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.
by 
