Last track I recorded with Alan Wiseman

When I originally recorded the track "Reasonable Persons" using only Propellerhead's Reason, I knew that I wanted a "real" drum track on there eventually. And who better to do it that my old pal Alan Wiseman. I've known Alan since 7th grade, and we've been playing music together since 8th grade...over 30 years. His drumming style was something I had grown so accustomed to, I think when I "programmed" drums they sounded a lot like what he would play (in fact he said as much during the session).

Anyway, I provided lunch and access to the swimming pool, and that was all he needed for payment. We had a great time. I really played producer on him, pretty much telling him what to play in every spot. I tasked him with exactly copying the basics of what I had programmed on the original track, but also to make it his own, which he did with the usual flair and taste. I especially like what he did with those two "build ups" on the toms during the last two turnarounds, toward the end of the track. We did a couple of takes before his swim, then when he came back he nailed it after about four more takes. I don't think we did ANY punch ins; the take you hear was played start-to-finish in real time.

I did very little editing of his MIDI part, which he performed on my Roland V-drums triggering Native Instrument's Battery 3 plugin. Originally, I thought I might replace all of the Reason instruments with higher quality VST instruments in Sonar, but I ended up not doing so, just dumping each Reason instrument, raw, to it's own Sonar track and mixing them down with Alan's drum track. I did use three instances of IKM's Classik Studio Reverb on the various instruments to provide a "stage" ambiance.

My friend and musical comrade Alan passed away in March of this year. I'm still struggling very hard to deal with this loss, so I suppose resurrecting these takes (which were recorded in summer of 2007) and finally finishing this track was a form of therapy for me. Several times during the mixing and tweaking I could swear he was right behind me pounding the skins.

I am indeed blessed to have had his friendship and musical companionship for all those years.

So long Al, and thank you for all the drumming! I love you, man.



here is a direct link to the mp3 for non-shockwave environments

Tribute to Tim Conrardy

I just learned today that respected sound designer and electronic musician Tim Conrardy passed away. Tim's sounds have found there way into countless tracks I have composed. Whenever I am needing inspiration, I can load up any number of virtual synths and find "The TC Bank"...never fails to provide the needed inspiration. Recently, the release of Camel Audio's Alchemy synthesizer once again spotlighted his skills, and made me realize all over again just how talented Tim was.

I always found Tim to be a gracious and humble person. He always answered email questions and forum posts promptly and with a dignified patience not often prevalent on the internet. In addition to his sound design and production skills, he was a gifted composer. He frequently shared his work on KVR and elsewhere, and I always enjoyed his tracks, many times downloading them to the iPod for repeated listening.

In honor of Tim, I am re-posting this track I composed and posted some time ago which features one of his sounds prominently. It's the "TC Ozricky" lead guitar sound from the ManyGuitar VST. I used this same TC patch on another track found here.

Rest in peace, Tim.


direct download to the MP3 file here

or

Click on the play button below to listen:

A little romantic interlude

Just in time for Valentine's Day, here is a "romantic" orchestral piece that I composed some time ago, and recently recorded using just one VST Plugin Instrument. The instrument of choice is the Miroslav Philmarmonik orchestral workstation from IK Multimedia. The realism of the samples in this thing are just scary. You can hear the bowing noise on the solo strings, the breath of the winds, etc. And it has a pretty cool looking "wood grain" interface as well (see picture below).

Hope you enjoy the piece, which I titled "Lament".



here is a direct link to the mp3 in case player won't play for you

Trying not to be a Grinch this year

Christmas has never been my favorite time of the year. It's cold (and usually rainy in Nashville), traffic is awful, everyone is grumpy, and right on Christmas day...BANG! I turn another year older. Yep, I could skip the whole thing and be fine with it.

