Hybernation Music - The Music of "Fragile Forest"

"Happy Christmas" from Fragile Forest and Hybernation Music

2011-12-23T12:06:00.010-06:00

Yes, it's that time of year again. And so this is Christmas...and what have *I* done? Another Christmas "cover tune" of course!

This year I recorded John Lennon's classic "Happy Christmas (War is Over)", a song released in 1971. According to Wikipedia, this was a Vietnam War protest song, though I doubt many people realize that (I sure didn't). Over the years, the song has gone on to top the charts of favorite Christmas pop songs.

Quoting from Wikipedia: "The lyric is based on a campaign in late 1969 by Lennon and Ono, who rented billboards and posters in eleven major cities around the world that read: "WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It) Happy Christmas from John and Yoko". In 1971, the United States was deeply entrenched in the unpopular Vietnam War. The line "War is over, if you want it, war is over, now!", as sung by the background vocals, was taken directly from the billboards."

I tried various arrangements with me singing the "War is Over" part, and it just came off cheesy and not "authentic" to my ears. So, I decided to just focus on the main theme of the song, sort of like the Moody Blues did on their holiday album "December", released in 2003. I think the main thing that differentiates my version from all of the many cover versions I have heard is that mine is produced with no guitar whatsoever :-)

So, Happy Christmas everyone, and thanks for listening!

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

...And here are the ghosts from my Christmas Cover Tunes past:

I tried not to be a grinch in 2008...
I got kind of deep in 2009...
Then, I got a little bit controversial last year...

Serious Music (1979-1983)

2011-08-20T18:32:00.004-05:00

I have blogged about these individual pieces a lot over the past few years. Some of these compositions I have recorded many times over the last 30 years, with various levels of technology and to varying degrees of success. Some of them I have just recorded for the first time recently. So finally, using SoundCloud, I have gathered them together into a "set" that you can listen to without having to press more than one play button.

Please press play when you have 20 minutes to spare. Headphones are highly recommended. Comments are welcome.

Serious Music (1979-1983) by fragileforest

Catching up with the DAW Wars...and a whole lotta remixing going on

2011-08-20T16:33:00.000-05:00

The DAW Wars continue unabated here at Hybernation Music. I really felt that when I switched to the iMac in the spring of this year, my search for the ultimate DAW (digital audio workstation...ie. software) was over. After years of suffering with the instabilities of Cakewalk Sonar, I felt that once I had switched to the Mac, as I posted here before, Apple Logic Studio seemed to be "the one". It was stable, intuitive and efficient, and it's 64-bit mode worked better than any DAW had for me before. I still liked Pro Tools, and when Pro Tools 9 came out I did start using it more, but it's lack of "offline rendering" and it's limited 32-bit memory space can be a big frustration when working with larger projects with many complex virtual instruments.

My only real complaints with Logic have been that sometimes the workflow seems a bit "clunky", and the mixer and arrange windows just aren't are visually appealing as some other programs (it hasn't seen an update in a couple of years, which is part of the problem). Then when this year's debacle over Apple's Final Cut X revamp hit, it became a little scary to think about totally putting all my eggs in that Apple-cart (to mix a few metaphors). I feel quite certain that the next release of Logic (probably "Apple Logic X") will be a radical departure, though perhaps not as radical as this video suggests. Great, just as I am getting comfortable with it!

In the meantime, Steinberg came out with Cubase 6, which finally offers full 64-bit support on Mac OS X. Though I was impressed with Cubase 5.5 on the PC as I noted in several past posts, when I installed it on the iMac, I was disappointed to learn that is had no 64-bit Mac version. And, to be honest, it was a little unstable on my iMac. It just didn't feel as solid as Logic or Pro Tools. Heck, it didn't feel as solid as Reaper, for that matter.

But after asking around, I decided to download the fully-functional 30 day trial of Cubase 6, which prompted me to go ahead and buy the reasonable priced upgrade this weekend. Yes, I am impressed. Very stable and efficient. I'm going to be working with it.

And speaking of Reaper, that program was just gone "4.0", and it continues to knock my socks off, for the money. I guess I bought a $60 license back when it went to 3.0, and you get two full version upgrades for that price! So, my license will continue to be good through all of the 4.x releases. Sweet.

So, in the last few months, I've been using all of these programs, and below are a few things I have to show for it. I'll be including screen shots of all these DAW's, so let me start out by showing you what the new Cubase 6 looks like (I've not finished a track yet, so just pictures of this one):

Cubase 6 Tracking Window

Cubase 6 Mixing Window

Here is a new little dance number I came up with that I call "Afrikan Techno". I did this one in Reaper:

Afrikan Techno (Reaper Mix) by fragileforest

Reaper 4 Tracking Window

Reaper 4 Mixing Window

I did a complete rework of the song "Ancient Violence" (which I blogged about here two years ago). I did this completely in Pro Tools 9, reworking all of the virtual instruments used. This was an exercise in "getting rid of Native Instrument Kore 2" in a track which was heavily dependent on that technology. Kore 2 is being discontinued by this group of professional rip-off artists who call themselves music technologists. I have a lot invested in their software, but they'll not be getting any more of MY money, I can tell you. But I digress...anyway, I really like the way the new version of this 20-year-old composition came out. It has a completely different vibe than the original version:

Ancient Violence (remix) by fragileforest

One of the first tracks I did on Pro Tools 8 a couple of year ago was this one that I call "One Lonely Desert". I felt the need to remix it on the iMac recently, to take advantage of Pro Tools 9 and some recent plug-ins I am really loving, especially IK Multimedia's Black 76 Limiting Amplifier, which is simply the best track compressor I have ever used! This remix sounds really superior to the original, I think:

One Lonely Desert by fragileforest

Pro Tools 9 with Tracking and Mixing squeezed together on my 27" monitor

Lastly, I still use Propellerhead's Reason/Record duo some as well. It's just so quick and immediate (and is hands-down the best at "cross-platform" session compatibility, due to the closed nature of the system. Something I start on the PC will sound EXACTLY the same and load up with absolutely no issues on the Mac with Reason/Record). I'm really looking forward to those Swedish folks rolling all these feature into one product with the recently announced Reason 6. I recently fired up Reason/Record and remixed this piece I call "Piano Idea Two", using the Yamaha C7 grand piano found in the Reason Pianos Refill:

Piano Idea Two by fragileforest

Reason / Record Duo with Tracking, Mixing and "Rack" on one screen

My 50th Blog Post...and two Piano Solo pieces

2011-07-09T22:56:00.002-05:00

Welcome to my 50th post on the Hybernation Music blog. Wow. Can it really have been five years ago that I decided to take the blogging plunge with my inaugural blog post. Yes, is was May 12, 2006.

I just want to say I quick "Thank You" to the (few) folks who take the time to read and listen, and occasionally comment, either here or on Facebook. Speaking of Facebook, it's hard to believe that Facebook was barely even around back in 2006 (it was, it just hadn't gone viral yet). I joined Facebook (as myself) about a year after starting this blog, in April of 2007 and didn't have a clue what to use it for. So my first post was: "Visit my blog at http://hybernationmusic.blogspot.com". LOL. I say "it's hard to believe..." because so many people I know, including myself, use Facebook now as a primary mode of communication!

I created a "Fragile Forest Page" on Facebook in January of 2010, sort of as a companion to this blog. Lately when I finish a track, I first post it there and then later, if I feel like it, I blog about it here. In fact, the Fragile Forest facebook page now has over 70+ "followers" (or "friends", or "likes" or whatever the heck they are calling it these days) so I suppose more people listen to my music there than here!

Anyway, I have decided to make more of an effort to blog every piece of music I work on here. Facebook is hard to navigate and go back and review old posts, due to all the clutter there. This blog is concentrated Fragile Forest, and it's my musical diary. I just need to make myself be more consistent with it.

Tonight, have a listen to these two piano solos. These are the two final pieces I mentioned last time I blogged in this post, which I have revised with a hyperlink to the future.

The first one is called "Searching" and it's actually part three of the "serious music suite" I wrote between 1979 and 1984. At one time I called this song "Song In Search of a Continuing Daytime Drama" since I felt that it was a bit on the sappy side, and the initial arrangement DID actually sound a little like "Nadia's Theme" (the theme from "the Young and the Restless"). In that original version written in 1979, I didn't play the arpeggiated left-hand part...I played simple quarter note triads, similar to "Nadia's Theme". I believe that it was a bit later (very early eighties) after I heard Keith Emerson's soundtrack to the horror film "Inferno" and that spurred the idea for the left-hand part. I remember being in Youngstown, Ohio when this happened, traveling with a top40 band. Isn't it funny how the mind retains some completely trivial bits of detail?

This recording was performed last year before I got the iMac, and was recorded into Cubase on the PC. The interesting thing about how I did that recording was that I played the entire piece to a metronome against a strict tempo, with no slowing down or speeding up. Then I went in a manually created all of the tempo variations you hear after the fact. I did this because I intended on orchestrating the piece and I wanted everything to line up perfectly on the bar markers, but then I later decided NOT to orchestrate after all. It was just too much work for someone who knows almost nothing about formal orchestration.

A few months ago I exported the MIDI file, with the tempo information intact, and then imported that into, you guessed it, Apple Logic Pro 9 on the iMac. I then constructed what I feel is "the perfect piano" sound....or at least as perfect as I can get at this time:

Native Instruments Kontakt 4 playing SampleTek's mega piano called "Seven Seas Grand" (a Yamaha C7)
IK Multimedia's new compressor called "Black 76 Limiting Amplifier"
Nomad Factor's EQ plugin, the "PulseTeq EQs"
Waves IR-L convolution reverb using their impulse response file that is an actual recording of the Ryman Auditorium from the 7th row.

So, first for tonight, here is "Searching":

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

The second solo piano piece in the suite, which was the last piece I wrote and was always meant to be the last one before the reprise, I am calling "Unnamed" because I cannot for the life of me remember what I used to call it. I probably have the old title written down an a piece of paper somewhere...I'm just not sure. I'm also not sure if I've even recorded it before. If I did, I probably recorded it on a Fender Rhodes electric piano....that is the way I first envisioned it. For this recording, I chose to use the exact same Piano sound as I did for "Searching", thinking this would give the suite a little bit of needed cohesiveness.

So, to end the night (and perhaps put you to sleep, this one is pretty mellow), here is "Unnamed":

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

Victory Theme

2011-06-22T21:19:00.007-05:00

I meant to post this song when I finished it a couple of months ago. I am behind in my blogging!

This is a piece of music that I wrote many years ago as part of my suite of "serious music". The other pieces in the suite that I have blogged about are located at these links:

1) Passage (original version)

2) Intermezzo

3) Searching (piano solo, blog post here)

4) Victory Theme (this piece)

5) Proclamation

6) unnamed piano solo (blog post here)

7) Passage (reprise)

If I ever finish completely recording this suite, perhaps I will post a "playlist" link where they can be listened to, in order, without clicking all around the place. For tonight, I hope you enjoy listening to "Victory Theme":

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

Here is the obligatory image that I usually include in my blog posts:

image courtesy of Tanya Hall (farflungphotos)

Technical details of the recording:
This track was started in Cakewalk Sonar 8.5 many months ago (perhaps more than a year). After letting it bake for that long, I finally ported the MIDI file over to Apple Logic Studio on my iMac, and then re-assigned many of the same virtual instruments used on the PC:

1) Native Instruments Kontakt 4 (Piano, Electric Piano, Bass)
2) Toontrack Superior Drummer 2 (using the "N. Y. - Hit Factory" drum set).
3) IK Multimedia Philharmonik (Strings)
4) Spectrasonics Omnisphere (String Pad and Vocal Pad)
5) Arturia Analog Factory 2.5 (two lead synth parts)

High-end Plugin maker Waves have been running serious discounts on their "Renaissance" line of plugins. This is the company that makes plug-in bundles that cost thousands of dollars. Well, for a ridiculously paltry $38, I picked up their Renaissance Compressor, and I'm very glad I did. I ended up using six instances of it on this mix, on drums, bass and master buss, and it really does add punch and warmth in a very subtle and professional way.

Another thing I did different on this track, that I used to do and just haven't lately since switching to Logic, was that I created a "drum submix" where I broke out the kick, snare, toms, hat and overhead drum "mics" onto separate tracks, and then did different EQ and plugin settings for each track. I also created a separate reverb buss for the drums, feeding just the right amount of post-fader output of each track into this channel. I also used several instances of Toontrack's EZMix plugin on some of the drum tracks to give them some extra sparkle. In the end, this drum mix sounded so good to me, I wanted to go back to all of my recent Logic projects and drop in this drum mix! In fact, I did on one, and Logic's "selective import" feature makes this incredibly easy to accomplish. You can copy pieces and parts of tracks and track settings very easily from one project to another. Very cool. Try THAT in Pro Tools!

Deep Space Music: "Lullaby"

2011-04-16T13:39:00.004-05:00

Occasionally, I like to compose and record completely dreamy space-music tracks.

Back in the early eighties, I began listening to a radio program on NPR call "Music From the Hearts of Space". This program showcased the kinds of artists that created this style of music, long before "New Age" became a "genre". I used to record the programs which aired very late on Sunday night, and then play them back at bedtime every night. To this day, I still listen to this kind of music pretty much every night at bedtime! And although I don't still follow the program, I understand that HOS is still very popular.

So occasionally, I start playing with a very dreamy, atmospheric synth sound, and something like this piece is born. I call this one "Lullaby", and I hope you enjoy it!

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

Rising Tide

2011-03-28T00:10:00.017-05:00

Digital painting by Mitchell Mohrhauser, USA. Software: Photoshop.

Click here to give to Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami Relief via the American Red Cross

Recently, Apple released the iPad 2 to much acclaim and hoopla, and they will no doubt sell a gazillion of them. I have been enjoying my iPad since July of last year when my wife sprung it on me for father's day. I use it mostly for reading books and blogs, surfing, facebooking and email.

Part of Apple's recent announcement included the release of GarageBand for iPad . Personally, I believe this achievement in software development is a much bigger game-changer than the iPad 2. The day it was released, I scarfed up my copy (for a whopping $4.99) from the App Store and started playing around. Though this is very much a "1.0 release" product, I expect Apple will probably build on this platform and use it to sell all manner of add-ons in the form of "in-app purchases" in much the same way as they sold all those "Jam Packs" to go along with original GarageBand (for Mac).

The second day I had the program, I spent about an hour putting this track together. I was sitting in the TV room with my wife and we were jumping from channel to channel soaking up news of the recent catastrophic events in Japan, and looking at videos on the internet as well. Disturbing and surreal. Shocking and startling. So much damage...so many people affected...words just don't do it justice. So if this track, which I call "Rising Tide", sounds a bit dark and foreboding, well now you know why.

It wasn't until days later that I realized how much this track sounds like the intro to the Genesis song "Mama". Completely unintentional!

Apple promises a future update to GarageBand for Mac that will allow you to start a track on the iPad and resume working on it on the Mac, in GarageBand OR in Logic Studio, my confirmed DAW of choice. While this feature isn't there yet, when it does come I suspect that the iPad will finally find a place in the heart of many composers....as a "scratch pad" tool that can be used anytime, anywhere an idea strikes. Very compelling.

So, here is my first track composed and recorded completely on the iPad. "Rising Tide". Enjoy!

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

March 31, 2001 update!

An update to GarageBand (for Mac) has been released, as promised!

Yep, all I had to do was apply this update, then when I launched GB to open the "Rising Tide.band" file I transferred from my iPad via iTunes, I got this message:

And sure enough, after 10 minutes or so, the project opened. And it played FLAWLESSLY. It sounded EXACTLY like on the iPad (well, better I suppose since the Audio on this iMac is high-end) and it allowed me to do all the wonderful edits GB provides:

Pretty bloody amazing, actually. Now you really CAN use GB for iPad as a mobile musical sketch-pad, and then continue building on your idea with all of the instruments and editing features offered by GB on the Mac, which is an awful lot.

Although GB projects on the Mac can normally be freely opened in Logic, sadly this is not yet the case for these GB for iPad projects. When I tried to open the saved GB file in Logic, it said the "GB Synth" instrument was not found, and that this project had been created with a "new version of Logic". So, I guess there is a Logic update coming down the pike soon that will bring all of this together. Can't wait!

Actually, I could continue to edit the project in Logic and save it there, I would just have to pick a different Logic instrument (or AU plugin) to replace the missing "GB Synth". Not a big deal if I really wanted to continue working on this track. But, for now, I think I will let the iPad version stand on it's own two feet for the sake of this blog post.

Last year, I took a Laptop, small keyboard, audio interface, headphones and USB hub with iLok and e-Licenser dongles on vacation with us, just in case inspiration struck! This year, I will be able to travel a bit lighter and just take the iPad and some earbuds. Nice.

Excursions

2011-03-15T21:40:00.012-05:00

ex·cur·sion  (Ĭk-skûr′zhən) n.
[Latin excursiō, excursiōn-, from excursus, past participle of excurrere, to run out : ex-, ex- + currere, to run; see  kers- in Indo-European roots.] 

A usually short journey made for pleasure; an outing.
Organized outing to a specific place of interest.
A side trip, usually short, made with the intention of returning to the starting location
Round-trip completed within a specified period of time.
digression: wandering from the main path of a journey
The movement of the cone or diaphragm of a speaker. Higher volts or amps will increase excursion.
Lateral movement of a well logging curve or trace in response to a galvanometer deflection. "Excursion" is often referred to as deflection.
Moving the jaw from side to side
A range of movement regularly of a joint or muscle
The Excursion by William Wordsworth, published in 1814, in nine books, a philosophical poem which shows his disillusion with the French Revolution
Excursions, Op. 20, is the first published solo piano piece by Samuel Barber.
Excursions is the latest track by "Fragile Forest" (aka John S. Hagewood), produced entirely in Apple Logic using a variety of virtual instruments including Kontakt, Omnisphere, EZ Drummer, Moog Modular V, M-Tron Pro, Korg Mono-Poly and B4II.

enjoy!

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

Piano Idea Two

2011-02-24T22:05:00.001-06:00

It's been too long since I last wrote something here, and a lot has been going on in Hybernation Studio. Since getting "Mac Fever" a few months ago, Pro Tools 9 was released to much acclaim. I finally scored my upgrade copy a few weeks ago and I was and remain very impressed with this update to the standard in digital audio workstations.

I was also again impressed by how much more stable Pro Tools is on my under-powered iMac than my honking quad-core PC. And I was missing using Apple's Logic DAW. You see, in December when I was recording my "Big Christmas Production", I realized quickly that I had to revert to the PC, since the iMac was just not powerful enough for all those tracks. Since then I have also been working on several other compositions, and experiencing the same thing...I start them on the iMac, and then have to port them to the PC once I exceed eight tracks or so. And since Apple Logic is a "Mac Only" program, well, I just wasn't able to use it, so I have been using Pro Tools almost exclusively.

That is until Valentines Day came. My incredible wife insisted that I let her treat me to the "iMac of my dreams", and how could I argue? So I scored a 27" iMac with a quad-core i7 processor, 12GB of memory, and a 2TB hard-drive. This is one amazing and beautiful machine, and now I'm able to port those projects BACK from the PC and work on them on this amazing machine. And it looks and feels absolutely amazing!

But I'm still in the "Pro Tools vs. Logic debate" internally. Logic is incredibly intuitive (like the Cakewalk/Sonar I grew up with), and it's way more CPU-efficient than Pro Tools. And Logic now has a full 64-bit version, so those extra 8GB of memory don't go to waste! (Pro Tools 9 is STILL only a 32-bit program, so it can only address 4GB of memory at the most). So, I have begun to re-explore Logic, and I'm reading another book on the subject and planning on starting and finishing all new projects in Logic for the time being.

This little project I'm posting tonight was one of those 10-minute deals. I had Propellerhead's Record/Reason up on the new iMac, I thought of a quick idea, and I played around with it for 5 minutes, building up a little arrangement in my head. Then I hit record and played it through, only to notice that I didn't really hit record. Then I REALLY hit record and played it through, and that was IT! Done.

I posted the rough mix on Facebook and got some positive feedback, so this lead me, tonight, to import the MIDI file into Logic and remix it. I removed four notes that seemed superfluous, added some compression and EQ, and chose a different piano sound. Ironically, after auditioning several of my favorite multi-gigabyte pianos from SampleTekk, none of them seemed quite right. I ended up going back to Reason and using Sonic Reality's new refill called "Classic Rock Piano". I added IK Multimedia's T-Racks 3 Vintage Compressor 370 to the master buss, and bounced the Rewire track down to audio prior to mixing. The whole thing took me less time to accomplish than to type the last few paragraphs. Like I said "intuitive".

Here is what Logic looked like when I was done:

So, here is "Piano Idea Two", an exercise in simplicity.

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

I Believe In Father Christmas

2010-12-18T14:10:00.004-06:00

If you have been reading my blog for the last few years, you probably know how I feel about Christmas, since I have blogged about it before. I suppose having two children has probably softened me up a little bit about this whole Christmas thing :-)

Last year, I got kind of deep and personal, and posted a synthesized rendition of one of my favorite carols, "What Child Is This".

In 2008, I posted a much less serious cover of Peter Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" (be sure to listen to it all, as it has a surprise genre-spanning ended).

Doing "cover tunes" is fun. I don't do it that often, but I always learn from the experience. This time, I actually learned a song (note-for-note) that I have always loved, and previously only dabbled with. I did the entire learning and recording session in one four-hour span, with a single hour-long follow-up session of final overdubs and the mixdown. The song is "I Believe In Father Christmas", recorded and released by Greg Lake in 1975, and then again by Emerson, Lake and Palmer in 1977, and yet again in 1993. In addition to the Wikipedia link above, you can read more trivia about this song, and about the controversy it created at this songfacts link.

Bottom line is, I believe that lyricist Peter Sinfield left the lyrics to this song ambiguous on purpose. Unlike some of his other blatantly atheistic lyrics (for instance, in ELP's "The Only Way" from the album "Tarkus") the lyrics to Father Christmas, the middle verse anyway, can be interpreted several ways. In an attempt to make my version a little less ambiguous, I altered the lyrics in very subtle ways (just one word really, and a couple of pronoun substitutions is all, hardly worth mentioned actually...in fact, forget I mentioned it).

I will let you draw your own conclusions. I hope you enjoy my rendition of this timeless holiday classic. The lyrics, as I sang them, are posted just below the song links.

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

I Believe In Father Christmas (Lake/Sinfield)

They said there'll be snow at Christmas

They said there'll be peace on earth

But instead it just kept on raining

A veil of tears for the virgin's birth

I remember one Christmas morning

A winters light and a distant choir

And the peal of a bell and that Christmas tree smell

And their eyes full of tinsel and fire

They sold me a dream of Christmas

They sold me a silent night

And they told me the fairy stories

Still I believe in the Israelite

But they believed in father Christmas

And they looked at the sky with excited eyes

'till they woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn

And they saw him and through his disguise

I wish you a hopeful Christmas

I wish you a brave new year

All anguish pain and sadness

Leave your heart and let your road be clear

They said there'll be snow at Christmas

They said there'll be peace on earth

Hallelujah noel be it heaven or hell

The Christmas we get we deserve

First track done on my Mac

2010-11-24T23:55:00.002-06:00

Yep, you heard that right. Hybernation Studio now has a Mac. A 21.5" iMac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.66gHz, with 4GB of RAM, to be specific.

I bought this used machine on a whim for a paltry $600, from a friend who no longer needed it after getting himself a MacBook Pro. I was thinking it would just be an experiment. A Toy. Something to mess with, and entertain the kids with using Photo Booth.

Little did I know I would fall in love with this unbelievably stable platform. I've been a PC user for my entire life, and have always stood by them. I still love them. Windows 7 64-bit is, without a doubt, the best and most stable Windows platform ever. But, now I see why everyone was telling me I needed to try a Mac.

So of course now I am wanting a full-blown 27" Core i7 iMac pretty bad, after acquiring Apple's DAW program "Logic Express". Logic is so intuitive and feature-rich. And incredibly stable. I believe it is my new favorite DAW, edging out Pro Tools. So, I'm willing to live with the somewhat limited hardware of this current Mac I own (compared to my quad-core PC) and will probably continue to use it as the platform of choice for composing, just because it's so incredibly stable, and Logic is so unbelievably productive for me. "It just works". Help, I'm turning into a Mac Fanboy!

This track is the first one I recorded completely in Logic on the Mac. Enjoy!

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

Jamming on Indian instruments

2010-05-14T22:30:00.003-05:00

I've always liked the sound of the "trademark" Indian instruments such as Tanpura, Sitar and Tabla. Well at least since I was a youngster and first heard George Harrison experimenting with them to great effect. So I was delighted last year when Native Instruments released their Kore Soundpack entitled "North India", which contained these and other Indian instruments. I won't say they are "authentic" because, to be honest, I wouldn't really have any way of knowing! But they advertise that they are, and they sure sound that way to me.

This track was just me experimenting with the three instruments that I mention above, and then layering in some more conventional western sounds....synthesized voices, electric guitar, drums, percussion and big Moog Synth bass. I must warn you that this track doesn't really "go" anywhere, it just presents a few simple melodies and provides an ambiance that is a blend of eastern and western tonalities.

I tried to get my son Jonathan to "name that track" a few days ago in the car, playing him an earlier mix. When he first heard the "vocal synth drone" part he said "Hey Daddy, that sounds like a bunch of Indian guys burping!". Funny, but not a great title for the track. I couldn't think of anything either, so I just stuck with my working title, which was "Jamming India".

Enjoy!

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

The original version of "Passage"

2010-04-25T20:51:00.018-05:00

I have blogged quite a lot about this composition in the past, which you can read here, and also referenced here and most recently here.

