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My newest album is out now!following the life and death of an abandoned factory during the pandemic
Hey guys been a while since I posted here. I stopped posting on the regular because I would always wake up early and post angry rants about how this MPE app or that MPE app stopped working after an update, and everyone seemed to hate it. But you know what I hate? An mpe app that only processes modwheel info on ONE channel, which is literally by definition NOT MPE. Haha, see what I mean? No one want's that :P
Well, anyway, I just released a multi-media audio visual album featuring a novella, all of it produced in its entirety in my ipad. It’s about the struggle to find something to do while employment and social interactions are scarce in a quarantine society. More specifically, this is a multi-media project regarding the secret world of an abandoned paper mill in a vacant industrial district of the city — the artifacts on site, the colorful characters that inhabited the space after dark, and reconstructions of chapters from the mill’s past. The album is a collection of atmospheric instrumentals punctuated with vocal samples that give voice to the history of this place. Most of the music videos were also shot and edited on the ipad as well which shows how good the built in camera is.
I put a lot of love and care into this and if the music isn't your thing, maybe the videos are, or even the short story. My previous album, Please Fall Awake, was reviewed by none other than our resident Gavinsky who described it as "jazz pumped through a wormhole".
Much love, Sclurbs. Hope you enjoy:
https://goldgazebo.bandcamp.com/album/9pm-5am
Comments
I think @Gavinski nailed it with his description.
Could you describe the process used to make one of these tracks? You provide a clue by
saying they are "atmospheric instrumentals" but that leads me to question what instruments
were used for these evocative sounds and then what FX processing was applied.
They remind me of the keyboard work of Joe Zawinul who usually kept a recording device
on even when he practiced to be sure he had a capture of something good or new when it emerged from his fertile creative brain.
I suspect I might have a different favorite depending on what was going on in my life when listening. Today "Union Pacific Engine 3545" hit me as especially interesting and unique.
Anyway... share some clues about your process. Are you using a "prepared" or molested piano? You can get a piano for the price of being able to move it these days for sounds like these and process them into spectral landscapes.
I can imagine a paper mill in a liberal state probably got shut down for environmental impacts on that river and the things that depend on the quality of the water like fish and
humans downstream. Paper is a material we probably can't afford to continue to produce like it's free or completely sustainable. But amazon ships billions of boxes a year made from it but much of that gets re-cycled.
great stuff. was it made with a prepared guitar?
Like this!!!!
Only 1 track in and I’m digging the vibe and soundscape you’re building already. Sounds dystopian, cold, and very movie soundtrack like. Very nice 👍
Great stuff Sclurbs!
Here is a direct link to the audiovisual version
Track 1 is my fave so far, its absolutely the kind of thing I want to be listening to at the moment
Willamette Falls Paper Mill is just lovely, I love the use of harmonics, and wormhole jazz is pretty spot on
‘Private Property‘ will be getting a lot of replay as well, similar vibe to track one 👍👍
Thanks for sharing the video link @Gavinski
@sclurbs Glad to see you’re making use of the iOS cameras. Liked the vibe of track 1, especially the intro. Hope it wasn’t super cold during filming. Winter shots are great to watch…not so much to take, especially when wearing gloves, haha.
We got tanks, winter fields, abandoned factories, and more. Thanks for showing us around.
This is good work. Thanks for posting.
Woah, thanks so much for the positive response, everybody! This means a lot, I was worried I had made everyone here hate me from my angry little per-coffee morning rants, lol.
@Gavinski you're a bro for linking the audiovisual album lol, I had forgot to do that! Track 1 is probably my favorite track too, especially the crescendo at the end
@seonnthaproducer it was actually so cold my battery died about five times as fast as it normally would. I basically worked myself up into a full blown manic episode trying to get those shots before I ran out of juice haha. I had been waiting since I was a child to get video of a good freezing rain storm (which are super rare in this region) so it really was a once or twice in a lifetime opportunity. My favorite video is tabernacle with the firetruck lights playing with the ice crystals and then the transition to the footage of the factory on fire. I was up til like 6am getting that shot. I made all these videos before the VS synth app released, which I've yet to master but really wish I was using that at the time of producing these.
@Krupa The video from private property is a collection of pictures I found from the INSIDE of a beaver den, that they built into a ruined section of the Willamette falls dam.
And last but not least @McD to answer your questions:
This might be a bit long winded and not quite what you might have wanted but I’ll try to be as thorough as possible. The process for creating these tracks is kind of hard for me to reverse engineer. I recorded these last summer back when I was hauling hundreds of pounds of free stuff into the factory every other night, so I don’t remember that much detail, because I usually do everything in one take and move on and completely forget how to make the track again within like 10 minutes. Any time I open AUM I’m basically reinventing my entire workflow and immediately forgetting it (might have something to do with the dozens of grams of 99% THC oil I was vaping a week at the time to cope with the pandemic, which is a whole album of it's own, haha); in fact I’m always forgetting my favorite auv3 apps but it’s kind of neat in a way cuz I keep rediscovering my favorites which keeps me from buying new ones to get the same feeling. So it’s been a year, and then I sat on them until the factory was burned down due to arson last December and then realized I fucked up cuz I never got video of the interior design project in the factory I had spent hundreds of hours on. Only had pictures. But I did the best I could with that. The past year I’ve just been teaching myself trumpet and figuring out unique ways to electrify the trumpet audio into an audio signal using a yamaha silent brass mute and send to the ipad via an audio interface to process effects and multi track live recordings (although just using the built in mic without the silent brass mute and putting headphones on and supplementing with brusfri to circumvent the audio interface seems to be a lot less hastle)(does anyone else seem to struggle with the ipad just deciding not to register the audio interface every so often?)(I would pay $2,000 for an ipad with proper i/o ports for musicians and a usb port that can power a keyboard without another frickin external battery) so I've really abandoned a lot of the workflows from this album.
But anyway! Believe it or not Union Pacific Engine 3545 was recorded exclusively using a 5 string Banjo! It was inspired after a train somehow snuck up on me and Casper and came from inches of running us over. I do use Ableton for it’s “convert audio to midi” feature, and then send that midi into AUM because for some reason Ableton can only handle a fraction of a single synth before my CPU starts to spike. I’ve since found some good audio to MPE converter apps for the ipad to replace this but I forgot the names of them lol.
The piano sounds are likely coming from Ravenscroft. Although you do bring up a good point about free pianos. I found a Steinway in great condition for free cuz someone was moving across country and didn't want to deal with it. Almost rented a storage unit and a truck to try and find a buyer but they didn't respond to me.
A big part of the process for this album was meditating on the place and the narrative I had in mind, and creating tracks on location that evoked the same feelings. I would email my friend in New Mexico about the feelings and he would sneakily record improvised guitar tracks under his Skype calls to his therapy clients while his speaker was muted using his iPhone and sent them over to me via Google drive. I would clean up the recordings in AUM using Brusfri and some of the fab filter apps. Then I would play my Linnstrument over the tracks after analyzing the midi and figuring out what chords he used. Any drums involved in the album are programmed LUMbeats I set up and 'performed' along with the existing aum tracks I had layered in the set. I do know that Continua was used as the main synth for a vast majority of these songs; it's the closest thing I've found to a 'True Built In Plug N' Play MPE' synth to use with my Linnstrument that doesn't make me want to burn my house to the ground. I can also say that Neo-Soul Keys Studio 2 was used often as well. I basically use AUM as a DAW without a timeline. It really helps me from editing and fiddling the life out of tracks and just moving on to obsessively finishing new tracks. As far as FX apps go, basically all of them that were available on the market at the time, haha. I don't use compression though. Ever. Only EQ and panning.
Lastly, I don't think the mill was closed for environmental reasons; it just became unprofitable. But The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde did recently purchase the (stolen) land back to themselves for 27 million dollars, considered sacred to their culture, and are planning on creating a public walkway to open a path to the Willamette Falls. Currently there is no way to view them without trespassing. The falls are actually the 2nd or 3rd largest waterfall in North America by volume and is totally off limits to the public eye. Which is pretty fucked up! I had to risk jail time every time I checked it out cuz I'm not about to wait 10 years for that footpath to open up. One interesting fact about this particular industrial complex, is that the dam that they built into the falls and the resulting power plant was the first place in the known universe to send electricity on a long distance grid. And funny enough it is now the first place to go down and last place to go back on whenever there is a power outage
I think most of us have had the experience of a "creation" just sliding past the first page and
being ignored completely. Persistent creators will bump it back for another pass of viewers.
But it happens a lot.
I try to scan all the creations and look for any that have Zero comments... I listen and post a comment that asks for another comment and magic happens.
This is some serious good work and I'm glad to see people commenting.
I haven't checked that out yet.
It sounds like another great act of creation in another media.
