Sunday, October 9, 2016

'Underwater' and 'Hopeful'

I finally was able to finish off two (mainly) electronic tunes this past week. I had started them in May and July 2016 and they had been sitting on my computer unfinished up until now (October 2016).

The tune 'Hopeful' came out sort of accidentally as a by product of me uploading a a few guitar loops for others to use at the site http://www.looperman.com/ . Because I have an uneasy sense of rhythm I depend on drum loops or drum machines heavily, so I have been extracting drum loops from this site for a number of years now. Though sometimes I do program my own beats, more often than not I use loops and layer them.

Anyway, I thought it was about time I paid pack the site with loops that others could use and so I uploaded a small number.

I had a thought that it might be cool then to use some of these guitar loops and make a song out of them.
As usual with me, whatever starts an idea for a tune often gets lost on the way and I ended up using about three loops and the rest was made up by my own playing and a few more audio loops from the fine people on http://www.looperman.com/.  Somewhere along the way because I usually listen to dance music when I'm driving the car (mainly from http://fresh927.com.au/) I thought it might be fun to attempt a house-sort-of tune. The end result is 'Hopeful which is more a 1990's dance-ish style':






And here is a blurry video of how I put it together



The tune 'Underwater' really started with playing with an original 1980's Casio MT 70 keyboard that my dad bought brand new back when we were young-er.

It looked like this when it was new:




Somehow I eventually inherited it and it's sat in a few different sheds and houses along the way. I was playing with the very basic sequencer on it - I think it was after listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album with the use of a basic sequencer on the track 'On the Run'. I get easily inspired and so I programed in a basic pattern on the keyboard and that was beginning of the tune.

The next inspiration was a routine rental house inspection. I always load up my mp3 player with music to keep me going with the preparation. This time around I had collected a few Chemical Brothers albums from a second hand shop, also an earlier work from BT and The Prodigy's Fat of the Land.

I have no idea how they get such fat sounds but with my vintage computer and bits and pieces I tried to make a track with a little more muscle using mostly electronics. I did play live bass on the track because it needed more live grunt.

So here is 'Underwater':





And here is the 'making of' Underwater:



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