to. Set loop start and end points round it and then increase the release value of the AHDSR and adjust to taste.

Finally to add a bit more old school grit, use the brilliant RX950 DA Converter and adjust the levels of crust to taste.

Filter

You can also modulate the filter on the RX950 using the VEL setting from the Expressions modulator to get something similar to s950 filter sound.

The result.

 

Why am I doing this?

~ lwhiled ~ Leave a comment

Good question 🙂

In my previous post, I mention music is my hobby and not my day job and I thought I would share my ramblings about my creations. I enjoy making music and I have this philosophy : I can have finished items sitting on my hard drive or I can release them on to the general public and one or two people may stream and or buy it.

I’ts not really a social thing either. I have a newly created Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter. My page is dead by the virtue that any post is held hostage until you pay Facebook inc some money to “boost” your page. Twitter is really noisy and the real bizarre thing is Instagram is my most active social site.  How mad is that? a site that was originally about photography is where someone posts about music on it… What string times we live in.  I really respect Dom Kane’s attitude about social media and the music generally, which along side EL Hornet’s posts on twitter about doing stuff for yourself and not for the “likes” sort of got me on this journey.

I also want to share any tips, tricks and secret weapons that I find along the way.  So if you work alone sometimes you think how do I do that? and it would be nice to bounce ideas with someone.  Hit me up and I’ll see if I can help.

 

 

First Contact

~ lwhiled ~ Leave a comment

The obligatory “Hello World” 🙂

Hi and welcome to the first of many (I hope) blog posts regarding my adventures in music making using just a laptop, set of headphones and an audio interface. The purists out there will reel in horror at that statement, but first some history.

Music is my hobby, my release whilst holding down a day job. I don’t have the space or the justification for a purpose-built acoustically treated room. This is my compromise.

Daw of choice is Bitwig. For the interface, I use an Audient ID4. I have recently purchased a pair of beyerdynamic DT 770 (250 ohm edition). The laptop is a run of the mill Dell i7 laptops. To add some control I have also purchased Sonarworks Reference 4 Headphone edition to try and get as neutral listening experience as possible.

I have released my first track out in streaming stores and BandCamp.

 

 

Links to …
Bitwig
Audient
Sonarworks
beyerdynamic.com