Week #48 - Gratitude

Being as it's Thanksgiving, I chose Gratitude as the feeling for the week. But as my sister came to visit last weekend and stayed until we drove up to PA on Thursday where we spent a couple of days, I didn't have time to sit in front of my computer. Luckily, I got a new phone last week: the Motorola Droid. Details below, but suffice to say, I produced this song on my PHONE!



Description:

I didn't really get to the heart of gratitude with this piece, but as a first attempt at producing on a mobile device I'm pretty happy. I tried to pick mellow loops and samples to work with as when one is thankful, one is usually rather content and at peace. I went with softer bass tones, piano/electric piano, and horns for the most part.

Tools:

Motorola Droid
niko twenty Electrum Drum Machine
Ableton Live 7
IK Multimedia T-Racks 3 Linear Phase EQ, Opto Compressor, and Brickwall Limiter

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Notes:

- The Droid is an amazing device, and there are a few music apps available for it (nothing like the iPhone yet, but I feel confident the market will grow). I tried a bunch of them, and so far my favorite is the Electrum Drum Machine by niko twenty. Despite the name, it is really more than a drum machine. It's closer to an MPC sampler. I loaded my phone with loops and samples, and through the week in free moments on the train and at lunch I managed to put together a collection of song sections.
- While there is a loop sequencer built into Electrum, I ended up moving the loops to my computer and laying out the sequence in Live. Then as a final step I put some mastering plugins on the final product.

- I had to convert all of my samples to 22050, 16 bit, mono audio to work on the phone so the resultant layered loops were in that format, but I rendered the sequence from Live at 48000, 24bit, stereo - mainly because my audio hosting site wouldn't allow the lower quality file to upload.

- I started out by building a custom drum kit. The way the program works is that you have 6 "pads" and load a sample onto each one. You can edit your samples' start and end points as well as setting the level and pitch for each one individually. I do wish there was a mixer page where you could set all of the levels at once instead of having to go back an forth between each sample's edit page to tweak. You'll hear a fe spots where a sound really sticks out because it was hard to get the levels just right without a proper mixer. (I'd also love to be able to work in stereo, but it is only a phone, and such limitations can be a good thing to really make you focus on blending things together for a good sound.)

- Then you use a step sequencer to play the pads on particular beats creating patterns. My custom kits was made up of sounds from the Hip-Hop and Glitch sample packs for Electrum. I made three separate beats all using this same kit as a foundation.

- Once I had the basic beats, I'd export them as WAV files. Then I'd reload a loop onto a pad and replace the samples on the other 5 pads with either more percussion or bass and instrument loops. I could then program a new sequence, export it and reload to the first pad and add even more new sounds. I got up to about 4 layers before things just got too cluttered to be usable. When you load loops onto a pad, you can even set them to match the tempo as long as you've included the tempo of the original loop in the filename.

- It's sort of like working on my old Portastudio 4 track where I'd record 4 tracks, bounce them down to one and add 3 new tracks, etc. but with better editing of each sample like and MPC. Like an old school sampler, changing the tempo also changes the pitch, and changing the pitch either speeds up or slows down the sample. It's another interesting limitation that forces you to be careful and make good decisions to get things synced up.

- At this point, I could have loaded my completed loops onto the pads, set each one to play on beat 1 of a pattern and then made a sequence of the various patterns to create a song, but instead I copied my loops and patterns over to the computer and opened them in Live. I did not go crazy with further edits and effects on the computer. I wanted to stick to the limitations inherent in making music on a phone. Instead, I simply set out my sequence on a single track. I did, however, run final arrangement through a mastering chain to sweeten the sound a bit since I had to export my final mix at a higher resolution.


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