I decided it would be good to record the "original version" as it was composed for that Freshman Composition class at the Belmont College School of Music in 1979. This is pretty much exactly what I heard in my head at the time, and the music is exactly what I played for the class (if my 30 year old memory can be trusted). As I mentioned previously, I eventually want to showcase the entire "Suite" of "Serious Compositions" which I wrote between 1979 and sometime in the early 80's in a single blog post, and I only have a few more pieces to record before I can do that. But this is the piece of music that started it all, and this was my very first attempt at actually "composing" (not to be confused with the art of "songwriting" which I gave up on years ago!).

Recently, my amazing wife insisted I buy myself a really top-end laptop computer on which I can do my music "anywhere, anytime". After looking around at commercial laptops such as Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc, and reading music blogs (including many horror stories) and otherwise researching this, I decided to stick with ADK Pro Audio, where I purchased my main studio computer over two years ago. I have nothing but great things to say about Scott and his whole crew based on my past experiences...they are fabulous people with a passion for great, continuing customer support long after the sale. They sell computer systems specifically for the Digital Audio market, and they are extremely well respected in their field. Scott fixed me up with a killer laptop based on an Intel Core i7 M620 processor, with 8GB RAM and all the fixings, as we say here in the south (the "K" in ADK does stand for "Kentucky" after all!).

I was thinking that this new addition to "Studio B" would give me the ability to "start things", but that I would probably still transfer the projects down to "Studio A" to finish them. Well, I had no idea how much processor speeds have improved in the two years since I bought my quad-core machine from ADK! This laptop will do everything my big machine will do, and without breaking a sweat. It actually runs Pro Tools better than the other machine (still not completely sure why that is).

I recorded this version of "Passage" in Pro Tools 8 M-Powered using Kontakt 4 for the Rhodes and CP-80 piano sample that makes up the main "piano" part. The synths you hear are all from the CPU-hungry folks at Arturia, specifically the Moog Modular V (Taurus bass sound), the Jupiter V (String machine sound), and the Arp 2600 V (lead sound). I laid on the mastering and EQ plugins pretty heavy while mixing this down, and saw my CPU meter holding steady at less than 20%. Amazing.

In the few weeks since Studio B got this upgrade, I've only spent a couple of hours in studio A! I actually did start and finish this piece completely on my new laptop. Amazing technology. What a great time it is for musicians to be alive.

A HUGE "THANK YOU" to my lovely and amazing wife LoriLea for upgrading "Studio B"!

Hope you enjoy this "Original Version" of "Passage", composed in the 20th century...recorded well into the 21st!

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

Proclamation

2010-04-01T21:17:00.019-05:00

The year was 1981. February. I had been on the road touring with "Amy and Members Only" for several months, my first "professional musician" job. We landed this really sweet gig in Stratton, Vermont, where Olympic skiers train, to play a one night party for the U.S. Olympic Team. Payment was 6 days worth of lift tickets and lodging in a huge chalet for the whole band.

First day there, me and the bass player, Dow Tomlin, took some skiing lessons, since we were the only two newbies. It went pretty well, and by the end of the day we were doing the beginners slopes, him more successfully than me by far. I have never had a good sense of balance, and NOTHING about downhill skiing felt intuitive to me (plus I hadn't and still haven't ever been water skiing). I could get down and only have 3 or 4 major falls or tree crashes with each run.

Second day there, back at it that morning, my hardware kept malfunctioning and one or both skis would pop off when I would put any stress on them. They tried to tune them twice but it kept happening to me. Then it happened at a very bad time and I took a horrible fall, dislocating my "trick shoulder" which I had major surgery on just 18 months prior. Not good. As I writhed in the snow in excruciating pain, bellowing at the top of my lungs, I was finally able to pop it in myself, and then I somehow got down the rest of the way and went to see the on-site doctor. Well, he took one look at my surgical scar and dished out a huge bottle of pain-killlers. No more skiing for me this week.

With several days alone in the chalet with my keyboards, I decided to continue composing additional sections to the suite of "serious music" that I had started in college, and which I blogged about here and here. I had actually started a slow and very melodic piano-solo piece and finished it in my head for a third "movement", but since I couldn't actually play very well with my arm in a sling, I started writing a fourth movement, one I envisioned as being a very strong Proclamation of life.

I stumbled upon some very cool chords...the right hand playing F major and Bb major, over the left hand playing Bb and Eb (a 4th higher than the tonic). Sounded very progressive to me at the time...still does actually. Probably borrows quite heavily from Keith Emerson and Aaron Copeland, not surprisingly. Some shifting time signatures, and then a B-section in 5/4. I wrote it all down on staff paper, and got very excited about this piece. I remember that the guitar player, Dan Searles, loved the B-section and couldn't get enough of it. That is, until I kept playing (through headphones of course) after everyone else crashed. They would yell down, "Hey John, that clunky sound is keeping us awake" -- me banging the keys!

The amazing thing is that I have managed to keep up with the hand-written scores of this piece for the last 30 years. You can view the A-section here...and the B-Section here. Notice the pretentiousness on page one: "Sonata #1 for Polyphonic Synthesizer and Piano". LOL!!! and "Part 1 - Exposition". Ah youth...pretentious and didn't care a bit.

Now, those of you that listened to the the song "Passage" earlier may notice that the final section of Passage is exactly like the B-section of this piece, Proclamation. Here is the story. Originally, Passage was JUST the A-section, repeated twice. It only had to be 16 measures long to meet the requirements of the Freshman Music Comp class! But as the years went by and I continued to work on this "suite", I started playing a "reprise" version of Passage that ended with the 5/4 section of Proclamation, and that is actually what I recorded a few months ago for that other posting. Perhaps soon I will record the original Passage and the other three pieces in the suite and put them all up on one page so they can be listened to in order.

Anyway, for tonight, here is "Proclamation". Enjoy

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

Painting courtesy of Ken Ahlering

Pulsation - first new track for 2010

2010-01-18T21:01:00.009-06:00

Here is a happy little tune I tossed together in Ableton Live 8 the other night, using Rob Papan's Blue and Predator synths, joined by an Absynth5 pad sound processed through a trippy CamelSpace effect, Arturia's Arp 2600V and using the Roland TB-303 sounds from the Electronic Expansion for EZDrummer.

Ableton Live 8 is yet another contender in the "great DAW race" at Hybernation Music. I've have had a copy of Live "Lite" for years which I got for free with an audio interface. When Live Lite 8 came out last year I thought I would give it another try. Their integration with Propellerhead's Reason is very good, second only to Pro Tools 8, but their real claim to fame with "Live" is the "Session View", which is an interactive clip-based way of working that lends itself to spontaneity and the whole "DJ" thing. While the "DJ" thing interests me not in the least, I do always appreciate experimenting with other ways of working while composing which might produce ideas that otherwise wouldn't be realized, and Live 8 definitely offers that!

Ableton Live 8 Session View

So I began this piece by recording several bubbly little pulsating parts into the Session View and chaining them together that way. As this evolved into no less than 5 of these parts coming and going, I then added the lead lines using the more conventional "Arrangement View" which works pretty much the way all the other "linear" DAW's do. Having used a very simple "guide track" for the electronic drums, I then had a great time auditioning various TB-303 patterns in EZDrummer and stringing my favorite ones together to create the finished drum part.

This whole process took about 3 hours, spread out over 2 nights.

I wondered after-the-fact if it needed a proper "bass part", but I didn't labor over the idea. I just decided to mix it down and get on with it. So here it is. I call it "Pulsation". Enjoy!

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

What Child Is This ?

2009-12-23T20:17:00.015-06:00

I've never been a big fan of Christmas. Ask anyone who knows me and they'll say I'm a scrooge, and I suppose they are right. Part of this is most likely due to the sad fact that December 25th is also my birthday. For the most part, this was a huge rip-off when I was younger. Did I get twice the gifts at Christmas time as people often suggested? No, I was lucky if people even remembered my birthday. And the whole Santa Claus thing has always totally ticked me off...people basically lying to their kids and trying to get them to really believe this whole pagan fantasy thing, whilst side-lining the REAL reason for Christmas: Christ.

But that's not the whole story. Some of my most stressful and sad memories were formed during the holidays. Seems like a lot of people die around this time of year, and we also tend do a lot of "reflecting" as the year-end draws close, making us miss people who died during the year, or even years before.

And then there is the shopping, and the traffic, and the crappy weather that sets in this time of year in Nashville (cold, gray, wet and hardly ever white). And worst of all, there are the "Social Events" and all the STRESS that they bring with them. Yep, I must admit, I pretty much hate it. "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch".

But then, musically, I do have this little soft spot for it. There's the "Carol Candlelight" services that are always beautiful and awe inspiring. There's the radio playing John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War is Over)" and ELP's "I Believe in Father Christmas". I even like the Carpenters' "Merry Christmas Darling" (shhhh, don't tell). And although I despise the horrendous "Christmas elevator music" you hear while shopping, there have been many good Christmas albums I have listened to over the years. Just last year I discovered what has to be the most unique one ever, an album called "Chris Squire's Swiss Choir" which blends an adult choir from Switzerland with Yes bassist Chris Squire's arranging a vocal skill, along with some other great progressive rock players. Great stuff.