But in the spirit of NOT being a grinch this year, here is an arrangement I did a few years ago of Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" from the Nutcracker.



here is a direct link to mp3 in case player won't play for you

Peace on earth, good will toward men (grinches included)

Brother Up In Heaven

It's hard for me to believe that it has been four years since my friend Dale Roy Mansell went to be with the Lord. His untimely passing was about the most difficult thing I have ever had to face. I've been working on this track for well over three years, a cover of a song from Alan Parson's CD "On Air". So in memory of my good friend Dale, please enjoy "Brother Up In Heaven".



here is a direct link to mp3 in case player won't play for you

A boy flies for freedom
But dies for the peace
In the clouds, he waits for an answer
But there's no release

It's strange here without you
And it's so hard to see
So brother up in heaven
Please wait up for me

Oh brother up in heaven
Please wait up for me

I still see his shadow
His laugh lingers on
When i dream, we're all back together
When i wake, he's gone
It's strange here without you
This was not meant to be
So brother up in heaven
Please wait up for me

And though we try to change the world
A flower when it's cut will surely die
So why do men with so much hate
Destroy what they cannot create
While we all stand by

We'll look back in anger
But you helped us to see
So brother up in heaven
Please wait up for me

Oh brother up in heaven
Please wait up for me

lyrics and music written by Ian Bairnson

Song for this Day

Here is a short, thought-provoking tone poem that I hope can provide some peace and meditation for you today.

May we always remember the heroes and victims....



(Click on the little speaker icon above to listen...)

Here is a direct link to the MP3 in case the player won't work for you.

Twelve Memories

Here is a track that I am proud of. I recorded this piece a couple of years ago before I started blogging, and several people have insisted it's their favorite, so I though I would give it some new exposure here. The twelve-string guitar parts, mellotron strings and flutes, and harpsichord sounds are all from IK Multimedia's Sonic Synth 2. I don't remember what else I used (not much I don't think).

The guitar part was somewhat inspired by the Styx song "Crystal Ball", which I was was playing around with when I came up with this riff.

I promise I wasn't trying to sound like Yanni with the key and tempo change, but I fear that perhaps I did!

Click on the play button below to hear "Twelve Memories"...

Industrial Waste

This is not something I'm proud of, but in the interest of full disclosure, here is a "track" that I literally through together in about an hour, made of ENTIRELY of DrRex loops, a few reDrum patterns, and a simple EZDrummer track.

In Reason 4.0, I first put together nine different synthesizer loops from Analog Monsters 3, the Quadrasynth Story, and Virology Refills. Then I constructed the drum loops in the reDrum device using a combinator patch from the PhatMath Refill (this amazing refill using NOTHING but Subtractors).

Next I rewired Reason into Reaper 2.4 and bounced down the audio onto a single track. Then I loaded up EZDrummer's Drumkit from Hell and laid down a simple pattern over the 2nd half of the track. Then I bounced the whole thing down, and here you go.

The reason I say I'm not proud of it is that I never TOUCHED the keyboard (the musical one with the little black-and-while things) to create this. Didn't play a single note. Nada. Zilcho.

Musician? Programmer? Technician? DJ? I dunno, you decide. Click on the little speaker icon below...

Organic Lifecycle

This is a rather "organic" sounding new age / ambient piece that I produced using only Propellerhead's Reason 4.0. As I have said before, this is one very amazing piece of software, as evidenced by it's massive popularity. In professional circles, it gets a bit of bad rap for it's "sound quality", but I think this track is evidence that you can get a very powerful final product out of Reason without a whole lot of effort. Granted, I do usually export the WAV from Reason, and then "master" it using another VST plugin in Sonar or Tracktion, but that takes all of 5 minutes to do!

The piano sound was produced with Sonic Flavours Home Piano Premium Refill, and some of the other synths were from their Mystic Dream Pads series. These french guys sure know how to produce some incredible sounds!

The fretless bass sound is from Sonic Reality's Triple Bass Refill, and the drums are from their Monster Drums Refill.

There is just one other synth sound in there from Pink Noise Studios Analog Monsters 3 Refill. I just obtained this one recently, and boy has it kept me up late a few nights! Hundreds of incredible old-school analog synth sounds to expand the mind.

Hope you enjoy this track...click on the play icon below to hear "Organic Lifecycle":

Recovered from the DAT archives

Today I hooked up the old TASCAM DA-30mkII DAT machine (that's "Digital Audio Tape" for you youngsters) for the first time in years. I started looking through all my old tapes and discovered five pretty decent tracks that I have never converted to MP3 and put on soundclick! So, here they are...press play below, and then read on...

These are tracks recorded between 1995 and 1996 that didn't make the cut for the CD release I called "Stay On Trail" (also available on soundclick here).

Quick run-down of the tracks:

1) Gentile Jive - originally written and recorded in the pre-DAT days, around 1989, and part of the cassette release called "Temporary Rituals". Definitely influenced by one of my all-time favorite progressive bands, Gentle Giant!

2) Imaginary Friend - This somewhat sad little tone poem was written after I had read Isaac Asimov's "Nemesis" novel in 1989. The main character, a teenage girl named "Marlene" has an imaginary friend, who of course turns out to be real...an alien consciousness.

3) Making Myself Happy (Triplets) - This was also a do-over from the 80's, originally recorded to cassette in 1989 and re-recorded here using updated synths and no tape...direct to DAT.

4) Enchantment - I honestly don't remember a THING about this track. Listening to it now, I am amazed at how good the sounds are considering this was in the hardware days, long before virtual synths and multi-gigabyte sample libraries. I believe a lot of the sounds came from an emu Proteus 1 and a Korg M1R. That might be real Moog synth (The Source) in there too.

5) Meandering - I called this song Meandering because if just "never really goes anywhere". It's kind of a fun little semi-atonal ride though.

Enjoy!

Short prog piece from the composers archive

Click the play button below to here Intermezzo:

Back in 1979 I was a freshman music major at Belmont University here in Nashville. One of the scariest things was Freshman Composition class, where everyone had to write music (actually write it down, this was long before music technology became mainstream) and present it to the class. Those of us that had in "instrument" in our major (my major was "Commercial Music - Piano") had to also perform the pieces for the class, and we were graded on the composition and also the performance. It was pretty scary for me.

Up until this point in life, I had written only some pop music. Really just a few ballads and a couple of rock tunes. I had never actually tried to write a "serious" piece of music, though confident teen that I was, I was pretty sure I could if I tried. Well, now I had no choice...I had to. And it had to be at least 18 measures long!

I was heavily into Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes, Genesis and Gentle Giant at this time, so of course most of the things I heard in my head I could not only NOT play, but I could NOT begin to write them out in musical notation....I just didn't have the skills yet. But I was acquiring them, or at least trying to. The first piece I wrote I called "Passage" and it was slow and creepy, lots of open fourths with a left-hand ostinato figure...looking back it sounds a bit like the opening theme for Keith Emerson's soundtrack to the Italian horror film Inferno. It went over quite well and I got a solid A.

For the 2nd piece, I envisioned that I would write something vaguely similar and start a "suite" or pieces meant to be played as a whole. The 2nd piece was to start in the same key (sort of an A minor 7 with sus 4) but be in a rapid rollicking 6/8 as opposed the slow and stately 4/4 of the first piece, and also make use of much more "angularity" in the musical passages. In my head I was hearing driving drums and bass, searing Moog synthesizers and blasting Hammond organ, and crashing CP-80 electric piano, not unlike something Eddie Jobson's band UK would have played (without Allan Holdsworth's guitar noodling of course, God bless him and his wonderful tone).

But of course all I had to work with when performing it for the class was the humble piano. I explained to the class that this piece was a bit of a continuation from my last one and got the teachers permission to perform "Passage" first, followed by the 2nd one (the piece this blog is about) which I called "Intermezzo". Though I performed Passage well, I didn't do a stellar job on Intermezzo and I don't think most of the class "got it". At all. Wickedly muted response. I knew at that point that I had accomplished my goal and written something progressive enough to not appeal to the masses. Success! And I got a A-.

Fast forward to 2008. My friend Jimbo has just turned me on to a very cool piece of software (which of course I rushed out and bought for myself) called "EZ Drummer". Though the name is silly and makes it sound like a toy, it is not. It is one very serious compositional tool. It comes with very high-quality drum sounds, an awesome interface that is intuitive, and a boatload of MIDI drum loops. You can drag-and-drop loops into Sonar, stringing patterns and fills together into your drum track, then edit them and add stuff in Sonar. Very powerful. It took me about 10 minutes to put together the drum track for Intermezzo....it would have taken me HOURS had I been programming it by hand like I used to do, and I doubt I ever could have programmed a drum performance this convincing. You would never guess that a "drum machine" came anywhere near this track!

I used the "Drumkit from Hell" expansion sounds for this track. Look at this GUI! Need I say more. Wicked.

Then I spent the better part of 4 hours on the keyboard parts. CP-80 and Clavinet from East West Colossus, synth bass from Native Instruments FM8, Organ from their B4II, Minimoog and Roland Jupiter 8 synth emulations from Arturia's Analog Factory. Amazing that it took 4 hours considering the piece is only 1:14 in length! Then again, these are some of the more difficult keyboard passages you are likely to hear on this blog.

