New Song: “Snow Break” (92bpm)
On this very snowy Santa Fe morning and with one week left until the 2008 Winter Solstice, I’m pleased to release this new song for free under a creative commons license. Snow Break is a 92bpm ‘breaks’ piece based around a sampled string melody from a 1960’s Mellotron tape loop. (The Mellotron was the original pre-digital sampler, a massive and fiddly organ that triggered the playback of tape loops instead of tone wheels…)
It’s been years since I’ve played around in the 90-bpm breaks range. Having that extra time/space between the beats makes it possible to play with wicked bass sounds and long cymbals - things that are hard to squeeze into my usual 140-175bpm range. This is also the first song I’ve mastered using Logic’s built-in multiband compressor and adaptive limiter (instead of an off-the-shelf mastering tool like Yamaha’s finalizer or T-racks.) I think the Logic plugins preserved a lot of the crispness and space that would have been muddied up by the other harder-edged mastering tools. What you hear below is the final (13th) mix of this song.
Listen:
Serious Song (Drum ‘n’ Bass)
Wow this song was a long time in the making. 12+ months? Not sure if it’s done yet — this mix feels a little thick and awkward at times — but it’s done enough to let me move on to some other tracks in the near term.
174 BPM d’n'b, growly nasty bassline, occasional explosive speaker-ripping kicks, and an acid synth line that snuck in from my techno personality.
The “This song is a serious song, isn’t it?” sample is from this very silly record.
Listen here:
Dance Dance Revolution
Does anyone have a Xbox 360 I can borrow?
A while back I was hired to compose two songs for Konami’s DDR UltraMix 4, and they sent me some free copies of the game… but I don’t have a console to play on (or stomp on or whatever it’s called when you do the blinky-light DDR thing.)
They bought all-out rights to the songs I made so I can’t post the DDR editions here. However one of the songs was a remix of an older drum ‘n’ bass tune I wrote called “Indian Summer” which I can reproduce in full here:
Benbient (Ambient)
Composed for Benjamin Becker, born Feb 12, 2008. 102 bpm. Ambient groove deep ethno dub. Usually I make music on a Macintosh running Logic Audio and a sizable amount of outboard gear… but this one was composed entirely on a Palm Pilot T|X using Bhaji’s Loops between the hours of 3am and 5am while lying around in bed waiting for Ben to wake up to the dawn.
Listen here:
Stringy (Drum ‘n’ Bass)
168 bpm, lush strings, jazzy fun drum ‘n’ bass with a couple of deep-beat breakdowns.
Listen: