KVR Audio

donkey tugger · Post by **donkey tugger** » Sat Sep 16, 2017 9:19 pm

skipscada wrote:Adding a note to myself here: keep guitar parts simple and be relaxed when you play. I get tense whenever I press record. God knows why. Good thing I'm never on a stage.

Weird innit? When I used to play live in bands I was never bothered by it - mistakes are part of it, and to be honest I'd generally had a few 'light ales' by the time we went on..

Recording on the other hand..even now after playing for over 30 years, sat on my own in the comfort of my own house with no-one to answer to, tense as f**k!

folderol · Post by **folderol** » Tue Sep 19, 2017 5:08 pm

donkey tugger wrote:
skipscada wrote:Adding a note to myself here: keep guitar parts simple and be relaxed when you play. I get tense whenever I press record. God knows why. Good thing I'm never on a stage.

Weird innit? When I used to play live in bands I was never bothered by it - mistakes are part of it, and to be honest I'd generally had a few 'light ales' by the time we went on..

Recording on the other hand..even now after playing for over 30 years, sat on my own in the comfort of my own house with no-one to answer to, tense as f**k!

Yep. Same here

Also, it looks like my cunning plan is falling aprat (that was a typo but it actually fits!) - it's one thing to have all these nice new controls, but it's quite another thing actually making use of them without considerable practice.

It looks like I may have to fall back to 'conventional' methods

skipscada · Post by **skipscada** » Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:41 pm

Thanks for the moral support. I've actually tried to work on this a bit the last couple of days. Simply tapping my foot helps my timing. I know I should do it, but I never really got the habit. Recording shorter takes, dividing parts into 1 or 2 bar segments also helps, although the flow of the thing may suffer. The only real solution is probably hours of serious practice every day, so I have to decide what to ditch, my job or my family.

Folderol, I suppose you're talking about faders and encoders etc to control synths, effects, mixer etc. I've never got around to setting up mine properly either. It's like convincing yourself to go through one massive headache in the hope that it will save you many small headaches further down the road. Having said that, coincidentally I mapped my keyboard's faders and encoders to the mixer in my DAW recently, and it'll be fun (hopefully) to try to do the final mix that way for once.

Picked up a virus (microbe, not synth) this week and can hardly talk, so what was intended as a guide vocals will probably make it to the final mix. Oh well.

Mister Natural · Post by **Mister Natural** » Wed Sep 20, 2017 3:19 pm

feel better Skip

I embrace your suggestion of keeping the parts as simple as possible. For my humble skill level, that seems to work the best

I keep reminding myself two things while putting together a piece : less is more and that I only have to please myself with the mix.

Mister Natural · Post by **Mister Natural** » Mon Sep 25, 2017 2:37 am

wow BluBot . . . just wow

rockstar_not · Post by **rockstar_not** » Mon Sep 25, 2017 4:56 am

So many old KVRians participating again - I think I'll have to play next month...

skipscada · Post by **skipscada** » Mon Sep 25, 2017 9:33 pm

Hooray, with Hellfog's entry there's 11! Moving in the right direction.

Feeling better after light bronchitis, but all work no play the rest of the month, so I'm happy I posted mine despite the dodgy vox and half-baked mix.

Will try to do comments. Close listening and trying to describe what I hear is always a good exercise, I find. Not sure if it's of any use to anyone else, though. I suppose we all know more or less where the strengths and weaknesses of our tracks are.

bluerobot · Post by **bluerobot** » Mon Sep 25, 2017 11:09 pm

Well, this month was all about collaboration for me, and it was really interesting/challenging/fun.

Thanks to Mister Natural and Hellfog for the great inspiration!

I'm glad I asked. Feels like community. Something we can do with more of in the world.

Jay F. · Post by **Jay F.** » Tue Sep 26, 2017 9:15 pm

Too bad I usually don't read the Gossip forum. I missed BlueRobot's proposal.

This month I wanted to take the opportunity to use the embryo of my home made modular synth. But it was too time consuming. So it ended up on only two tracks, along with my Anushri. Not bad but I'll do better next time when the necessary VCF and VCA functions are available.

skipscada · Post by **skipscada** » Wed Sep 27, 2017 11:00 am

Voting thread up. Any ideas on next month?

folderol · Post by **folderol** » Wed Sep 27, 2017 8:57 pm

How about a space theme. Sputnik, Voyager, Beagle2, Cassini. There's no shortage of them!

bluerobot · Post by **bluerobot** » Wed Sep 27, 2017 9:58 pm

+1 for Space!

skipscada · Post by **skipscada** » Wed Sep 27, 2017 10:42 pm

Space is the place

skipscada · Post by **skipscada** » Fri Sep 29, 2017 3:29 pm

Made some comments. Don't take them too seriously. I mean well.