Maybe next month I'll finish up my reworked version of Passage so you can hear the prelude to this one, Intermezzo. Oh, I should also point out that even though the original composition was in 6/8 (and I have recorded it that way in the past) I chose to convert the composition to 4/4 for this go-round, mostly because I found a very infectious groove in EZD that I thought "fit". But, I should add that not one single note of the composition was changed, only the timing.

Featured Instruments:

Toontrack's EZDrummer, "Drumkit from Hell" expansion


Arturia's Analog Factory

I've gone all Loopy

Click on the play button below to listen:

I'm thinking someone had better put me back in my box before it's too late!

Well, I've been experimenting again. I guess you could call it that anyway. I used to really be down on people who "composed" using loops; As in "loops of music create by other people". It just never seems like really "composing" to me...just clever borrowing and rearranging.

Then I tried it a little in Reason 4.0. And not only is it fun, it's a bit addicting. Especially this "Dr. Rex" thing. Basically, it can play back a drum beat or other loop that's been all "sliced up" into little snips, so you can change the tempo and/or rearrange the slices without changing the pitch.

So, both of these tracks are just really 2 minute "throw-aways", but still...it's a lot of fun!

Heroes

I recorded the 8 tracks that make up this composition in about one hour a few evenings ago, based on an idea I had a month or so ago. It's sort of a heroic sounding theme. I don't have a lot to say about it, but I hope you like it.

Click on the play button below to hear "Heroes":

Totally out of my box on this one

Click the play button below to listen:

Well, I finally broke down and bought the quad-core computer of my dreams for Studio A. My old box, a Dell Pentium 4 3.2 HT, was really showing it's age and crimping my creative workflow. I like to use lots of VST instrument plug-ins simultaneously, and the old box just couldn't handle it. There were even some synths I had spent good money on that I flat-out could not use. One instance would put the CPU in overload!

Well, the new box does everything I imagined it would (and perhaps a bit more). For those who like specs, I had ADK Pro Audio build me a HUGE honker of a server-class machine with an Intel Q6600 (Conroe) processor...that's four processors on a single unit. Though it normally runs at 2.4gHz (per core), this one is over-clocked to 3.0. It has 4GB of RAM and 1.3 TB of disk (on three drives).

It took me a few days to re-install and re-authorize all of my software and then I was in absolute heaven. I threw every stress test in the book at it and it just performs like a dream.

Music? Oh, right...this IS the Hybernation Music blog after all, isn't it? Well two nights ago I was playing with a wonderful CPU-eating synth I've never been able to use until now...the Ultra Analog VA-1 from Applied Acoustic Systems (see screen shot below). It's got one of the smoothest pure-analog sounds you'll ever hear, and it used to send the CPU on my old box into never-never land with just one or two instances. I started messing around with a couple of arpeggio patches and before I knew it I had come up with a "Dance" tune!

Dance you say? Well, heck, I don't know what else to call it. It's definitely not Prog or Ambient, or any style that I normally do.

It's totally and completely outside of my usual set of genres...I was "totally out of my box" on this one.

More statistics: 7 instances of Ultra Analog VA-1. One instance of Native Instruments Battery 3 for drums. Then for flavor, I doubled some of the VA-1 parts with one instance each of Native Instruments Massive, Rob Palpen's Albino3, Arturia's CS-80V and Moog Modular-V and GMedia's Minimonsta. A total of 13 tracks of Virtual Synthesizer bliss. My new box? CPU never went above 35%!

Reasonable Persons

Click on the play button below to listen:

I've been in San Francisco all week for the JavaOne conference. What a total geek-fest! To keep myself from totally geeking out every night afterward, I brought "studio B" with me. It didn't totally work, for instance, last night I was up late making JRuby on Rails and Prototype/Scriptaculous and Oracle do amazing things together (like present a list of data on my screen and make the list "grow" and "shake") with only a few lines of code. There are an awful lot of "hyper-enthusiasts" that are promoting Ruby on Rails in a very unreasonable manner, let me add. Yes, it can do a lot with fewer lines of code, no argument there, but time will tell how big of a dent in Java this language/framework makes over the long haul.

Anyway, I did manage to crank out this little ditty over the last few nights. For some reason, I was really in the mood to listen to the Alan Parson's Project the first few days I was here. Since I did at least an hour of walking every day, I listened to most of those CD's on my MP3 player...some more than once.

As I tried to compose, I found myself drawn toward "that sound". It usually starts with Electric Piano, bass and drums. It's usually in the key of A minor. His stuff is predictable, yet tasteful...and it holds up well to multiple listenings (heck, I've been listening to some of those albums since high school, such as "Pyramid" for instance).

Anyway, I did this track completely in Reason, and I didn't want to use Alan's last name, so I changed one letter....hence the title "Reasonable Persons".

enjoy!



Edit (July 17, 2008): Refills used:
1) Sonic Reality - Mello-T (choir)
2) Sonic Reality - Triple Guitars (12-string acoustic and electric gtr solo)
3) Sonic Reality - 60's & 70's (rhodes)
4) Sonic Reality - Film Orchestra (solo flute and wind section)
5) Sonic Reality - Triple Bass (bass guitar)
6) Sonic Reality - Pianos and Organz (B3 organ)
7) Sonic Reality - retro keys (minimoog solo)
8) Reason Factory Refill - drums
9) Sonic Flavors - Mystic Dream Pads #4 - synthesized strings

Spacemusic Swish

Long time, no blog huh? Well, I'd like to say that I've been busy in the studio working on multiple new works, but I'd be a liar. In reality, I've been busy with the family and a new job. I hoping to work on some new ideas in the upcoming months, though, so stay tuned!

Meanwhile, take a look at Tom Derry's new "Swish". He took a piece of "spacemusic" I did a while back and put some very thought-provoking words and out-of-this-world images (literally) to it. The result is called "Mostly Space in Between" and I hope you enjoy it...I know I did.

>>> click here to experience "Mostly Space in Between" by Tom Derry <<<<

i am the fragile forest (poem)

My friend and colleague Tom Derry has written a poem titled "i am the fragile forest". Tom does these things he calls "Swish Poetry" that are interactive, and for this one he used (and apparently was inspired by) my track "The Clown".

Wikipedia defines Swish as: "...a family of software created by Swishzone.com Pty Ltd, culminating in the SWiSH Max presentation design product, an inexpensive alternative to the Macromedia Flash software".

This is pretty awesome, view it by clicking below. It might take a minute or two to start playing if you have a slow connection (10 MB download).

>>> experience "i am the fragile forest"  by Tom Derry <<<

Progressive Rock from Studio A

click the play button below to listen:

Well, the new release of Sonar (version 6) just arrived, so I've been spending some time in Studio A with all the "big toys". Here is a piece that I have been working on for a long time. I wrote the song in the early 90's, recovered the old cakewalk MIDI file into Sonar a few months ago and started re-doing parts. Tonight I finally mixed it down. I'm not sure what to call it. Once upon a time I called it Progress Attack Part Two...I reckon that name will do as well as any.

This has a real "retro vibe" to it. The percussion is supposed to sound like it's coming from an old Roland drum machine (TR-626 maybe). The main keyboard part that plays throughout is a combination of two vintage-emulating VSTs, the Korg Wavestation and the NI FM7. The bass is a layer of more FM7 combined with a Minimoog type sound from Antti's ASynth and a deep boom from his Taurus (both extremely excellent and free/donationware, by the way).

The guitar sound is the same one used in "Dark and Pink" from Manyguitar. Tim Conrardy is a genuis, by the way (he programmed that sound), and I just can't get enough of it.

I mastered this one with the excellent VC64 Vintage Channel audio processor that comes with Sonar 6 and I must tell you this is one very fine tool. Sonar 6 is really amazing...check out the screen shots below of how this song looked in mixdown mode!

Peace (still in studio B)

click on the play button below to listen:

I discovered a program recently that is "old news" to lots of people, and I do mean "lots" as in this is probably THE most popular peice of music software in the world today. I'm talking about Propellerhead's Reason 3.0. This software is advertised not only as a "standalone music production environment" but also proported to be "very easy on the CPU" so I felt I should give it a try for "studio B". Well, I was absolutely BLOWN AWAY by the factory sounds. But since I didn't want to sound like everybody else, I bought a few "ReFills" (which is what Propellerhead's calls the sound expansions for Reason).