Of course the real reason for Christmas is important and vital. I believe that choosing to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is the most important decision a person can ever make.

As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, we should also celebrate the Reason for his coming, and how much his life and sacrifice means to mankind. It is everything. He is the way, the truth, and the light, and yes for a time he was also a precious, helpless baby.

What child is this? Emmanuel. God is with us. The word become flesh.

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

What child is this, who, laid to rest
On Mary's lap, is sleeping?
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?

This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing:
Haste, haste to bring him laud,
The Babe, the Son of Mary!

Why lies he in such mean estate
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christian, fear for sinners here,
The silent Word is pleasing.

So bring Him incense, gold, and myrrh,
Come peasant king to own Him,
The King of kings, salvation brings,
Let loving hearts enthrone Him.

Raise, raise the song on high,
The Virgin sings her lullaby:
Joy, joy, for Christ is born,
The Babe, the Son of Mary!

painting courtesy of Liz Lemon Swindle

It isn't ALL about computer music here at Hybernation Studio!

2009-12-18T13:12:00.001-06:00

Just so you know, I do have a few vintage instruments (and otherwise non-computerized things) here at Hybernation Studio.

Pictured above is a 1956 Hammond M3 organ, recently acquired from my good friend and musician extraordinaire Dan Tracey. On the bench is the Ovation acoustic/electric guitar I bought just before my son was born 6 years ago.

And left over from my days on the road, above is my 1980 model Rhodes 88 Suitcase. After carrying this beast all over the country for three years, I just couldn't bear to part with it (not for a fraction of the purchase price anyway). Honestly though, nothing else sounds like a real Rhodes (or Hammond for that matter). Though I seldom use these two vintage keyboards in recordings, it's still nice to have them around to provide that "vintage vibe" to my recording space.

Imagine...it's been 29 years

2009-12-08T00:01:00.006-06:00

In December of 1980, I had just dropped out of college as a music major to join a traveling top-40 band. We spent the holidays learning five sets of music prior to beginning what would be my first tour, and the beginning of my 3-year stint as a "Professional Lounge Musician".

We had to learn a wide variety of music for the types of clubs we would be playing, not just the current "top 40" and "dance" music, but also a "dinner set" (the early set) which needed to contain mostly laid back stuff and ballads. I suggested we learn "Imagine" by John Lennon, and everyone agreed it would be a good one....so we did. I sang it. In my mind, this was to be one of the high-points in the evening gigs. This was not to be...for a while.

About 3 weeks before the end of our 8 week rehearsal period, I walked into rehearsal to a bunch of very sad people. I was not into "news" so I hadn't a clue what had transpired the evening before, on December 8th, 1980. John Lennon had been shot and killed outside his home in New York City. An icon...no, a living legend was gone. I was devastated, and we all agreed to can rehearsal for that evening. I cried...a lot. I got very drunk. Then I cried some more. For days it seemed. I tried to watch some of the "tributes" and such that were on TV, but I couldn't. Every time "Imagine" came on the radio, for weeks to come in fact, I cried.

Since age 8 in 1969, I had been a huge Beatles fan. My first two LP's were "Let It Be" and "The Beatles Again" (the US-only LP that was a collection of singles, including included "Hey Jude", "Paperback Writer", and "Lady Madonna"). I had always said that Paul was my favorite Beatle...his first solo album was the 3rd LP I acquired. But I loved plenty of John's songs as well, and I always held out hope that they would re-form in the 80's, and conquer the world all over again. I was actually quite SURE that this would happen. When John "retired" in NYC I got a little worried, but then those rumors of "what almost happened" on Saturday Night Live kept the flame alive.

With John's passing, part of me died. No chance of a Beatles reunion now, for one thing. For another, I carried around this visceral fear and loathing for this type of evil that I never really admitted, before now, could exist in the world. How could ANYONE be so evil as to deprive the world of someone like John Lennon? It was just unimaginable.

Even five years later, I recall seeing TV shows marking the December 8th date and crying. My sadness was not for myself, or for John, or Julian, Sean or Yoko. My sadness was for a world so pathetic that something like this could happen. For a world that would never again know the magical synergy that was The Beatles. I'm sure I sound like I'm being overly dramatic here, but as I write this, the feelings are as fresh and real as they were 29 years ago.

So flash back to the spring of 1981. After three months on the road with "Members Only", a show band fronted by singer Amy Runion, the band started asking me, "hey can we go ahead and play Imagine now". I said I would try. The first few nights were hard, but I made it through, then it got easier. We didn't waste this song on the "dinner set", which was often played for 3 people, 2 of them waitresses. We actually saved it for a "slow dance" number in the rocking-out last set, and it was amazing to see the dance floor FLOOD with people during the first few chords of the song.

People LOVED it. Almost every night, I had someone come up to me after the last set was over and tell me how much they enjoyed us playing "Imagine". Some said "I've never heard a band play that song in a club". Some people begged us to play it one more time before we went home. During the summer of 1980 when we spent 12 weeks at the same resort, we began to get requests for "Imagine" from the regulars, and would sometimes end up playing it 3 times in one evening!

All for this little three minute song with about 6 chords in it. This simple little ode to world peace, written by a man who may have actually been capable of furthering that concept, had he not been so rudely interrupted.

"Members Only" was Randy Runion, Dow Tomlin, Amy Runion, me and Dan Searles

I first recorded "Imagine" almost four years ago, but I was never happy with the mix. Listening back to that original mix which you can hear here, I can't believe how bad it sounds to me now. So, I decided recently to completely remix it. I think the new mix is light-years better than what I produced originally.

All the MIDI parts (just 5) were recorded with new virtual instruments. The biggest difference there is that the modern "pad synth" sound was replaced with a more retro sounding "Mellotron Strings" sound, produced by IK Multimedia's SampleTron.

The Hammond is a different sound altogether, a sound called "Preston!" from Native Instruments B4II, obviously named after Billy Preston, a man often referred to as "The Fifth Beatle". The bass guitar sample is a vastly superior sound to what I had back then, a 3GB sample of a Fender Precision from Native Instruments called the Scarbee Pre-Bass. The drums are the EZDrummer engine playing the "Nashville" expansion, while the drum part itself is me playing drums on the keyboard, as recorded back then. In fact, ALL of the actual MIDI notes are exactly what I played back then with no editing. For the Piano, I used the same sample as before (a 7GB sample of an upright piano from SampleTekk called "Vertical Pop"). And the vocals are the same tracks as before. They were recorded using an AKG C3000B microphone through an older DBX tube pre-amp.

So, I imported all of this into Pro Tools 8 M-Powered (which I should probably admit is fast becoming my DAW of choice, over both Cubase 5 and Sonar 8) and started completely over on the mix. First re-working the MIDI instruments used, then completely re-thinking the vocal effects and the effects on the instruments. I used a LOT less reverb on everything, in fact the piano, bass and organ are completely dry, and there is some intentionally fake-sounding reverb on the Tron (to give that Moody Blues strings effect)....I was going for a real "live-in-the-room-with-you" band sound.

For the vocals, I used a rather complex (for me) effect chain of EQ + compressor + De-Esser + Reverb.

I left every bit of the "slop" in the timing on the MIDI parts and didn't fix a thing. I was tempted on a couple of parts where the bass and kick are not completely tight, and especially tempted to just completely quantize the drum part, but I resisted the urge. I wanted this to sound natural....like me in the studio laying down this classic track with very little editing or other studio trickery. And it is.

I hope you enjoy my latest rendition of John Lennon's timeless classic, "Imagine".

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

Scary, my elbow is giving me song ideas

2009-10-19T21:07:00.012-05:00

Scary things happen in the studio sometimes. Usually it's late at night, but this time it was Saturday afternoon. I was messing around with Ultra Analog VA-1, which I raved about in an earlier blog post. I was diligently trying to get it's sounds to load up in Native Instruments Kore2, and not having much luck. While Kore2 was doing an exhausting and subsequently futile scan of my whole hard drive, I leaned forward and rested my elbow on the keyboard, and my chin on my hand (you know, the famous pose of "The Thinker" statue, only in front of a keyboard (the kind with 88 black and white keys) and two 24 inch monitors...

Well, my elbow held down three simple notes, the A, B, and C right there at middle-C on the keys, and VA-1 was on the initial sound, an arpeggiated sound that was the starting point for the song in that other post mentioned above. What emanated from my headphones was a mesmerizing little figure in 9/8, actualy A-B-C repeated as eight notes in three ascending octaves. Well, it immediately sounded like something in the key of A minor to me, so I reached over to my hardware keyboards and started jamming. Yes, I still have some of those hardware keyboards around, the kind that make sound all on their own without being hooked up to a computer: an Alesis QS 8.1 and a Roland VR-760 (which incidentally, Neal Morse plays live).

