If you’re like me, you just want to turn on your machines and go! Most of the time, this works without a hassle, but in the case of the Virus TI (Total Integration) series of synths, it’s almost a necessity to use the software integration.  It’s a blessing and a curse; along with the deep editing capability comes the usual issues of mixing hardware with soft.  Although I have used my Virus TI Snow quite a bit in the past, I know I’d be using it a lot more if things just worked.

Don’t get me wrong–everything functions as the makers intended–but it takes a couple extra steps to get everything going in Reaper.
I’m writing this guide because it’s not as inuitive as it is in, say, Ableton live.   If you’re interested, continue reading after the jump.

So, here we go.  Make sure your Virus is powered on and connected via USB, then start Reaper.

1.  Add a new instance of the Virus TI VSTi plugin by right clicking on the track area and selecting, “Insert virtual instrument on new track…”
2.  A dialog box will ask you if you want to automatically route audio from the plugin to separate outputs.  Yes, do this.
3.  Now for the MIDI portion:  Go to the plugin window on Track 1 (“Virus TI Snow”) and go to Options–>Build 16 Channels of MIDI routing to this track…
4.  Delete the any MIDI tracks that you don’t use. For this example, we’ll delete all but three tracks, correlating to three internal TI Snow channels.
5.  If you wish, arrange the MIDI tracks so that they’re mated with their audio counterparts.
6.  Important: Disarm the “master” Virus TI track (track 1–the one that’s hosting the VSTi).

Ok, that does it for Reaper setup.  In order for each synthesizer channel to be heard on a separate audio track (say, the Virus’ Part 2 on “Virus TI 2″), you must route the audio properly within the VSTi interface.  No problem: set Part 1 to “USB 1 L+R”, Part 2 to “USB 2 L+R”, and Part 3 to “USB 3 L+R”.  (The TI Snow has four internal “Parts,” but only has three separate USB outputs and one physical output. We’re just focusing on the USB channels, here.)

3 channels of virus ti in reaper

Now for the test:  enable record monitoring and arm the first Virus channel (in my system, it’s “Virus TI Snow MIDI 1″) and play some notes.  You should hear output from USB1 on the “Virus TI 1″ track.  Do the same with the other channels (remembering to disarm recording on inactive tracks) and you’ll be happy to hear their output on the appropriate tracks.  You won’t even have to change the channel on your MIDI controller keyboard/device.
“But what about rendering each channel’s output?” you may ask.  How intelligent you are!  You must’ve experienced one of the Virus TI’s biggest shortcomings:  no offline rendering.  That is, you can’t just “freeze” or “render” the Virus TI’s MIDI parts, as you can with any other soft synth; you actually have to record the output.

Exporting a single Virus TI Part is easy; the trick is to choose the right rendering method, “Online Render.”  It’s also vitally important to remember to have both the MIDI and audio components of the Part unmuted, or you’ll get silent files.  Oh and “online render” simply means that you’re recording the tracks in realtime.  In other words, if you have an hour-long opus, you better have something to while it’s being digitally reconstructed.

What about rendering multiple Virus Parts, at one time?  Well, you could use the method above and choose “Master mix,” but that will only give you one file, combining all the Virus Parts.  What you need to do is this:

1. Select the audio components of the Virus TI Parts (not the MIDI) by holding control while clicking. (Including the MIDI tracks won’t hurt, but they’ll just render blank files.)
2. Go to Reaper’s rendering function and set the following:  a) render type to “Stems (Selected tracks)“, b) render method to “Online Render“, and c) a path to save your rendered files.

reaper: render settings

You should now have a few separate audio tracks, correlating to the Virus TI MIDI channels you selected, in the folder you specified.

Yes, it seems like a lot to go through, but you really only need to do this once.  If you right click and select, “Save tracks as template…“, you can insert a full complement of Virus Parts into your arrangement, at the drop of a hat. Just right click and insert the template at any time.