One of the most impressive refills I got was by Sonic Flavours and it's called "Home Piano". This is one very unique and organic sounding instrument. to quote from their web site:

"The purpose of this refill was to make a less clean, not so perfectly pitched but warm sounding piano experience compared to everything that is on the market already. It's surely no substitute for all those great libraries but a nice addition for those who like a lively and warm, retroish sound.

Home Piano is great for anyone who needs to score a living room scene where someone is playing the piano. There have been too many movies where the sound didn't match the picture, our Home Piano however will do a great job in these situations."

I wrote this little piano ditty about a year ago and never finished it as a track. Home Piano seemed perfect for it. I then layered a synth pad, cello section, wind/flute section, acoustic guitar and string section into the arrangement (each of these instruments enters the mix as the song builds).

The night that I finished this track was the evening before I was to have surgery to have my defective and painful gall bladder removed. As with all surgeries, I knew there was a chance I would not be coming home, yet God gave me a sense of Peace about it...a sense that no matter what happened everything would be ok.

And of course it was. My bad gall bladder is gone and now I'm posting "Peace (At Home)" for you to hear.

Enjoy.

Experimental 1 - Dark and Pink

Click on the play button below to listen:

Over the last few weeks, I've set up a "studio B" in my home which consist of an older Dell notebook computer, a cheap M-Audio USB audio interface, a cheap 2X2 MIDI interface, a little 5 octave keyboard and some nice headphones, and a select number of Soft Synths. This smaller alternative to the main studio has the benefit of being "upstairs" and close to our newborn infant so that late at night I can compose and listen for her waking up, needing a bottle, etc.

I've been quite amazed at what can be accomplished with this small, scaled-down environment, so much so that I feel a little guilty about my huge "Studio A" (see picture in my first blog posting).

Although I have Sonar and Tracktion installed, I've been composing using a DAW program called energyXT almost exlusively on this notebook since it's so much easier on the CPU. And, to be honest, energyXT is such a cool and immediatly environment to work in, it appeals to the "programmer" in me to be able to manipulate "objects" like only this program will do.

So, this track is my first mix from these experiments. It's Dark. The "guitar" sound (from the excellent Manyguitar program) reminds me a bit of David Gilmore, hence the "Pink" in the title. After listening back to it though, I think perhaps I've been watching too many Miami Vice reruns.

Other synths used were Wusikstation (VOX'ed soundset), FM7, and two instances of Atmosphere. Effects are two instances of the free Luxonix LFX-1310. Mixdown was "mastered" and converted to MP3 in Tracktion using Mackie's "Final Mix" mastering plug-in.

Enjoy this 2 minute experimental track, which I call "Dark and Pink".

Superstar Overture

Another cover tune?

You betcha! Sorry no time to blog lately, but please listen to this cover of the Overture to Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Jesus Christ, Superstar". This is about a 20 track arrangement, which is pretty big for me!

To listen, click on the little "Speaker" icon inside the widget below:



a view of the "console" window in Sonar

All "Fragile Forest" music is free

>>> click here to listen <<<

One of the things I don't like about Soundclick is that once you make your mp3's available for purchase, they can no longer be downloaded for free. I would like for people to have the option of buying my music, but I want them to also have the option of enjoying it for free. And by enjoying it, I mean not just listening while you are online, but the ability to download it to your PC, load it on your iPod or even burn yourself a CD to play in your car.

Hence, I have put up a small "player" sight here where you can listen to and download all of my music.

Of course if you really like it, nothing is stopping you from purchasing it on Soundclick!

Sign, Sign, everywhere a Sign

I'll let you draw your own conclusion here. This is an actual sign in the subdivision where I live.

Cover Tunes with Dale

I recorded this cover tune of John Lennon's "Imagine" in late 2005, as a tribute to the untimely death of my best friend Dale Mansell.

This version of the Beatles "Rain" was recorded in 1995, with Dale doing all of the vocals, and me doing all of the instruments.

Click on one of the icons below to hear these two tracks:



Here is a photo of me and Dale from 2002, just prior to a Yes concert. Dale is on the left. I sure do miss him.

Early virtual synthesizer excursion...

Click on the play button below to listen:

I found this track called "Space Voyage Zeta" the other day while cleaning up my hard drive...I had forgotten all about it.