Later that afternoon, I couldn't get that little figure out of my head, so I fired up Pro Tools and recorded a bit of it. Then I started playing with the Boom drum machine plugin, or "dumb machine" as drumming legend Chester Thompson once referred to them in a clinic appearance I attended. Rather than using any canned patterns in Boom, I wanted to play some things in real-time and loop them, and I actually created three separate instrument tracks with three different Boom sounds on them. Then I realized just how hard it is to play along to something in 9/8 when each eighth note has the same accent amount. Impossible. There is no meter. Where the heck is the downbeat?

Actually, the effect I got was kind of cool, in an Alan Parsons sort of way. I love the way "I Robot" starts....you can't figure out "where one is" until the drums finally kick in. I sort of recreated this effect by playing several drum patterns at the beginning that were definitely NOT in 9/8, and then after a few bars it all comes together and syncs up.

The track rundown showing plugins used looks like this:

Ultra Analog VA-1 - Arpeggios
Boom - basic rhythm
Boom - "Urban" fills
Boom - kick/clap sound ala Peter Gabriel
EZDrummer Latin Percussion - shakers
EZDrummer Latin Percussion - wind chimes and fills
Vacuum Synth - Bass
Ultra Analog VA-1 - spooky lead sound
Structure - String sound, a mix of real and synthesized
Xpand!² - Electric Guitar
Rob Papen's Blue - Phased Synth Pad

As usual lately, I played this track for my son Jonathan first, just this afternoon, and ask him to help me name it. After he heard the whole song, I soloed the "spooky lead synth" sound and said "doesn't that sound kind of spooky". He said "let's call it Haunted House". Alright then, just in time for Halloween, here is "Haunted House".

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

Winter Dream

2009-10-02T22:08:00.012-05:00

Yes, I know it's not winter yet...in fact it's turning into a beautiful fall here in Middle Tennessee, and I'm in no hurry for winter to get here! But I continue to let my son Jonathan name my tracks as I finish them and audition the early mixes in the car with him. He decided this one was to be called "Winter Dream", so who am I to argue?

I started this track using Reason 4.0 in "Studio B" about a year ago. After laying out the initial parts and the haunting piano melody, I thought it had a striking resemblance to something that Patrick O'Hearn might have been doing in about 1989. So my working title was "O'Hurt Me". Often my working titles make no sense at all to anyone but me.

Recently the final version of Propellerhead's Record 1.0 software, which I raved about in an earlier post, arrived in my mailbox and so the last few weeks I've been having a bit of a "battle of the DAW's" here in Hybernation Studio. I seem to be rotating projects between Pro Tools, Cubase and Record! This track I finished in Record, since importing the Reason 4.0 file and converting to Record's format is so easy. In fact "easy" is the one word that perfectly describes Propellerhead's new product. Anything I want to do, for the most part, I can figure out within a couple of minutes without ever looking at the manual. With Pro Tools and Cubase, I am continually referencing the copious documentation (granted they are both deeper programs than Record). But with Record, they really went out of their way to make the software incredibly easy to use and intuitive. And it still manages to be a very powerful and professional tool.

So, this is officially the first track that I have completed using Record. This is also another first....the first track I have ever actually PLAYED all of the drums on...on my Roland V-Drum kit, triggering drums sounds from the Reason Drum Kit Refill 2.0. I'm not talking about the many percussion tracks, just the "rock drums" that come in the "B section" and again at the end of the song. Ok, so it's primarily just the kick and snare, and some cymbals, but it really is "all me" playing them. Alright, I admit I did quantize the part later to clean up the timing, and I edited a few mistakes, but other than that...

Alright granted, Alan White and Bill Bruford don't have anything to worry about. Learning to play drums is hard, they say especially so for keyboard players. I've only been at it for about four years. Really makes me miss Alan, trying to pound it out myself.

Record is different from Cubase and Sonar in one large way: everything happens in just three windows. I usually put the "track" window on the left monitor:

And then I put the "rack" and "mixer" windows side by side on the right monitor:

As I explained previously, the "virtual mixer" in Record is quite awesome, it being modeled after the classic Solid State Logic XL 9000 K Series, a piece of kit that will run you in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm not really an audiophile with "golden ears" but I can tell you that this mixer sounds very good for what it is. The only thing I can't really come to grips with is the "master buss compression". I just couldn't make it do what I wanted on the final mix. So I ended up exporting out a 24-bit WAV file (uncompressed) of the final mix, importing this into Sonar and using the excellent Voxengo Elephant plugin to "master" the song, adding compression and limiting. This plugin is amazingly transparent, giving you that "loud" sound without colorizing the mix in any way.

I should also mention that this track resembles the one I call "Ancient Violence" in several ways. I believe I actually had that 20 year old composition in mind when I started this one, intentionally going for the same kind of vibe. I guess there is no law against ripping off oneself is there!

Here is "Winter Dream". Enjoy...and stay warm.

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

One Lonely Desert (giving Pro Tools another try)

2009-09-23T22:02:00.015-05:00

Pro Tools and the company behind it, Avid/Digidesign, has been in the news a bit lately. It's really pretty amazing actually, that a company that until recently only catered to "Music Industry Professionals" has done an about face in just a few years. It started a number of years ago when they began selling Pro Tools LE and their series of project studio interfaces. Given a decent Mac or PC, one could get into a system like this for way less than the original Pro Tools "HD" systems. Like $1K to $4K for an LE system (even less later) compared to something in the $10K to $40K price range for the HD systems that practically all major recording studios run. With Pro Tools LE, like the more expensive HD systems, you bought the rather pricey interface and the software came bundled with it.

Then came the software only "Pro Tools M-Powered", which is what I own, which is basically Pro Tools LE designed to run on the more generic M-Audio interfaces instead of the proprietary Digidesign ones that only run Pro Tools. As I've said before, it's really quite a lot of DAW power for the money ($249). I'm running it on a $99 M-Audio Audiophile 2496 Interface (which also runs Cubase, Sonar, etc). This was a version of Pro Tools for the project studio person who already owned an M-Audio interface, either FireWire, USB or PCI (of which there are many, and they have been popular for quite some time).

But in the last couple of weeks, things have REALLY changed. M-Audio is now selling something called "Pro Tools Essentials" which is a limited version of Pro Tools M-Powered that is bundled with several different pieces of M-Audio hardware, targeted squarely at beginners. This is truly "Garage Band meets Pro Tools"...Pro Tools for the masses...and you can now buy these packages for $99 to $149 at places like Best Buy, just one aisle over from that silly "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero" trash that kids are going nuts over. From a marketing perspective, it's really quite clever: those 9 to 12 year old kids that are playing the games today may at some point decide they want "the real thing" and here it is -- A fully professional, though somewhat limited, recording rig that hooks up easily to your computer, and costs less than most gaming consoles. Pretty Sweet!

OK, enough news and advertising links!

So, in the last few weeks I've been really stretching my brain and learning Cubase as well as digging back into Pro Tools, which I have managed to get "stable" in both Vista64 and Windows 7x64. The key to stability with Pro Tools is what RTAS instruments you use (RTAS stands for "Real Time Audio Suite" and it is Digidesign's proprietary instrument and effect plug-in architecture). RTAS for Pro Tools = VST for everybody else, well except for Apple Logic, they have their own format as well, something called "AU". Most of the Virtual Instruments I have purchased say they support RTAS, but many of them are not really "approved" by Digidesign, and those are the ones that make Pro Tools unstable!

So, I got to thinking I would try to do a track using ONLY the virtual instruments that come with Pro Tools 8 M-Powered, and this is what came out of that. They say that placing limits on the tool set you use, in any medium, will often foster creativity, and in this case it seemed to work for me. One thing is certain, I am "spoiled for choice" when it comes to software instruments!

The guitar parts were produced using the excellent Structure Free sample playback unit, which I also used for one of the string synth parts. The other string synth / pad part was done with Xpand2. I used two instances of Vacuum, a virtual analogue modeled synth, one for bass and the other for the lead synth sound. I used the Mini Grand piano plug-in as well. On many of these instruments I also used the out-of-the-box effects plug-ins for things like Chorus, Delay, Reverb, and Compression.

Lastly, I used the new Boom drum machine plug-in. This one is very cool and nostalgic for me. It's modeled very much after the Roland-type drum machines from the 80's, of which I once owned two, a TR-707 and a TR-626. Even before those "sample-based" units came along, Roland made units like the CR-78, TR-808 and TR-909 which had all analogue circuitry. These distinctive sounding units are still used today, especially in Hip Hop, Rap, Chill and D&B styles of music. The sound set I used in Boom sounds a bit like a TR-808 or a CR-78.