Although Reaper is great, I do hope that future versions allow for greater integration of hardware and software.

http://glitched.bandcamp.com/album/point-within-a-circle

As always, it’s FREE or name your price.  Any proceeds that I receive will go toward a physical disc for my next release.

An interesting thing about this EP is that some of these tracks were originally recorded as far back as 2007–they laid dormant on my hard drive for several years before I was able to find the magic ingredient to consider them complete.  Specifically, I found the skeleton arrangement of “before the fires” in early-2012.  I knew something was there, but it needed another layer, something to keep the listener involved.  The Access Virus TI is usually a source of great inspiration (especially for emotive pads), but no sounds seemed to fit.  Software to the rescue!  Yes, it was the humble SQ-8 VSTi, an SQ-80 emulation, that inspired the melody in the middle of that track.  From there, it was easy to finish the song.

“A way through” was recorded in 2009, but I could never figure out how to arrange it.  There was a breakdown in the first half of the track that cut off abruptly and didn’t transition well.  I also couldn’t figure out how to end it; 90% of the time I abandon a project, it’s because I have solid groove or feeling, but it doesn’t go anywhere.  Some songs are so inspirational, they almost write themselves, but other times, as good as they seem, they require more work to be considered a finished piece of work.  That’s the story with “a way through.”

Another hinderance in finishing this track was that I had only a couple of tracks to work with because of my haste in recording the whole thing in one go.  Stupid mistake, but through some clever copying, pasting, and cross-fading, the pieces came together.

I’m proud to have put together a cohesive project on my favorite music-website, Bandcamp, and will be doing it again in the very near future.  Speaking of the next project, it’ll be more modular-focused and maybe a little harder-edged; “point within a circle” is certainly a showcase for Elektron products, oh, and the Nord G2.  (I forgot how much I used that thing!)

I’ll leave you with one of my favorites from this compilation, “a way through”:

Why?  First of all, the pricing.  I haven’t paid a penny yet, but the cost projections for this month’s usage amounts to about…$0.07.  Yes, seven cents.  A single month of Dreamhost cost $9.95.  At this rate, even if I paid just $10 per year, that’s still ten times the cost of a year on S3.  (Note: since I use lots of “cloud” services, the bandwidth and storage usage for me is minimal.)

Second, I discovered that I didn’t have a need for a fully-dynamic site, run on something like WordPress.  Yeah, WP is great, but I don’t use many of the dynamic features, like comments or galleries or whatever.  I don’t update the blog every day, so that’s another reason why a static site is better for me.

Third, you can’t say enough about security.  It’s hard to keep up with all of the software updates.  Sometimes, your favorite plugin is incompatible with the latest version of WP and that can be vexing.

Finally, the speed of a static site can’t be taken for granted.  There are some database-driven sites that take 15-30 seconds to load, which is not something I like to endure.

How?  It wasn’t too, too difficult, but it took some time and research to figure out.  Read below to find out more.

I started by googling, of course, and came upon a few helpful pages and subsequently, a method that works for me:
1) http://is.gd/4SzWvg — In February of 2011, Amazon enabled the “website” feature of the S3 product.  At that point, I wasn’t sure of the benefits and if it would be too difficult, but this page, “Cloud Apps Experts,” really convinced me.  This guy had three sites, one of which was doing 5.1GB outbound (above my usage), that came to way-less-than-a-dollar per month, on Amazon.  The article demonstrated that even if the most popular site had ten times the amount of traffic, the cost would still only be the price of one month on a standard web host.  I was sold.

The article describes what one has to do to configure S3 and his domain, in order for them to work together.  The Amazon side is a breeze, but your mileage may vary, depending on your domain host and its configuration software.  Dreamhost’s is ok, but not as intuitive as some others.  Still, when I did have a problem, the support personnel helped me out, quickly.