Back in March of 2005 I upgraded Hybernation Studio from an old Klunking Dell P3 750Mhz relic to a new Dell Precision 370 P4 3.2 Ghz machine. This was the beginning of something very new to me: "Virtual Studio Technology" or "VST". (well, actually VST is only ONE "implementation" of the idea, but I tend to use the term "VST" to mean any kind of "Virtual" synth, sampler, rompler, etc). Before this point, my PC just wasn't fast/powerful enough to even bother with VSTs.

First I bought the Moog Modular V from Arturia. Next I bought the Native Instruments Xpress Keys (little preset versions of the FM7, Pro-53 and B4, which mimic the legendary Yamaha DX-7, SCI Prophet 5 and Hammond B3 organ, respectively). Shortly afterward, I found a great deal on the "Komplete" bundle, which contains 13 instruments including the three I mention above, plus a very unique synth that I immediately fell in love with called Absynth.

Next I bought two synths from rgc:audio which do not directly or intentionally mimic anything "vintage"...these are the most excellent z3ta synth and the Pentagon I.

Unfortunately, I didn't stop there! But this song was composed at this point in time, so my arsenal was much smaller than it is today, over a year later.

This track was recorded in a way completely different from anything I had ever recorded...in a word "unstructured". It started with me just improvising for about 1.5 minutes using a very spacey "pad" sound from the z3ta. Then I overdubbed another track, using Pentagon I. Then I overdubbed yet another improvisation again using Pentagon I. Thing is, there was no tempo, no real "chord progression" and the parts didn't really do anything with respect to each other....they were just all in roughly the same key using some of the same pseudo-melodic ideas.

At this point, I played with a new feature of Sonar (the program I used to record and mix on the computer) called "track freeze". What this does is basically creates an audio track from a VST MIDI track. Once this is done, you can cut-and-paste and slice-and-dice the audio track as much as you desire, and this is what I ended up doing. I actually froze all three tracks, which were of varying lengths, then I looped them such that the start and end points of each track overlapped in interesting ways. So, this created the illusion of a 5+ minute composition that slowly builds, and which has very little obvious repetition.

Next I added two tracks using Absynth, playing over the duration of the track. Both are very far back in the mix, but still vital to the mix. Once is a echoy windchime sort of a sound, and the other is a ghostly droning sound. Neither plays continuously, but they come and go thoughout the song.

Lastly, I added those little "bleeps" that you hear (using the z3ta) as one long track. My idea was the the bleeps would start out happening infrequently, and then gain in intensity as the song progresses, with the song ended with a long fading shimmering bleep.

Prepare yourself for a very deep excusion into space...which I call "Space Voyage Zeta". Click the play button at the top of this posting to listen.

Welcome to the Hybernation Music Blog

Greetings. My name is John Hagewood and I record under the name Fragile Forest. For the last few months, I've been hosting tracks on Soundclick, where you can listen to and download my creations.

My "style" ranges from New Age / Ambient / Chamber to Progressive Pop/Rock. At this point, all instrumentals (I do vocals on cover tunes I record occasionally, and I sing with a classic rock cover band occasionally, but I have yet to record vocals on an original).

My "studio" consists of two Dell P4's running Sonar, Tracktion2 and energyXT, mostly Sonar. These are networked using a MIDI-and-Audio-over-LAN technology called FX Teleport. I also use a Muse Receptor which is a stand-alone Linux-based unit for running VST's remotely.
*** EDIT: please see update below ***

I use lots of VST Instruments (way too many). My favorites lately are all the Native Instruments stuff, Spectrasonic's Atmosphere, big piano libraries from SampleTekk such as TSO and Black Grand, and lots more.

If I get into this blog thing, I plan on putting up entries about new songs and rough ideas as I work them out. Also, I may offer some "historical" perspective on things I have recorded over the last few years. We'll see...

Here are a couple of pics of Hybernation Studio:




EDIT: June 2008 - Ok, I know some people feel that blogs should be little snapshot in history, but I'm not one of them. I sometimes edit my old blog postings to add more information, change the way the songs are linked-to or embedded, and occasionally even revise information. So, in the interest of clarity, I wanted to provide a quick update on the state of my studio, since this original inaugural post is over two years old now.

I no longer own the Muse Receptor mentioned above. For more information on that see this forum post on KVR.

I no longer run multiple Dell's using FX Teleport. I had to give one of the Dell's back when I changed jobs back in the fall of 2006. And in November of 2007, I replaced the remaining Dell with a new quad-core machine from ADK, which you can read about here.