Prior

Another tune that's entirely within VCV Rack. First go I had at recording something from VCV, and the first ambient piece I've ever written really. 

Lots of things I'd change, but couldn't throw it away.

946060519

I absolutely love this track. It was mostly written and recorded on my guitar, which I had directly plugged into my interface and barely effected through FL. It was mostly a matter of adding a tone of reverb and a slight bit of distortion using FabFilter Saturn. I just recorded layer after layer and eventually coming up with the idea of a big stadium track as I was recording. I copied a few of the tracks I had recorded to make the reverse and slowed down sections just to add some extra texture to the track, and I think there's probably only one element that isn't made using guitar recordings. 

My guitar was pretty out of tune for this track, but the way I wrote it was so disjointed and spontaneous that I couldn't rightly go back and re-record everything with a tuned guitar, so I just kept it the way it was. I think it gives it an interesting feel though.

Again, love what I was able to achieve with this track, even if it doesn't have a lot of energy, I can still picture it on a massive sound system.

LTD Stadium

Another track completely made in VCV Rack. I got the idea from watching a YouTube video of a guy making a patch that was completely generative, hence the name of the track. All the sequencers and pattern generators in this patch are randomly triggered by each other to create new progressions, and then all put through the same quantizer to keep them in tune. 

I could honestly load up the patch and let it play on its own for ages without hearing the same thing, so this recording is just a snippet of what the patch was actually creating. Even a lot of the levels for some modules are randomly affected and changed by other modules. 

If I can find the patch I might include a picture of it.

Generative

When I first got my hands on the free version of Kontakt I was blown away by the preset instruments and stuff that were available. Not that they're the greatest samples or anything, it was just another opportunity to make some new sounds and I immediately got stuck in writing this track. It's almost entirely made of Kontakt preset sounds that I've written through MIDI as the base tracks and then effected or slowed down and reversed and yadda yadda. I think maybe most of the drums aren't Kotankt, but some of them are.

Fresh Air

I really liked this track when I first wrote it, mostly because of the interesting groove in the second half, but the mixing and stuff is really reminiscent of my older, more terribly mixed and mastered work. Super crunched together, over-compressed; it's a bit of a style of my own I suppose (a style that's called 'bad mixing'). 

Still, couldn't throw the whole track away because I like the direction and the aesthetic of it.

Big Mess

This whole track was written and performed in VCV Rack. I can't remember the exact details of the patch I made but I had everything running through a mixer in VCV and changed levels or muted and unmuted elements to change sections of the song.

VCV Rack is amazing and this was one of my first goes at making an entire track that included a drumbeat within VCV, but it really shows how different it is to a real modular set up when you're trying to change multiple modules at one time and don't have the accessibility of being able to use both hands.

Still, love this track, did some compression and stuff through VCV as well to get the pumping effect when the kick and snare come through.

Ponty

Little piano track I wrote because I loved the way one of the presets from a Kontakt pack sounded. There are some strings and stuff in here too reversed in the second half, they're from the Strings Sessions 2 Kontakt pack and I've just reversed them after writing a section that fit the pianos I wrote initially. 

At this time I was messing around for like film scoring and theatrical pieces and I liked this as a little break track in the middle of a potential album.

Sonaip

I love putting together drum breaks, it's something I've sort of only recently fallen in love with. I could honestly sit and write complicated breaks all day long, and often I sort of fall into this trap and never actually flesh them out into a song. So my approach for this was to keep it fairly simple with the instruments so that I could put something together with the breaks I had made. There's two main drum samples that are sliced into breaks that play around with each other, and another break that I had written last month over the top of the main chorus, panning left to right.

Excuse Me, Sorry

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