I learned to program drum beats in 1986 on the above unit, a TR-707. The interface was just amazingly "immediate" and became very popular and imitated by other manufacturers. So, when I saw the user interface for Boom I felt right at home!

I don't have much to say about this track, other than it's kind of a happy, trippy little bit that started as a "guitar idea", so I called it "Guitar Idea One" for lack of a more inventive title (and because this little ditty probably doesn't deserve a more inventive title). But the morning after I first mixed it, I was playing it in the car, as I often do to see how the mix sounds outside of Hybernation Studio, and my 6-year-old Jonathan said "Daddy, what's that song called". I told him I didn't really have a name and would he like to name it? So, he listened in complete silence for 4 minutes and then said "I like it, I want to call it 'One Lonely Desert'". Ok, Jonathan, "One Lonely Desert" sounds good to me!

The "genre" is a little hard to pin down...I guess you could call this "progressive acoustic ambient chill" music.

Enjoy!

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

Heroes, revisited

2009-09-07T22:00:00.008-05:00

As I began thinking about the 9/11 anniversary this week, I wanted to do a track in honor of the "heroes". Not just something to honor the incredible bravery of the FDNY and NYPD that served on that day, many making the ultimate sacrifice, but also to honor those heroes all around us who serve every day, usually unnoticed.

I remembered that I cranked out a quick track a while back and called it "Heroes", but in reality, I didn't give it that huge, heroic sound that it deserves. That takes time, and for some reason I just didn't feel like spending the effort back then.

So, I resurrected this track and completely redid it, probably spending about 20 hours reworking it in Cubase 5 Studio. This program continues to be an absolute pleasure to work with and is rock solid. It still hasn't really crashed on me a single time (though my sound card did start misbehaving and causing the BSOD one night, forcing me to reinstall the sound card driver). Though the interface in Cubase is not as visually interesting and "pretty" as the one in Sonar, I'm now realizing that Cubase is MUCH easier to look at for long periods of time. All the "3D-ness" in Sonar becomes completely distracting after a while and as much harder on the eyes that the generally 2D look of Cubase.

About the only part that remained completely intact from the first incarnation of this composition is the piano part, which was rendered using SampleTekk's "The Big One" piano library. The other tracks were cleaned up, overdubbed and rearranged, and some totally new elements were added, such as bass guitar and drums. I made heavy use of the Halion Symphony Orchestra plugin that came with Cubase 5, and also used IK Multimedia's Miroslav Philharmonik on several tracks.

I think the end result sounds quite "heroic". Let me know what you think?

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

Fun with the Delay Lama (total silliness)

2009-09-05T21:47:00.008-05:00

When I first started getting into VST instruments (back in 2005) I was looking around for freebies one night, and I discovered a VERY unique little plugin called "Delay Lama", from AudioNerz. Here is the description from their site:

Delay Lama is the first VST-instrument to offer both vocal synthesis and a real-time animated 3D interface. Its advanced monophonic vocal synthesis engine enables your computer to sound just like an Eastern monk, with real-time, high resolution control over the vowel sound. What's more, the plug-in window displays a 3D animation of a singing monk, that reacts directly to your input!

As I played with it that night I was extremely entertained. It was FUNNY, it was MUSICAL, and it was very very clever. Last year I was fooling around with a couple of synths and decided to actually try to create a short track using Delay Lama, and here it is. This is NOT to be taken seriously, folks!

You really have to SEE this thing in action to appreciate it, so I recorded the VST window to a shockwave file during the playback using the open source CamStudio software. Watch the little fellows face as he sings. Amazing! Especially toward the end when he really gets going.

I had technical difficulties embedding this video into blogger.com, so when you click the link below, a new page will open and hopefully you will see the video and hear the audio, after a short pause during which the shockwave file downloads.

Click here to view/listen to "Fun With the Daly Lama"

(and yes, I know it's really spelled "Dalai Lama", but I didn't want to get sued or anything...he looks like a pretty intense and powerful man)

Ancient Violence

2009-08-29T01:00:00.004-05:00

I wrote this piece of music 20 years ago when the news was all about Tienanmen Square. I was deeply affected by the images and stories being shown in the media, and I was of course appalled by the Chinese government's response to the pro-democracy protests. As a young man, the whole idea of this kind of basic lack of freedom was incredibly alien to me. As an older man, I'm appalled at the lack of progress made towards democracy and human rights in many parts of the world. I can only pray that the next 20 years will see more progress toward peace and freedom in China, not to mention Korea, Palestine, Iran...I guess the list could be long indeed.

I started this track a couple of months ago in Reaper, making heavy use of Native Instrument's very unique True Strike Tension Kore soundpack and EZDrummer's Latin Percussion Expansion. The main melody line, a rather haunting vocal synth, was produced with Tone2's Gladiator 2 synth. Today after I installed Cubase 5 Studio, I imported the MIDI file and reassigned the same virtual instruments and got to cutting, pasting and tracking some new overdubs. I worked probably 5 hours on this track in Cubase today without a single crash, hiccup, glitch or unexplained behavior. Those clever German software developers, I gotta hand it to them...this is one smooth and slick program!

I didn't expect to finish this tonight, but I did. Wow....two blog posts in one night, that is a first for me.

Warning: This song is NOT pretty. But then Ancient Violence never is.

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

***EDIT: remixed in Pro Tools 9 on the iMac in July 2011, using many different sounds, including some African drums at the end:

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

Passage

2009-08-28T21:22:00.011-05:00

This track is a recently completed, all new recording of a very old composition. It will be 30 years old this fall, in fact. This was my very first "serious composition", written when I was a freshman music major at Belmont College and blogged about previously right here.

Some of the many definitions of "Passage" include:
a short section of a musical composition
a way through or along which someone or something may pass
the act of passing from one state or place to the next

If memory serves, I believe I was thinking of the first two definitions above when I originally wrote the piece. But over time, this piece of music has become somewhat representative of the "life passages" I have experienced over the last 30 years.

I suppose life is all about Passages, isn't it.

I still remember how insecure and out-of-place I felt as a music major at Belmont. I just didn't fit in, I knew it, everyone knew it. I knew I wasn't there for the long haul, and I didn't even last 2 years. After three semesters the "call of the road" was too strong (not mention the call of making money playing music) so I joined a "show band" and embarked on the "Holiday Inn Circuit". I saw 24 states in 2.5 years, playing in 3 main bands over this period.

While the first passage of this three-part piece was written as an assignment for that freshman music composition class at Belmont, the 2nd and 3rd passages of this three-part song were actually written about a year later, in late 1980, during a band stay-over in Vermont at a ski resort. The first day of our week-long stay there, I dislocated my shoulder skiing, so for the rest of the week I took painkillers and played my keyboards. This was long before I had any kind of portable recording apparatus, so I actually wrote down the new sections of music, along with the old, on staff paper. I still have that document somewhere!

I probably have played this piece (at least the first passage) at nearly every "sound-check" I have ever done...at every music store where I sit down and try a new keyboard...as a test piece when I try out a new piano-emulating piece of software. It seems like this piece is always there. Burned into my brain to a degree far exceeding anything else I've composed. It's like a familiar old friend, and I always feel a sense of peace when I play it.

In the late eighties, I recorded this piece for the first time on a borrowed 4-track cassette "Portastudio" (a term invented by Tascam) using only my old Fender Rhodes 88 Suitcase Electric Piano and my Moog "The Source" synthesizer (which are, incidentally, the only instruments from my road days that I still own). Having only four tracks made me really think about which melodies I wanted to augment with the Moog. Somewhere along the way, I decided to use the Moog's "arpeggiator" function at the end of the track as an effect. I liked that effect so much I copied/emulated it for this recording.

I won't go into too much detail about the VST instruments used on this new recording, but suffice to say that in the first part of the song I was trying to emulate the kind of keyboards you heard in the 70's....Fender Rhodes, Arp String Machine, Mellotron (flutes), Moog synth and Moog Taurus bass pedals, etc. Then in the 2nd part, the main keyboard sound advances to a very 80's sounding emulation of the Yamaha CP-80 Electric/Acoustic Piano. And for the ending, the instruments once again seem to morph into a more modern-sounding blend, carried forth by the pounding drums (once again created with EZDrummer running the Drumkit from Hell expansion, using some awesome 5/4 MIDI patterns from oddgroves.com).

Which brings me to tonight, since a major technological "Passage" is happening here at Hybernation Studio. Today I purchased a new DAW software package, Cubase 5 Studio from Steinberg. I have been a Cakewalk/Sonar user since Cakewalk for Windows was released for Windows 3.1...sometime in the early 90's. More than 15 years! I've seen this product mature and morph into today's "Sonar 8 Producer" product. It's robust, feature laden, and visually it has a beautiful user interface.