2) http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html - XAMPP — a portable, local web server on which I would develop the site.  A local WP installation has several advantages, not the least of which is speed.  Also, it’s a great testing ground.  If I ever messed anything up, my website visitors wouldn’t have to deal with any down-time.

Once you instantiate the MySQL and Apache servers, you can install any web application you want, as if the servers were located on the internet.  I have three WP installations for each of my sites and I just log in, update or create a new post, then publish it, as normal.  Next, I would need a way to get static files from my dynamic blogs.

3) http://mossiso.com/2009/07/20/convert-wp-to-static-html-part-2.html – This site describes a method for rendering a dynamic WP site to static pages, using wget, a command line program for retrieving files via HTTP, FTP, and other protocols.  The commands are simple to understand and could easily be integrated into a script, but I looked at it as a hassle.  Yes, it did work as intended, but some files could not be retrieved, such as the RSS feed and sitemap.  I would have to look for an all-inclusive way to get static files.

4) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/really-static/ – “Really Static,” an essential WP plugin that, well, renders static pages from your dynamic WP installation, just as wget does, but it also allows you to transform any dynamic page, via an “advanced” settings dialog.  It took a few tries to properly configure the plugin because it was difficult trying to decipher the author’s poor English, but when it did finally work, it did what it was supposed to do.

Method.  With all these tools, I was about 90% there, but still not completely happy with the solution.  Although “Really Static” is great, it failed to change all the references to the local site URL (http://127.0.0.1) within the static files, resulting in 404 errors.  For instance, it seems to ignore URLs in widgets, such as the archives and anything in between <script> tags.

I also discovered that certain important theme files (the CSS) were not copied to the static files destination folder.  This wasn’t that big of a deal; I just had to remember to copy those files over whenever I changed the styling of the site, which is rarely.

So, how would I change the references to the local site, within the hundreds of .html and .xml files?  Text Crawler!

I was really happy to find this application.  It’s easy to use.  Setting up a batch file to find and replace all references of the old site with thew new one (http://glitched.org/up) took like two minutes.  This operation is now accomplished in one button press.

Conclusion.  After all the research and configuration, the process of creating a new post and uploading it for display on S3 is a pretty streamlined process.  It takes about three or four steps, which is two or three more than if I were using a standard, dynamic WP installation, but as I said, it works for me.  For someone who updates their blog every couple of days, the process described above would get pretty tedious.  Still, if you’re more motivated by cost concerns, as I was, it might make sense to convert your dynamic site into a static one, hosted on Amazon’s S3 service.

I will go into this, in detail, at another point, but I moved both of my main sites, modernsoundmastering.com and glitched.org, from a standard, shared webhost, to Amazon’s S3 cloud service.  Why?  In a nutshell: pricing ($0.07 per month?!?) and speed.  Sounds great, but there are pro’s and con’s.  More on that, soon.  On to the music…

Nothing to report on the progress of “real” tracks to put on bandcamp.com (and on the front page of glitched.org), but a few nice melodies and atmospheres, while you wait (these are embedded on the sidebar of glitched.org/up):

(d) – harmless3
http://soundcloud.com/d01/d-harmless3

Really epic-sounding track with massive bass and a little unintended distortion.  The original loop from which this idea sprung was a mere :30 long; I time stretched it, slowed it down and did a bunch of spectral processing to create the final track.  It’s very dynamic; I remember doing a lot of EQ and efx automation in FL Studio.

(d) – do you remember?
http://soundcloud.com/d01/d-do-you-remember

This simple melody created algorithmically, with some web-based app.  I forget which one.    Had to smooth out the “pluckiness” of the electric piano-type sound with some tape saturation.  Again, I was experimenting with spectral effects, which resulted in strange low and ultra-high frequency timbres.

(d) – when you’re not here
http://soundcloud.com/d01/d-when-youre-not-here

A sweet-sounding track based on a loop I found on my hard drive, dated 10/2009.  This one was done completely in Ableton Live; I really love the built-in reverb and resonators plugins.  I believe I did some spacial efx, using iZotope Ozone.