Wow. I have all those tools except the banjo and more but I suspect your use of AUM is
more layered than mine. But I've recently started to treat AUM like a pair of tape decks
where I add a new layer on top of a previous recording and build up something that way.
I think I need to leave more silence on some of the over dubbed layers so the project doesn't
have a sameness from start to stop and it will get closer to what people tend to do with daws where song forms are pretty typical. I suppose I could make shorter segments of audio
and then trigger them in sequence and have more song structure in the results.
What ever I do it will be in AUM, I suspect because the act of creation is the experience for me and the results are secondary.
Do you use the file player a lot to build these tracks? If yes, how many total files are generated to make a final track in general. Lately, with the 2 tape deck scheme I just keep
overdubbing the prior track. Using shorted segments I could give the listener something that
they recall hearing before and most brains seem to like those events.
Wingardium Leviosa
Wow nice work! It’s not the style I normally listen to, but I can appreciate the quality of work in composing, arranging, mixing and mastering - sounds great!
My fav was #10
Gorgeous music.🙏🏽👍🏽🧔🏼
I like Walking the Rails the most.
Track 4 reminds me on Mouse On Mars (Niun Niggung).
Have to hear the whole thing again with my good speakers...
Big respect!
Ascendio
This one needs to hit page 2 before rolling away. The work is a tribute to the power of AUM...
I think there's an openness to the final mixes that most of us loose in our multi-recording projects. But obviously to get this level of complexity there are key FX apps in the mix to
re-purpose the live input: delays, reverbs and some tone shaping tools... probably the FX of the month with a couple years of shopping. Fab Filter and/or ToneBoosters would cover ,most bases but Bleass and Sugar Bytes would have extra weirdness of a custom hardware "black box" piece of kit.
@mcd Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I just drove 1,300 miles in a day and a half and needed like.... 26 hours to sleep it off haha. Thanks for scanning for 0 comment submissions, that's very nice of you and a wonderful service to the community!
I do use a FX apps consistently, but I can't remember what was released at the time and what I didn't have yet. If mixbox cs was out at the time I was probably mostly exclusively using that. I probably used some Eos 2 reverb. WOOTT. Brusfru. Spacecraft. Just about all the eventide apps. Lots of 4pockets.
The file player is an integral part of my process! much like a tape deck. I suspect my use of AUM isn't quite as complicated or 'advanced' as you may think. My workflows typically consist of mastering maybe .01% of a program but using those things very creatively; like someone with a broken leg hopping on one foot. They might not be moving that efficiently, but it's a spectacle. And if you do that long enough you become somewhat of an acrobat hopping on one foot. So in a typical track I might open up a guitar track my friend sent me, and open that up in via file player. Then I will duplicate that track 1 or 2 times, and add effects to those while keeping a clean original file. So I make big use of parallel processing. I will record everything into a single mixbus in its own channel, but I try to keep everything as multi track as possible until I know I won't be adding any more layers. And then I will set up between one to 6 synths and program them in different workflows to my Linnstrument using channel per row mode. So that I could be individually controlling 16 different synths at once with their own keyboard shapes (but the cpu of my standard ipad can never really take that much). For instance, for Walking the Rails it was just two instances of Phosphor 3 to the left split of my Linnstrument, and one instance of Continua to my right split, and everything all played at once in one take. I've always put a lot of value in getting a good premix/performance instead of fiddling with things I could have gotten right when I started. So there's several improv sessions built in stages of me just playing and recording new layers to separate channels; it ends up looking like 4 or 9 file players set up, all set to record. Then I will do a master recording of a track receiving everything from mix bus a, these are sessions where I'll change the volume of certain tracks to sort of automate effects as the recording is taking place, as well as insert or take out effects chains. I use to do most of this using my RC505 loopstation, but that is basically always recorded as single master track when AUM has so much more control. So what I use the RC505 now is resampling into the ipad itself using the other audio interface attached to its own battery I am forced to use because for some reason because Ipad and Rc505 aren't class compliant for no good reason god damn it.
really would be nice if AUM had some sort of timeline equivalent function for setting up file players. If I want to add something to the end I just record it out from the beginning and wait to play it when it's at the spot I want
@Satie haha yeah walking the rails was a banger. I made this crazy preset on phosphor 3 that almost sounds like a cello but then the program updated and the preset was lost to time and I haven't opened phosphor 3 since. Does your name have anything to do with Eric Satie?
Beautiful, thanks very much for sharing
Well yeah - he is one of my favorite composer when I play piano.
TLDR - Every track sounds amazing!