But it's just not stable. At least not for me. I've reached a point of nearly zero-tolerance for crashes, unexpected errors, flaky and inconsistent behavior and the dreaded BSOD, and believe me, I see them ALL with Sonar. Frequently!

In the PC DAW market, Sonar has always played 2nd fiddle to Cubase. Cubase is cross-platform, but the PC version alone has many more users than Sonar. It's supposed to be more stable and consistent, with much better support for the VST standard (well, it should, since Steinberg, who was acquired by Yamaha a few years back, invented the VST standard). Today I installed it and imported a track I've been working on in Reaper for a couple of months. I worked with it non-stop for several hours without a single hiccup or glitch. So far, so good. I hope to post that track soon.

This recording of "Passage" will most likely be the last one I do using Sonar.

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

White Rock

2009-08-14T14:04:00.018-05:00

I just finished a new track that I call "White Rock". I call it that for no particular reason whatsoever, other than that's just what the melody invokes in my mind's eye.

This is the first track I have ever composed, recorded and mixed in Pro Tools. I recently purchased a copy of Pro Tools 8 M-Powered, which for the money is really a very good deal...when it works. I wasn't sure if I wanted this blog post to be about the music, or about the technology. Well, remembering what my Granny used to always say ("If you can't say something nice, then just don't say anything"), I think it best that this post be mostly about the music.

Mostly. Ok, so I've spent the better part of probably 60 hours using Pro Tools, most of that composing, recording and mixing this track. I've read large portions of the generous and well-written documentation. I've read most of Mike Collins' excellent book "Pro Tools 8: Music Production, Recording, Editing and Mixing" on my Kindle. All in all, it's been a very good learning experience, but it's also been quite frustrating. The program offers excellent work-flow and well-engineered tools (I suppose that is why it's the industry standard) but the stability...well, let's just say I've had some issues and leave it at that. I'll probably stick with Cakewalk Sonar for most of my future projects.

As I began to dabble about I had in my mind the idea for a very simple "Yes-like" kind of groove in D major, with all the Wakeman arsenal: Piano, Organ, Mellotron, Synths, Harpsichord and so on. I spent several days, a few hours each day, working on the "A" section, and at some point my son Jonathan wanted to hear it. What was really interesting was how much he LOVED the melody. He started humming along almost instantly, and would continue singing it for a long time after listening. It was really quite funny to hear a five-year-old humming along with the synthesizer! Every time he would come into the studio he would insist on hearing it, and he kept asking me "can we listen to this in the car?", to which I would have to reply "not yet, it's not finished"!

I had a bit of a struggle coming up with a good solid "B" section. Often times my "A" sections seem inspired, but my "B" sections feel contrived. But once I hit on it, I felt good about it. The next morning, I woke up singing the "B" section in my head, which is for me a good indication that it's a keeper. Though I wrote the chords for the "B" section on the strings, I ended up orchestrating that section using mostly harpsichord and Mellotron "flutes". I really enjoy the dynamics of the orchestration switching to these instruments from multiple synthesizers playing melody and harmony.

I remember reading something that electronic music composer Jean-Michael Jarre said once about his famous recording "Oxygène". Though there is a fair amount of repetition involved in this and all of his music, he mentioned that from an orchestration standpoint he tries to never do the same thing twice the same way in a track. So, part of the brain is hearing the repeated melody in the "A" section, and getting that sense of familiarity, while another part of the brain is noticing that each time it sounds slightly different, thus generating more drama and keeping the interest of the listener. Well, at least that's the idea, and it's what I tried to do here. So, while the "A" section repeats a total of three times (the last time after the "C" section, or bridge, and after having modulated from D to E Major), each time the choice of synthesizers changes and grows, as does the accompanying instruments.

Speaking of synths, Pro Tools 8 comes bundled with several, and I used two instances of the excellent "Vacuum" virtual analog synth for the initial melody lines, which I then later doubled and tripled using the Korg Mono-Poly and Arturia MiniMoogV synths.

For the organ, I tried out another Pro Tools bundled offering, the DB-33, a virtual Hammond organ and rotating speaker emulation. The piano is also another Pro Tools instrument, their Mini-Grand piano instrument. I must say that originally, I used my old stand-by's from Native Instruments, the B4 and Akoustic Piano for piano and organ, but then I decided to give the Pro Tools instruments and try, and they really stand up well in a track...the other benefit being that they are stable, which is more than I can say for many RTAS plug-ins not made by the Pro Tools people.

The strings and harpsichord are from IK Multimedia's Miroslav Philharmonik.

The Mellotron flute sound comes from GForce Software's M-Tron Pro.

The Bass Guitar samples are a custom sound I constructed in Kontakt3 using the DirectBass product from Pettinghouse.com.

The drums sounds you are hearing are from Toontrack's Superior Drummer 2.0, while the patterns themselves are from a company called "Odd Grooves" who sells MIDI drum patterns in all kinds of crazy odd time signatures (perfect for progressive rock), these being from their more tame "FourFour Drummer 2" product.

Hope you like this track! Don't forget to leave your comments (and remember what Granny used to say...)

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

New software and hardware

2009-07-31T14:36:00.024-05:00

I just entered into the "public beta" test of Propellerhead's new "Record" software. It's pretty freaking awesome, I must say. "Public Beta" means that anyone who has obtained a "code" from recordyou.com (free for the asking) can download the full software and use it until the September release date. Though it's marketed primarily to folks who want to record "audio", ie. guitars, vocals, etc., it also integrates incredibly well with their "Reason 4.0" software, which I have blogged about several times, such as here and here.

The skeptic in me says that this is simply Reason 5.0 and those clever Swedes at Propellerhead has found a sneaky way to market it in order to make more money. Of course the reality is a bit more complex than that. But for me, since I rarely record audio and do mostly virtual instrument tracks, this release means one thing: Reason 4.0 is now multi-core aware. Record does a very good job of utilizing all four of my processing cores when I play back a complex song like the one shown below, which Reason has never done. (and the skeptic in me is now reminding me that in an interview, one of the propheads said it was going to be incredibly hard to ever make Reason support multiple cores.)

The other thing Record offers is a much better virtual mixer than Reason, which has been modeled after a high-dollar professional board, the SSL 9000k.

So, if the goal of this "Public Beta" is to get Reason users like me completely hooked on this software so that we have to buy it when released, they have accomplished their mission with flying colors.

Like Christmas in July, the same day I got into the Record public beta, my two new Acer 24" wide-screen HD monitors arrived. I've got a lot more screen real estate now, as shown in the before and after pictures below. Click on the pics for a close-up look. These pictures show exactly how much of the beautiful Record UI will fit on my screens, before and after. Awesome. Just Awesome. (Thanks LoriLea!!)

Left Monitor (Tracking and Instrument Rack)

old

new - Notice that you can see ALL of both sides of the instrument rack without scrolling, and about 40% more of the timeline of the song!

Right Monitor (mixing desk and Tool window):

Old

New - notice all that black space where a whole bunch more mixer channels would be visible without scrolling

Last track I recorded with Alan Wiseman

2009-07-17T23:22:00.013-05:00

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

2009-03-06T15:19:00.007-06:00

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

2009-02-13T10:51:00.008-06:00

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

2008-12-09T21:24:00.006-06:00

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

2008-10-09T22:19:00.011-05:00

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

2008-09-11T18:48:00.012-05:00

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....

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

Twelve Memories

2008-07-22T21:19:00.008-05:00

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"...

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

Industrial Waste

2008-07-14T22:23:00.007-05:00

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.

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

Organic Lifecycle

2008-07-13T22:02:00.005-05:00

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

2008-06-06T22:15:00.015-05:00

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

2008-05-10T22:31:00.020-05:00

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.

Click the play button below to here Intermezzo:

Here is a direct link to MP3 for non-shockwave users

Featured Instruments:

Toontrack's EZDrummer, "Drumkit from Hell" expansion

Arturia's Analog Factory

I've gone all Loopy

2008-04-15T22:14:00.014-05:00

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

2008-02-16T21:29:00.010-06:00

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

2007-11-15T21:55:00.004-06:00

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

2007-05-11T18:56:00.004-05:00

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

2007-03-12T21:46:00.000-05:00

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)

2006-10-17T21:43:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-29T21:42:00.003-05:00

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)

2006-08-21T21:05:00.003-05:00

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

2006-07-26T23:34:00.005-05:00

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

2006-06-29T17:30:00.003-05:00

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!

a view of the "console" window in Sonar

All "Fragile Forest" music is free

2006-06-09T14:14:00.003-05:00

>>> 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" web page 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

2006-06-08T22:36:00.000-05:00

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

Cover Tunes with Dale

2006-06-08T09:32:00.003-05:00

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...

2006-06-05T16:02:00.003-05:00

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

2006-05-12T15:46:00.002-05:00

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.