(d) – Doepfer Dark Energy Experiment .934288
http://soundcloud.com/d01/doepfer-dark-energy-experiment 

The Doepfer Dark Energy is a supremely capable instrument and this short demo only scratches the surface.  The Elektron Monomachine is the sequencer, as usual.  Go to that link for the full description.

Finally, I wanted say that I’m really into this DIY electronics stuff and it takes a lot of time away from music.  Ironically, the things I make are meant exclusively for music-making!  Anyway, it’s great fun and hope to finish up some projects, very soon.  Read the full story on synth.pen.io.

http://synth.pen.io/

It will be updated regularly, as I run through my backlog of projects.  When I’m done with everything, I’ll put a better narrative on this site.  Or maybe I’ll just leave it there and keep glitched.org/up for music-related things.

Anyway, I’ll have a couple new sound snips of my modular synth creations, soon.

http://glitched.org/up/eurorack-front-panels-by-glitched/

After you’ve digested all of that information (or just looked at the pretty pictures) and decided you’re interested in one of them, you must understand these caveats:

1) Acrylic is fragile.  It may scratch or break, under a certain amount of force.

2) This first run of panels is 3.0mm thick, which is about 1.0mm thinner than typical Eurorack front panels.  (Two M3 x 8 screws will be provided.)

3) These are hand-made items, so they may have slight imperfections (but I strive to make every one as good as the last).

Pricing

Each panel will be USD 15$ + 3$ shipping (unless otherwise noted), for up to three panels, if in the United States;  4-6 panels, 4$.  Elsewhere:  4$ USD  for shipping, up to 3 panels; $5.50 for more.

Current Design Availability

Unfortunately, not all of the panels that I have shown will be available in this first run.  The main reason for not being able to sell the SCM/RCD panels is because the 3.0mm acrylic is too thick for the stock jacks to fit through.  If you don’t care about that and want to find your own jacks, make a note in your message to me and I’ll see what I can do.

Go to this link to check the available options:

http://bit.ly/eJPmvN

Procedure

Here’s what you need to do if you’re interested:

0) Check which designs are available by viewing this spreadsheet:

http://bit.ly/eJPmvN

1) Go to the “front panel request form,” here:

http://www.glitched.org/up/contact-form/

2) Enter your details.

3) In the message body state the following:

• Which panel(s) you’re interested in.  (Example: QUANT-white/black/raster.)
• Quantity (list a number for each style if multiple panels were chosen)
• Paypal address (if different from contact email address)
• Your country.  I’m located in the US, but will ship internationally.
• Any additional notes or requests.

4) Hit “submit”.

Now, this is important: unless the panel is currently in stock, the steps above are only to declare your interest in these panels; there is no obligation to buy and your paypal address will only be used at the final step, when I need to initiate the production run.

If I have the panel that you want on-hand (again, see the spreadsheet), I will send you an invoice right away and you can pay me.

If I receive interest for more than 5 panels, I will be able to initiate production and will then send you an invoice for the total, to your paypal address.  I will also notify you of the payment cut-off date.  If I don’t receive money by that date, you will not receive a panel (but there may be a couple extras, after everyone has gotten theirs).

Once the order is placed, it can take anywhere from 2-3 weeks be produced and get to me.  I take them, paint them, and pack them up.  This probably won’t take more than two days.  After that, it’s time to ship!

*UPDATE* — Go here for the full story, including tons of high-resolution photos: http://glitched.org/up/eurorack-front-panels-by-glitched/

The next update will include information on how to procure one of these panels.

