On the first of January I embarked on a new musical journey. I started project ONOMA.
The challenge: create an instrumental album with at least two tracks, 20 minutes each, for a release in mid-August. The title is the Greek word for name. Cheesy I know. But it has a very musical ring to me.
In August 2018 I made the opening theme, while just doodling on Machine, in 2 days, bounced it to Google drive to listen to it on my mobile. When I wanted to start working on it again the next day, my music hard drive crashed and I lost all of the midi files related to it and most of the midi for my backcatalogue. Just the bounced file and the tweaked Maschine beat survived. As I also lost access to my plugins, I couldn’t restart the work until I had built up my PC again.
I almost had forgotten about the track. In December I started to clean up my Google drive an rediscovered it, liked it and had the idea for the challenge. And so the new year’s resolution for this challenge was born.
By now I am well into creating the first track, the A-side. The style is eclectic as always. It definitely has vibes from Oldfield and Jarre. A little Markus is in there, too. Shifting from Rock to Folk to Pop to synthy Techno.
I started an production update series on my Instagram. Soon I will be uploading some sounds. Stay tuned for it.
But the project is not only a musical one. I also decided to streamline my visual appearance on social. I will focus on Instagram and started by trying to find a more coherent style for my posts. I hope you’ll like it.
This is all a evolutionary process. I hope the final product will find an audience.
As you may know 2018 was a year of disasters for me. Not only was I hospitalised with having had a heart attack, I still suffer from cardiomyopathy. But I am recovering and almost back to form. But by far the worst thing happened in September when my music harddrive, yes the one with all my instruments and my music went down. Sure I was backing up most of the files,and the instruments could be restored. But what I didn’t know , was that the backup was corrupted too.
I set all my hopes in a professional recovery service, prepared to shell out some serious money to get it all back, but all my hopes failed. Yep. Almost all the production files of my tracks since 2013 are lost. Thank god, only two current, unreleased tracks were lost. The tracks up to 2016 are on an old PC I will copy some time in the future. Some are backed up on blend.io. And I’m currently downloading them. So, until December I was on a forced production hiatus, as I had only very basic tools to work with, and underwent some medical rehab treatment.
But once black Friday came the Itch was back. I replaced my Maschine MK1 with an MK3 and stocked up on some synth. You can never have enough plugins …
So I’m back to making music but for now searching a theme for the next album. I’m sure the spark will come soon and I’ll be back on some late night sessions fiddling over some Bihar beat … Until then I wish all of you a very good start into 2019 and health for you and your hard drives.
PS: I am now backing up daily on a separate NAS harddrive and checking the backup integrity also daily.
My new album ORIGIN finally has been released on Bandcamp and Soundcloud on August 31. 2018. The full worldwide release will follow on September 3.
ORIGIN IS HERE. This album was my first foray into the sound of modular synthesis. I used Native Instruments Reaktor6 to crate new and exciting soundscapes to weave my melodies around. Building beats on Maschine i.e. and putting them through Reaktor effect Modular or sampling some crazy sounds from free Instruments on the Reaktor User Library was a wonderful experience. Next to Reaktor I have to cite several Heavocity VSTs I must as Inspiration for some tracks as well as the Roli Seabord which makes my VSTGuitarist life a lot easier. The electric guitars sounds so much more realistic. A late addition was the new version of Vocaloid5, which gets the non-vocalist a much more realistic voice. I will surely explore this in the future. Lastly I ventured into the binaural experience. Using the free Sennheiser AMBEO plugin I tried to broaden my tracks and make ORIGIN a truly immersive experience.
Headphones mandatory
So, put on your headphones and dive into the deep, rich tapestry of sounds and melodies. Let yourself feel the pulse of life and the relaxation of flight. ORIGIN to me is a wonderful journey, best listened to on headphones from the first track to the last. Thank you for listening.
Thank you for listening
The story behind ORIGIN
Origin has been an adventure in hard times. As you may know, I had a heart attack at the beginning of 2018 and am still suffering from heart insufficiency. As a result, I had way more time on my hands than was good for me. So I dived into creating new music, my one and only true passion besides my family.
The playful beginnings
One morning I started to play with some Reaktor Instruments I had never used and it sounded fun. I started sampling the sounds added some field recorded sounds and other samples, some quite raunchy samples I must admit, and what-do-you-know I suddenly had a track of almost 8 minutes with no real chord progression, no real melody, no real text. Just a slowly developing beat with some sound effects. I loved it. Listen to Tumbling.
From then on the whole album developed quite naturally. I couldn’t help but return to music with chords, melody, and rhythm, though. This just sounds thing was a one-off. I cannot deny that some tracks show my frustration at my slow-paced recovery and may sound angry at the world. Listen to Traumatic and (Not) End Of The World. But the joy of creating something new for my sound has also helped me through darker times.
Not only dark moods
There are also bright moments that reflect the better days. Cloudless Sky was the first track that deviated from the pattern mentioned above. Sometimes a glitch in the software can do the trick. I normally use Maschine as a plugin in Ableton when creating a track. Often after having created a basic track or some idea in Maschine standalone. Here the plugin stopped working for some mysterious reason. So I had a look at some of the new beat sets in Ableton and created the beat that sounded a bit like a tabla rhythm. Above that I just played some easy chords and started riffing with my seaboard and a guitar sound. Voila. Happy accident as Bob Ross would say.
Being a bad vocalist I am long interested in synthetic vocals. The spoken vocals are mostly created with the google translator. The singing voices are the new Vocaloid5. The release of the new update sparked a new wave of tracks. Dreamland was created as I needed an opener for the album. What else was an attempt at creating a song with that great new vocal engine that you really could enjoy. I feel that with Dreamland I created a little EP inside the album. Tracks 1 to 5 are a loosely told story of an excessively emotional time for me.
What is the ORIGIN
The story of creating the cover for the album I already told in the last post. What I haven’t told you that the title came before the track Origin. In a situation like mine, you naturally search for a reason why. Why me? Why now? Why at all? What is the ORIGIN of all this? So I came up with an answer in my music. You need to listen to get it too.
Thank you for listening and don’t forget to follow me everywhere. Go here.
Hi folks, recovery is going well and so is the next album. After some mixing and mastering problems as well as some problems convincing @routenote about the origin of the vocal samples, the release is now finally on its way to all major streaming sites.
The title of the album will be ORIGIN. I will tell you the origin story (no pun intended) in a later post.
If you want to have a sneak peek into the sound follow me on my social media. I already posted some snippets and will do so in the coming days.
Simply go to my link.tree for a shortcut to all my social media.
Cover artwork at last
The cover art was quite a challenge too. When it comes to making the final decision, I’m quite a lazy procrastinator. Even the final idea went through multiple iterations and took about 4 months to come to fruition.
Two similar ideas were shelved after the first month. Somehow they didn’t seem to fit my idea of developing something to remember.
If you want to have a listen to the sound of ORIGIN, just follow me on my social media. I already posted some snippets here and there, as well as some video stuff. I will do so in the days to come. Be sure to follow me on Spotify to get me on your Release Radar.