Mr. Natural – Vapor
Interesting synchopation, nice groove, held back slightly by some timing inaccuracies. A nudge here and there, and this groove would be heavenly. Soothing, hypnotic effect, combining potentially disparate elements into a coherent whole. Agree with BlueRobot that it's a grower, possibly because the unusual structure keeps you waiting for more vocals the first time around. Easier to accept it on a 2nd listen.

Donkey Tugger – Suddenly Appear
Nice jangly guitar sound (oh yes). Good job underscoring the inherent dynamics of the song by expanding and contracting the stereo image and adjusting the high frequency content. Textbook stuff. The fondness for delay effects gives it a distinct nineties sound after a sixties start. I can practically feel the shattered glass and sticky beer underfoot at the student disco. But in a good way.

Perfect User – Proves
Nice minimalist backing with just about enough variety to keep it interesting. Good strategy to keep the backing unintrusive. If I had a voice like that, I'd sing a capella. About the mix, I'd say there's some unhelpful compression going on there, and I'd try a different mic position or a different mic on the guitar to give it ever so slightly more high frequency content. Or perhaps you have made a conscious decision to EQ away some high frequencies to make way for the vocals? Cracking track, anyway.

Rollasoc – Music Box Reaktion
I see the appeal of the experiment, but as a piece of music it leaves me a bit cold, I'm afraid. Potentially hypnotic, but I felt the need to resist it somehow. We mustn't let the machines take over! Imagine driverless cars. Er...

Laguna Rising – Late Summer Mood
A couple of hungover Beach Boys knock out a prospective B side, Mike Love and Wilson Sr. veto it because of the spaced out rock guitar part. F**k you Mike Love. I love it.

ClaRago – Not Today
Well developed composition. Potential for more drama in the mix? Especially the guitar, which seems to want to soar much higher than this. Now the mix seems more static than the composition to me. Lots of potential in the track, but it sounds somewhat restrained to me, making me think of background music.

Beanpole – Saturday
Classic no nonsense pop punk. Beanpole in Buzzcocks mode. Buzzpole? Beancocks? Scores high on lyrics with popular appeal, scores low on musical preteniousness.

Folderol – Pony and Trap
A BBC Radiophonic Orchestra score for a 70's show? Lots of wonky charm. In a world where most people go for an in your face-approach, this sounds otherworldly with its wooly soft and reverberated sounds. The slow envelope of the melodic sound that underpins the track makes the melody indistinct when played legato, but I suppose that's deliberate since other lead lines are layered over it.

BlueRobot – Vapor (Blue Robot - Freedom Mix)
Nice textures, excellent development of the original track. The natural creative talent and humanity of Mister Natural paired with the robotic groove and machine-like precision of Blue Robot. A match made in cyber heaven, giving birth to a musical super-cyborg.

Hellfog – Blue Fog
Increasingly deep textures, but never out of control. Slightly unsettling rhythm and dynamics at times, but I like those moments when elements jump out. Feels a bit underdeveloped in terms of structure, it starts, grows denser and denser ... and fades out. Like fog, come to think of it. Blue fog. Makes sense now.

Jay F – Cassini's Free Fall
It definitely has a sort of weightless, drifting, spacey quality about it, but the melodic elements show there's a mission behind your ... submission. I think there's room in your music for some unpredictable modular stuff, so it will be interesting to see how you progress with your embryonic new toy.

Yeager – Going Nowhere Fast
This starts just like Eye of the Tiger, but thankfully it only lasts about a second. Nice work on the drum part in particular, which gives the track structure and urgency, and the bass plays along very well. The stereo organ with the leslie effect does a good job adding wideness and movement. The piano part doesn't quite do it for me. It's the most prominent part, but seems to be the least involved one.

donkey tugger · Post by **donkey tugger** » Fri Sep 29, 2017 5:14 pm

skipscada wrote: student disco.

Which was in fact the working title of the ditty before I wrote the lyrics...

September Contest: Gossip