END OF LINE

—————–

I have designed some alternate front panels, in eurorack format, for 4MS Pedals’ Rotating Clock Divider, RCD Breakout, and Shuffling Clock Multiplier.  Besides those “commercial” modules, I also did a design for a DIY quantizer found on electro-music.com.  These panels were designed by me (can you tell I’m proud of myself?) and manufactured by that wonderful “personal factory,” Ponoko.  Again, more information on the process will come soon.  View the gallery below for some pictures.  (By the way, it was really hard to get good pictures of these things, considering how shiny they are.  Plus, dust just seems love acrylic.  It’s vexing to know how good the panels look in real life, when the camera doesn’t do them justice.  More pics, tomorrow.)

1.  I’ve finally gotten into the modular game!  After maybe 10 years of pining after a modular synthesizer system, I finally gave in and purchased a few modules.  See below for a slideshow:

2.  I’ve updated my soundcloud with sounds and loops made with that system:
MODULAR SET 1: http://snd.sc/bABNwB
MODULAR SET 2: http://snd.sc/fuFH3p

3. Remember the Shruti-1 DIY synthesizer project?  Well, I wrote up a rather extensive article that describes the entire building process, which was hosted on drop.io.  That site is now defunct, so I have moved that information to this site, at this location: http://glitched.org/up/diy-shruti-1-synthesizer-glitched/

4.  My Monomachine suffered a memory-erasing crash last night; I lost everything.  The sad part about this is that I had a bunch of songs and ideas ready to record for my upcoming album, but now they’re all gone.  Subsequently, I won’t be releasing anything soon.  This is just a minor setback.  Whenever this sort of thing happens, I look at it as a sort of cleansing experience and usually come up with some material that is 10x better than whatever I lost.  I’ll be back in action, soon.

That’s all for now.

In the meantime, check out some of my recent tracks @ bandcamp.
I’ve been really into “Master Control,” recently:

http://glitched.bandcamp.com/track/master-control

UPDATE: Well, that was quick and painless–we’re back!  The transition from Godaddy to Dreamhost was flawless.

UPDATE2: I’m really happy with Dreamhost.  If you want to try them out, you can use this code, which entitles you to 1 year of hosting + 1 free domain for $60:  DHOST60 .  By the way, this WordPress site is maybe 3-5 times faster than it was on Godaddy.

One drawback of the (albeit, free) service is that it only streams at 128k and that makes some of my tunes sound like crap.   I suppose everyone’s in the same boat because 128k seems to be the industry standard (even bandcamp’s player streams at this rate).  Thankfully, there is a “download original” function, where the listener can download a higher-quality mp3, .flac, or even .wav.

Add me up!

As much as I wanted to keep everything the same, as I dug into “Hyperstarship”, I felt it needed some “breathing room.”  That is, there’s a lot going on and it just needed a little variety as the song progressed.

Instead of everything coming in after the intro [1], I silenced the hi-hat and allowed the pad to come in before letting the song get into its stride.  I also removed the 808-ish snare that appears in the :30 – 1:00 range [2]

Click to see the arrangement and annotations.

because I didn’t think it added much and I really wanted the listener to concentrate on that floaty 202 pad.  Speaking of which, to add a little [d]-ness to the track, I duplicated the track with the 202 and shifted one of them, so it sounded like a delay; one segment was also reversed, which is something I love to do [3].

Going back to the track with the 808 snare for a moment (labeled, “HSS_Percussions”, Live track 5), the pattern included a tom in it as well, which was a bit too busy; also, it interfered with the bassdrum, so I had to cut some of it out and create a new pattern [2a].  The new sequence sounds more “retro” to me.

I continued to comb through the arrangement and pick out parts that either didn’t add much to the song or got in the way of the enjoyment of the other elements.  At around :33 of the original mix, a thick, phasing, panning, buzzy sweep appears [4], which is a great lead-in to the next part of the song, but it is present throughout the entire song.  The problem isn’t with the sound itself (it’s a really cool Monomachine sound), but with the fullness and “liveliness” of it; in other words, it’s a really rich sound that might get in the way of the bassline or pad or whatever.

The light pad that plays throughout the track was left unaltered, except for an auto-panner instance, which was used more as a slow tremlolo effect, for variation [5].

At around 3:00, the bassline drops out and the kick and snare are allowed to do their thing, as a sort of final breakdown [6].

After making these changes to the arrangement, I was very happy with it.  The mixing was good too.  Of course, it took about five iterations to get it “perfect”, but after listening to it in my car (the acid test), it was done.  Oh, except for the mastering.

Because I spent so much time on the mix, “Hyperstarship” didn’t need all that much polishing off.  (I say this with all humility, as I understand that there are real “pro” mix engineers that would a lot of things differently than I did.)  The thing I didn’t want to do was smash the track into oblivion (it was already pretty compressed, anyway) and make the waveform hug the 0dB line the entire song.  (You can really screw everything up at this point.)

IL's Maxximus plugin.

Using my favorite plugin of all time, Image-Line’s Maxximus, I started with the “clear master” preset, which essentially flattens most of the settings.  Even that setting was too much, so I turned down the LMH mix (basically, the depth of the Maxximus effect).  At that point, the loudness was good, but it didn’t sound much different than the un-mastered version.  Expanding the stereo image in the high and mid bands was the key.

A few more minor tweaks to preserve the dynamics and hyperstarship was done.

So, there you go.  Two blog posts that took way longer than the actual remix project itself.  I love doing both.  Thank you for the opportunity, Buromaschinen!

If you like what I have done with his mix, my services are available to the public.  Contact me here or @ twitter.

So, I first discovered Buromaschinen on the Elektron-users.com forums, a while back.  His tunes, made almost exclusively with the Monomachine and Machinedrum, evoked a retro-futuristic feeling to which I was really drawn.  His take on the whole 8/16-bit-retro-80′s-electro-videogame -thing is framed a bit differently than the worn-out “chiptune” paradigm.  Think R-Type, Altered Beast, and the TurboGrafx-16, rather than Galaga, Pac-Man, and the Atari 2600.  When listening to his tracks, I imagine that I’m escaping murderous cyborgs or reconstructing my past, while searching out an alien artifact that releases oxygen from beneath Mars’ surface.

Anyway, as much as his sound takes me back to a pleasant time in my life, I often want to hear a more “modern” take on the mix.  As Buromaschinen has said himself: “The mix sucks but I like it a lot, as it sounds bad like electronic music used to sound bad in early nineties.”  It’s certainly not that bad, but the melodies and beats deserve to be polished to a hi-gloss, like a T-800, fresh off the line.

As soon as I heard “Hyperstarship”, I wanted to see if I could improve the mix.  Overall, the sound wasn’t bad, but the main thing that bothered me was that it sounded “muddy” in the low end;  I really wanted that analog bassline and bass drum to play nicely.  Yes, everything seemed over-compressed, but that’s part of his sound; I really didn’t want to change that too much.

The composition was good, if a bit repetitive, but again, I wanted to “re-mix” his tune, not “remix” it.  With this goal in mind, I came to Buro and asked if he’d be amenable to me taking some liberties with his track.  He responded nearly instantly with several .wav files (the stems of the song) and his blessing.  BONUS STAGE: The stems were 24-bit, included wet and dry versions, and reference tracks!  (This is how all mix/remix projects should go!)

So, now that the stage is set, on to the process…

As I mentioned, the track stems were in perfect order, starting with a “click” at the beginning, for syncing purposes.  (This got me to wondering what recording gear Buro uses…I think it’s one of those portable, digital, multi-trackers, which would explain the syncing “click”.)  I threw everything into Ableton Live, straight away, immediately trimming the files to the first transient.  I figured that I could just reconstruct the arrangement by listening to the original mix, rather than use the click.

