MattBowen/blog

I love delay. I don't think this is unusual for people who play rock instruments. For Christmas one year, I got a big multieffects pedal, and even with hundreds of effects patches, I pretty much left it set to delay. And last night, I discovered that record has hell-of delay. It's kinda like my pedal, only instead of two delays, there are 12. Having so many options was nearly paralyzing... but only nearly; I decided I couldn't just fool with them all night, found one that had a nice rhythm, and dug in with my bass. About 45 minutes later, this 45 seconds of music was ready. It's really simply — two variations of a bassline, a steady helping of delay, a nice rock drum loop that I found in reason, and a synth-guitar part that's actually just three notes run through reason's arpeggiator. Certainly not my most ambitious, but fun to lay down all the same.

None More Delay

On Friday, I got my Record beta invite, and last night I fired it up and wrote a song. Record is like reason, only you can record audio from instruments that you plug into your soundcard. So, I grabbed a drum loop, put down an initial synth melody, and then plugged my bass in to see what I could add. And then before I knew it, it was 2AM and I still hadn't really mixed anything yet, but I had a ton of tracks. I really enjoyed making this one; the more I played, the better each note felt, and I'm pretty happy with the overall sound. Like, so happy that I might have just thrown all my more productive plans out the window in favor of playing my bass more and trying to understand the massive soundboard that record emulates...

Long Bass

After that last minute, it was clear that it was time for a little distance between me and reason. So, as a form of detox, I wrote a simple dance song on the Kaossilator. I still love that I can just turn it on, start pressing on it single control, and 30 minutes later have a beat that has me bopping my head. Maybe by next minute of music I'll have a record beta invite and can integrate Kaossilator, bass, and reason into some glorious cacophony.

Some Simple Signing and Dancing

This one got really gross -- the bass is gnarly, the drums are out of time, and the organ is thick. I was fooling around trying to sequence some simple drums and I couldn't get the to quantize in a way that sounded good, so I just stuck with 'em out of time. Then, the bass came from playing with LFO late at night to get the distortion to growl. I'm not going to say I'm proud, but I'm not going to throw it away, either.

Minute of mess

Although my minutes of music don't sound this way, I actually listen to a good bit of rock music. I was even in a rock band (of sorts) in college. So, I thought maybe I'd try to make something more rock-y in reason. I think this will go better when Record is out -- then I will be able to play bass and guitar into the computer and things will feel more natural. But, I'm not unhappy with the results here, as you might be able to tell from the fact that this is closer to three minute than one minute of music -- I was having a good time and figured I'd just keep playing. I also got to use even more of reason's features; I used a drum loop, but I enhanced it with some extra stuff from the drum machine, I have a ton of mixer automation and a bunch of effects, and I even automated the song's tempo. It remains a great deal of fun.

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