I’ve been looking for a better way to record my guitar and bass-based music. FL studio is great for MIDI and VST instruments, but I don’t like how it records audio. Conversely, Audition is great for multitracking audio, but the system chokes if I try and feed it MIDI. I had dicked around in Abelton Lite yesterday after work to see if it was viable, but I didn’t like the interface and poor usage of monitor space. I was looking into running Pro Tools M-Powered on my Delta 1010LT, but M-Audio is still struggling with compatibility with a 64 bit system. Cubase 5 looked ideal in every way except for the pricetag. There had to be something that would fit my needs a bit better without breaking the bank.
Enter Reaper.
What surprised me most is the fact that the program fits in such a small package. The PDF documentation was about four times bigger than the five meg download for the installer. The program is sleek, uncluttered, and customizable.
Download it now and try it out, and if you like what you see, the licenses come as cheap as $60.00!
Triangulation is a song that was written a few years back for a random-topic songwriting contest. It was produced in FL Studio, which unfortunately does not have a surround mixer.
I exported all of the mixer channels to their own tracks so that I could import them into Audition. Keeping everything at unity gain, this gave me the stereo mix which I could then mess around with in Audition’s surround panner/encoder module.
The channels are shown relative to a circle with the listener at the center. The white dot shows where the sound source is to be placed, and the blue-shaded area gives you an idea of the coverage area and what’s coming out of the speakers. Audition does not have any way to record mixer automation, so from here on it was a matter of using the mouse to give the individual tracks room in the 5.1 mix. I was able to draw in some automation curves with the pencil tool, so one is able to give these elements some motion. I had originally low-passed the master-track to give me something for the LFE channel, but it turns out that there is a slider to control how much signal goes to that channel.
Here’s the finished product. Higher fidelity version.
The Audition surround panner can do nearly everything I’d like, but is a pain to use in that you need to have all your tracks (including effects sends) printed and ready to mix. I have quite a few MIDI devices with joysticks and X/Y pads, but I don’t seem to be able to use them with this DAW.
I have half a dozen or so songs from 2000 to 2005 that I’ve been thinking about re-releasing. At this point, they exist as a series of mp3s uploaded to soundclick or last.fm, often with fictitious album names to go with them. There is a fairly wide range of styles on these tracks, and some of them are experimental to the point of being painful to listen to. The songs are out there and I don’t want to disown them, but would it be in my best interest to officially release them on a compilation?
I’ve created myspace pages for my two projects. I’ll add these to the side link bar as well.
While going through the final mixes for the tracks on Sub Luna, I realized there were a couple of things that were bugging me about Sub Phoebus and I’ve decided to tweak a few things. The first problem is that it wasn’t sonically different enough from Sub Luna, especially in the first minute. Also, there were a couple of drum samples that stuck out to me on repeated listens with headphones. The challenge has been to replace a weak snare but keep the same relative drum mix.
A big issue in this remix was to try and get the same sound in a different software environment. The first time around, I had dumped all the tracks from FL Studio and imported them into Cubase for EQ, effects, and mix automation. FL 8 is nearly powerful enough to be a one-stop shop, but I was having trouble finding a way to draw automation from scratch instead of just editing recorded knob turns, etc. I think I’m nearly there, but I have a couple of tweaks to do here and there before I’ll be satisfied enough to release it officially.
Umbriel is a track inspired by my friend Malcom’s Theatre Noir project, and specifically the album Seeds and their sowers. I believe this is the final track for Sub Luna, though probably not in its playing order. I’ll finalize the tracklisting and upload everything to Jamendo some time in the near future.
Hyperion is another entry in my album of mood (moon) music. This is a mostly improvised piece that was given an asymmetrical structure to reflect a particular satellite of Saturn and it’s idiosyncratic orbit.
Io is set to be the third track from my upcoming TheForgotton album Sub Luna. It comes from the same session that begot the Caustic Reverie album Mute and contains instruments that use optical synthesis. Also available from Soundclick and last.fm.