After the reconstruction, I isolated each track, just to hear what was going on and to see if I could identify any problems.  One of the glaring issues was the bassiness of the snare.  It certainly contributed to the muddiness of the mix.  Obviously, I had to EQ a lot of the low end out, but I didn’t want to sacrifice the “body” of the snare.  (A note on equipment, here: I mostly use free or built-in plugins in Ableton Live.  Among my favorite, free paragraphic EQs is “Nyquist EQ,” by Magnus.)  I can’t tell you exactly what frequencies I targeted because this is a paragraphic eq, without numerical values; this is great for listening for good results, rather than going for a certain “golden” number.  The snare also needed more “punch”; it was too clicky and needed more body.  I smashed the amplitude spikes down and used the compressor’s makup gain to make the snare sound fuller.

Bassdrum rack and NyquistEQ plugin.

The bass drum needed some more punch, as well as “thud”, so the requisite (built-in Live) compressor and eq were added to that channel.  My main goal with the bass (the kick and bass synth) was to have them work together, by carving out some mid-bass from the bassline and some low-low bass from the bass drum.  The way I do this, for the uninitiated, is to solo the bassline and bassdrum tracks and tweak them together, away from the main mix.  This was the tougest part, but I think the result was good.   One other thing I did to the kick was reduce the stereo image, using the Live “Utility” plugin.  Bass panned too far to the left or right sounds awkward, at least in headphones.

Once I got the bass mix right, I found that there was something missing from the snare.  Actually, the drums seemed more “related” in the original mix and I wanted to recreate this.  I rarely use mix busses/groups because, well, when you have an infinite number of tracks, there’s really no need for them; however, after reading an article with the producer of Justin Beiber’s tunes (don’t laugh), I thought I should try it.  I piped the outs of the snare and kick drums into a spare channel, on which I launched an instance of a “tape warmth”-type effect.  Overdriving the input just a bit and upping the “drive” setting made the drums sound like they were meant to be together.

The rest of the mix wasn’t as difficult.  Buro did a great job on the highs and mids.  I didn’t do much on the hi-hats and only put a tiny auto-panner on the pad sound to add some variety.  The “percussion” track was fine, but needed to stand out more.  The low end was cut and a little bit of presence was added (@ around 11khz).  With the mix in a good place, the final task was to alter the arrangement.

In the next post, I’ll describe what I did to the song structure.

Speaking of, here’s the second part: http://glitched.org/up/2010/09/d-re-mix-hyperstarship-continued/

The original version seemed low in volume compared to my other tracks; the bass was somewhat lacking as well.  Usually, you don’t want to overdo it on the mastering front, but the bass, especially in the “boom” range, needed to be brought way up.  (Ideally, I would have boosted the bass in the composition phase [in the machinedrum], but it sounded good in the headphones.)

The lesson to be learned is that you should audition your tracks on several systems before calling it a day.  That being said, I think this newly remastered version sounds much fuller and louder than the original.

Personal note: If you like how some of my tracks sound, I am experimenting with mastering, for a fee.  Let me know if you’re interested in this.

One user on elektron-users.com experimented with assigning an envelope to the volume parameter of an “SWAV-ENS” machine.  Every time the sound is triggered, it will go down in volume, then sharply upward.  There’s nothing ground-breaking about that, but the real trick is to put a bass drum trig on the same trigs as the ENS machine, thus making it sound as if the bass drum is kicking off the compressor.  Even better, place empty (note) trigs on the ENS track that match the bass drum track (that way, the ENS note trigs don’t always have to be on the same trig as the bass drum).  Anyway, that’s what I did and the result is in that short tune.  (There’s a longer version, but I don’t think it’s worth remastering.)

Monomachine, Machinedrum and WTPA.  A 0.5 second loop was manually sampled from the Monomachine (going through the Machinedrum) and left freely running.  It wasn’t a perfect loop, so I matched the tempo and created a hip-hoppy beat that just fit.  I raised the “throughput” (dry) volume and that accounts for the saturated sound.  The WTPA has a very warm sound on its own (being 8-bit), but when you overload the input stage, it’s instant character.  That sine tone is from the MD–a random wave LFO is modulating pitch, periodically.  There’s a weird, filtered Atari sound in there, too.  I think it’s a “tank engine” type of sound.

