I’ve never really heard much about XP MCE’s sample music in comparison to that of other editions of Windows, but I like it. Good bunch of rock/alt stuff. Particularly Mark Knopfler, Rosie Thomas and The Shins. See: “515 am”, “Red Rover”, and “So Says I”. The video for that last one is very entertaining.
So around a week ago I decided to put together a mix CD. In part for myself to play on the CD Walkman I started bringing to school, in part because having a physical time capsule of my obsessive listening habits is near-fascinating to me, and in part because I thought the idea of burning your own discs to share with friends or whoever you cross the street was just dang pure to begin with. When you’ve got the right mindset, 2021 is whatever year you want it to be. Spotify can eat my trout.
I started it off as a kind of odd assortment of music I’ve found myself listening to the past few years, including works of Vansire and c.layne. Unfortunately it was really tough to actually make anything of it so that it had any kind of rhyme or reason. My familiarity with a lot of that music has dried up a little bit, and I decided that a chop suey of what interests me right now would be most effective.
It took a few days listening and thinking of tracks to add, but I believe I got a good result in the end. A few were prior recommendations from friends, as I find most of my music (new stuff! Starflyer 59, Baldwin Brothers, more Beck), a Grant Lee Buffalo track from the Guitars, Guitars, Guitars compilation I acquired a while back, and a couple bops from the Amplitude OST, hot off the presses. And of course, some frequent repeats from the past month—hence all those Wilco songs. All things considered, it flows pretty decently.
Basically, if I could work it onto the disc, and I had to use nothing but that CD to listen to music for a month, that’s what I picked. And it was a tight fit, too: I actually had to add crossfades in Nero for it to burn onto a 700mb disc. That’s just about 80 minutes of music. No meg wasted. (Well, apart from the lossy compression in some of the tracks, but I’m going for authenticity dangit, I didn’t know what a FLAC was in 2005, let alone how to read.)
The final order was pretty much done and got burned on 4/20. Cammy saw the list and wanted to get in on the fun, so I tossed him (and the other people in Outposts) a bin/cue of the burn, and he even thought to put together one of his own as well.
(not sure if he intends to blog about it, but if he does, I’ll link it)yo check it here
I gave it a burn, and well, I enjoyed it a lot. Cammy’s patrician music taste did not fail.
As mentioned, I got pretty into Am I Inside. Right now, Apollo’s a frequent repeat from it: a pretty, kinda sad song about leaving home for the stars. It’s a good assortment of songs, and I like listening my way through on the Walkman a bunch while on transit and at home.
Mix CDs are great. Though I’ve hardly been much of a playlist person with my music, it’s like this more personal and ultimately rewarding way of doing it. It’s something tangible to remember where you are when it comes to music and mood; I can see myself going back to them five years from now, and later. And heck, when you’re on the receiving end, like with Cammy’s mix? That’s a wealth of artists and music that I can dig further into.
Feels like an adventure, honestly. Reminds me of a particular dungeon crawler.
I’m calling this the Pituophis 1.1 theme.
This is actually from a band in Argentina influenced by works like Yoshimura’s and Kyoto soundscapes. (Note the similarities to the Wet Land cover.) Their discography is all free downloads, so check them out.
Here’s a full album because it’s just that good. Strikes me as 2000s System Menu OST-y for some reason.
Renoise demo from the 23rd that’s certainly less improvised than the last one, more constructed. I would’ve liked to clean it up some more, but this will do for now.
Made in Renoise, with two String Thing instruments, Init and 8th Arp phrases and some lo-def effects. I like it; I think it’s got that cavey feeling, kind of. And spacey too, of course.
I do like Renoise a lot; I’m sure you may have noticed all of these demos have been on different setups and DAWs, and that’s because I’ve been trying to figure out what I can be most comfortable with. Renoise is kind of the fusing of a tracker program and a professional DAW, which makes it interesting to work with.
The blog’s been stagnant throughout March, but trust me in saying I’ve kept myself occupied and more will be coming up going into spring.
Posted in Music, Software March 2nd, 2020 by dotcomboom
New demo! It’s weirdly improvised as always, but not too bad I think.
This time around I used BandLab instead of FL, which is a neat piece of kit that runs in the browser. If you want to look at the mix itself you can find it here. I didn’t do any panning so it might not sound that gud.
Made this demo within a class period. I didn’t have FL 10 installed on this laptop, so I had to settle with the 7 trial again. This time around, I did some more complex mixing, instead of using plugins all on Master; it worked out well. You may also notice the return of PRCPiano from James Blunt is True Speedcore, as I had been aiming to do a slightly more chordy thing. Notes were quantized at a beat or so. Came out nice.
I got hooked up with a box copy of FL Studio 10, which remarkably installed on the ThinkPad with no issues. I was a little concerned it wouldn’t run, as the system requirements stated XP or Vista and not 2000, but it installed anyway. I haven’t been able to make out whether it runs any worse than 7 on the Pentium M processor (the requirements stated a Pentium 4 or greater), but it appears to be working well.
What that means is that you could expect more demos coming from me in the future. The FL Studio 7 trial version didn’t support any project saving, which means should I come back to the demos I’ve posted previously, I’d need to reconstruct it from MIDI. Which isn’t impossible, just tricky to get the same sound, as knobs and plugin settings weren’t exported.
But anything I try out going forward is definitely gonna get saved, meaning I’ll be able to work on it after the initial export.
[6:05 PM] lince euroasiático: quick gimmie a dumb name for a 140bpm track
[6:06 PM] lince euroasiático: this thingy's untitled :pensiverat:
[6:06 PM] Cammy: James Blunt is True Speedcore
[6:06 PM] lince euroasiático: on it
Another playaround with FL Studio 7. Actually quite like how this take turned out. (Note that the percussion was somewhat shoehorned in, apologies.)
Just played around with SimSynth and delay. Recorded two channels live for 3:17 with (I believe) 1/4 step quantization. For it being me stumbling around on musical typing for a few minutes, it almost sounds like music, which is pretty wack.
Postage stamps, huh? That sounds.. vaguely familiar, but I can’t pinpoint it.Probably the most effective way to delay writing an essay, if I’m honest. I didn’t intend on that being a pun I swear.
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