limit to your love

This area is where I will share with you Acapellas, remix parts, sound design ideas and stems.

Acapellas, Remix Parts & Stems

Acapella

Follow-Mountain

_ORIGINALS

Acapellas

BT Stems

Grab your vinyl version here: 
https://www.decks.de/track/florence-florence013/cjg-2d

James Blake - Limit to your Love (Alex Dimou remix)

Inspired by watching the irregular isorhythms of my christmas lights (this and avoiding doing email). This was created in Abelton using STreson opcode (Csound for Live) for melodic figures and MAX/MSP (mainly) for beats. Spectral processing in RX and using Tob Erb's Soundhack plugins. Also LFO on the master tempo in places. Enjoy :)

Hymn[808]

Track released in April 2011 by BT. 

It is with exceptional pleasure I share this gift back with you. Thank you ALL so much for making a donation to Japanese relief efforts. As individuals we can do little, together we can do much. 

Thank you for supporting this worthy cause. Blessings to you,
_BT

ps: there is a marker for 3 minutes at the end of the track. It is not just silence, it is there for a reason.
All my best.

Hikari

Written tonight on my flight home. I was inspired by a twitter chat about favorite composers and decided to read up on one of my favorite pieces by Strauss. Ended up listening to some Debussy and it inspired this. On the flight I experimented with some new granular/convolution ideas. Overdubbed piano (Pianoteq) in the kitchen with some Valhalla shimmer and Room (automated). This composition is one of 7

Nicht Musik [Verklärung] No.2 in D major

This track was written and recorded in a single day. It is a short "what if" thesis asking "What do acoustic gut string guitar, vocal, hammered dulcimer, AC-30/Ebo/Tele sound like with judicious amounts of spectral bluring and some Csound granular opcodes". Inspired by a conversation...a long and meaningful one, late at night. 

Sometimes conversations become a place, that in memory at least, you can return too. Listening to this I can remember where I was sitting, and the way I held the phone and exactly how I felt on this very hushed night. 

I took this photograph in Erskine in Australia (short drive inland from the coastal town of Lorne). It was taken on a 5DmII using a 17mm 1.4 L lense and I did minor color correcting/film grain/vignetting in Magic Bullet. It seemed to really suit this piece. 

Excited to share these two new albums with you. Enjoy.

Our Dark Garden (Final Mix

Dear All,

I am very excited to share with you the first single from my forthcoming #EDM album on @Armadamusic. This song, a collaboration with Arty and Nadia, began several years ago in demo form when I emailed a rough track to Nadia. After several months of riffing back and forth on lyrical notes and counterpoint lines, I began the lengthy and arduous task of comping together a meaningful and poignant vocal. I often compare this process to pointillism in art. It takes an extraordinary amount of time, but in the end when it's worth it, it's well worth it.

This track then sat on my proverbial studio shelf for about 18months. During this time, one of the myriad of pieces I was composing was a 6/4 64 bpm orchestral composition that had these protracted movements of cello, vibraphone, metalaphone and handbells. It occurred to me, somewhere I think I have a vocal, in a related key and tempo / signature. I dug around on the server and bingo...dorian it was. Nadia's vocal was a near perfect fit and worked amazingly with some of the orchestral and small instrument (TBU style) orchestration.

Enter...Arty. At this time Arty and I had been talking over DM on Twitter about collaborating on a track together. I sent him both the vocal and orchestral things we'd written and he sent me back beautiful percolating and driving percussion, an incredible undulating tresillo ostinato synth line and a beautiful drop.

This part of the process began to culminate during this summer. As I was beginning to dig in to Trevor Wisharts brilliant new version of CDP. For those of you that don't know, CDP is a command based DSP programing language that calls opcodes and commands in either OSX terminal or DOS. I've been using it in both for many years but this track is the first time I've really gotten my hands dirty so to speak, on something as prominent as a vocal and Nadia's provided the perfect clay. After about 100+ hours of pure sound design, spectral blurring..distort repeating and the epic PSOW and modify brassage, you can hear the results of these sonic transformations throughout "Must be the Love", most notably at the very beginning. I for one have never heard anything like this.

More than anything, this is a beautiful and simple song that speaks directly to me, and I hope to you as well. After all, music is first and foremost a language to speak the unspoken directly from breathing life form to breathing life form.

Thanks for listening.
Always,
_BT


Must Be the Love

BT and Arty feat. Nadia Ali-Must Be The Love

DJ Sammy - Heaven (Acapella)

Hi guys,

Trying out something new here. This is something that was requested on Facebook. If popular, I'm going to start posting vocals, stems and remix packs from classic and new tracks of mine. 

This first one is very special. Jan and I sat around an old rickety Steinway piano in Planet 4 studios in Manchester. It was in our first hour meeting, we began with some proper english breakfast tea and sat down to write. Unknowingly, I was playing (in a 5 chord sequence) the first two chords from Chopin's 20th Prelude in C minor *cool to check out*. This began the first of many beautiful collaborations together.

One of the cool early vocal tricks I came up with on this song you can do yourself and compare to the original recording. I did on this track it making a reverb throw where pre-reverb I pitched the vocal up a fifth. You can try this yourself in any DAW by making a bus with a pitch shifter set to +7 (fully wet) and a long hall reverb (try about 8-10sec) also fully wet. When we did this, it was suffice to say MUCH harder (involving piles of patch cables and outboard gear). It's a super cool effect.

Enjoy!
_BT

BT & Jan Johnson -  Remember Acapella

Well, congrats to my Facebook followers. You guys voted, and 3k's of likes has unlocked for you the acapella of Every Other Way. You'll find here a dry version of Jes' acapella. I've prepared some stems as well and if the FB post with this in it get's 4k likes, I'll post some stems. Going through them this morning, they are epic. Enjoy!

BT and Jes - #EOW Acapella Jes

This track is off of my upcoming album which will be released on Armada Music this Summer. You can pick up this track on Armin van Buuren's 'A State of Trance' 2013 which will be out on February 14th, 2013. Pre order that album here; http://bit.ly/ASOT2013_iT and look out for my upcoming album soon!

BT-Skylarking [Preview]

This Yamaha classical guitar is a very inspiring instrument for me. We wrote Every Other Way upstairs in my home with my family and friends here (not in the studio). Jes and I sang the song over and over while I played guitar in the living room. It was a truly magical night.

BT and Jes - #EOW BT Classical Guitar 3

Another counterpoint line on my Yamaha acoustic guitar.

BT and Jes - #EOW BT Classical Guitar 4

This instrument was given to me for my birthday many years ago and it is still one of my favorite instruments. It is a metalaphone and plays just beautifully. It is quite hard to mike and compress but worth every second of the effort.

BT and Jes - #EOW BT Glock 1

"If I run away sometimes, its because of you..."  "If I can't love again, it's coz you."  I was in LA at Record Plant going through relationship issues LOL waited on the producer to get there and recorded this snippet real quick, I heard the horns, bass, drums, chords and everything.  Sang as much of the idea as I could.  Just found it :)

Grammy Nominated Composer and Technologist. I am a man that believes sound can change the world. I seek, I learn

BT & Jan Johnson - Remember Acapella

B T