[d] – “Master Control” — http://glitched.bandcamp.com/track/master-control

All WTPA.  A short loop was sampled from the Monomachine and manipulated programmatically, via CC#s, in Live.  (You can modulate start/end/and loop points, on the fly!)  I believe I tweaked the controls in realtime in a couple places.  There’s some filtering and ghetto phasing in places (by doubling up the track) and reverb.  Oh, and I used the Shruti-1 in a strategic places!  (It’s that filter-sweepy sound.)

Both of these tracks are two of my recent favorites.  I love “master control” and spent a lot of time mixing and mastering it.  The WTPA sound can difficult to control.
“Trap” is dirty and dissonant.  Different than my usual.

The idea behind the redesign was to make it easier to listen to and pay for my music (if you want).  This is facilitated by the wonderful (and free, for now) bandcamp.com.  They really package everything together nicely and seem to understand what an independent artist wants in a music distribution service.  Ok, so you’re not exactly going to be booked on Jimmy Kimmel right away, but their marketing infrastructure is pretty sound, especially for a free service.  My favorite thing about Bandcamp.com is that they’re a (technologically) forward-thinking company; artists want their music to be heard in the best quality and Bandcamp serves up 320k mp3 (ok) and lossless FLAC files (awesome!)  Ok, enough about them.

As of now, all the tracks on glitched.bandcamp.com are “pay what you want”, but are free if you enter “0″ in the price field.  I’m realistic, so I’m not trying to make a living at this, but if my art moves you at all, you could pay a dollar (or more) per track.  (By the way, thanks to those who have supported me in the past!)

Be sure to subscribe to this blog and my twitter for information on how my music is made and for lots of extra content that I don’t put up on my bandcamp page.

One final thing: this is the link to the archive of my previous blog.  There’s lots of information about my old tracks on there, but some links are probably dead.
http://glitcheddotorg.blogspot.com/

“sunridge”
http://glitched.bandcamp.com/track/sunridge

I will be updating glitched.org this or next week with these two tracks. I really want to do a redesign and move everything to bandcamp.mu (which seems to be the best free solution to get your music out there). Also, it’s time to renew glitched.org again, so there may be a couple site hiccups.

Anyway, “except europa” is inspired by the movie, 2010: The Odyssey Continues. I guess this movie is what I’m all about (or what my music is all about): the future, fear of apocalypse, space, the good ol’ USSR, and malfunctioning sentient computers. I don’t know why, but monoliths compel me to make the eeriest ambient music. All Virus TI Snow, played live.

“Sunridge” is a “found song,” in that I had forgotten about it and came back to it, a year after recording. One day I was rummaging around the myriad temporary folders on my harddrive, when I came across a simple, two-track Ableton Live file. Surprisingly, all it needed was a little EQing and editing, and it was done. My friend says it sounds vaguely “Orbitalish”, which is never a bad thing; they were among my first influences. I think he says that because the Monomachine’s FM machine (dynamic type, I think) is used liberally and is reminiscent of early Orbital tracks. All Monomachine and Machinedrum.  By the way, the name of the track comes from some suburban development I drove by, the other day.  Has a nice ring to it: “sunridge”.

I will continue to post important updates here, so subscribe to the RSS feed.

Anyway, here are a couple recent tracks:
http://glitched.bandcamp.com/track/computers-dream

[d] – computers don’t dream (no longer available)

Both tracks were made exclusively with the TI Snow. Both tracks were recorded live, without sequencing. No beats in these because I’m still in the “honeymoon period” with the Snow. As you will hear, it’s a very powerful instrument with complex synthesis capabilities.

UPDATE:
I have uploaded the one of the patches that I used in “computers dream”. (Ok, it’s not the exact patch because I didn’t save it, but it’s a reasonable facsimile.)

Here you go:

airtram2.syx Virus TI Snow single patch.