I got a hold of the Far East Movement's "Like A G6" vocal track and thought that the track lended itself well to a slower beat. It turned out pretty minimal and dark. Lots of noise and a grungey feel. This version of the track is a little quiet, so I might go back and re-master it later, but for now, just play it extra loud - helps bring out the sub-bass ;) All of the sounds (except the drum beat and the vocals) were made using a Korg Monotron analogue synth. All the production was done in Ableton.

Lykag6

This was recorded start to finish in 2 hours - including writing time. As the title suggests, it was a jam, so there was no set structure or written parts. Everything was improvised. I played all of the guitar parts. At the start, I had my settings wrong, and was recording via my laptop's inbuilt mic, and after I hit the record button in Audacity, I drew my hand back to my guitar and knocked over a glass and broke it. It sounds pretty cool, so I just left it in. The rest was recorded with REAL mics and a mixer. I never used a click track, so the tempo shifts throughout the song, and some parts are slightly out of time with each other. There's also some pretty horrible digital distortion near the end of the track - down to inexperience. Please don't cry. This may eventually get revisited and made into a polished final track, but for now, here's the demo. If you want to jam along, the key is C#.

E-A (C#) jam

This is another jam I did a long time ago. It was all done in one take, with me on guitar and a drum machine both ran through an echo and recorded through the same amp. The song had no real structure, and was made up from start to finish. Also, there is only one track in this song. There were no overdubs. All the "soloing" in the bridge was done by any fingers that weren't playing chords - and at some points it didn't quite work. Here it is. Quite a haunting sound, and definitely contains echos, a drum machine and weird chords.

Echos, drum machine, weird chords

This is a song from Dusk 'Til Dawn's debut album "In Our Place And Time" (check out the links on the right to the website for the chance to listen to the album in full for free and to download it for cheap). We felt that it had quite a prominent hip-hop beat, and that it would lend well to rap, so we got in touch with our friend Common As Muck and he agreed. Here's what we came up with. I sent him vocal-less versions of our tracks, he dubbed his vocals and sent the file back, then I mastered it in Ableton. The original was recorded in Audacity and CAMs vocals were done in EJay.

Roisin Dubh ft. Common As Muck

A resampled loop triggered rhythmically, played alongside programmed drums. Both are sent through a glitch effect and plate reverb.

One single take, direct stereo bus from the mixer, no post-processing.

250224_resampling_jam

One-take jam on a modular synth.

The main loop is granularly re-synthesised to produce strummed bell-like textures from the loop. These grains are repitched and played V/oct from a sequencer over a kick drum. The whole patch is modulated via a quadrature LFO which is clocked by the sequencer, and some free-running LFOs.

For the first half I'm mostly mixing the stems, for the second half I'm mostly patching and adjusting things.

6th July 2025

windchimes

One-take modular synth jam, straight off the stereo bus, no post-production. 

Starts as a rhythmic jam with drum against bass like a band, develops, then ends with an exploration of the bass voice which approaches orchestral.

* two square wave oscillators (Erica Synths DIY), whose pulse width and frequency are modulated with a quadrature LFO (Ornament and Crime) to produce a drone with changing harmonics
* this drone is resynthesised by a granular sampler (Monsoon)
* the pitch + gates for  these resynthesised notes come from a sequencer (Muxlicer)
* the sequencer provides a clock to a euclidean drum trigger synthesiser (Grids), which triggers drum samples (Squid Salmple). The density of hi-hat triggers is controlled by one of the quadrature LFO outputs.

251021_random_opus

For xmas 2011 me and a friend have decided to make an audiobook of "Eric" by Terry Pratchett for another friend's xmas present - however, we intend to have a lot of fun with it. This is a short intro track to the audiobook, which I think sums up how we are going to approach the process. It's frantic, strange, disorientating and pretty funny. We intend to do lots of stupid shit throughout the book, such as make up chapters, add and remove characters, make one character speak in Microsoft SAM etc. I thought I'd upload the intro track to let you share in the madness. This was produced using Ableton live using samples from a Korg Monotron, the internet and using Ableton's Impulse and Analog instruments.

"Eric" audiobook intro track (17/12/11)

This is the first song recorded by my current band, Pieces. It does not yet have a title. This was recorded using Ableton Live on 21/12/2011 in our drummer's bedroom.

Pieces are:
Mark Brannan - Guitar
Billy Robertson - Drums
Gavin Cheung - Bass

Recorded by Mark Brannan and Pieces.
Edited and mastered by Mark Brannan.
Additional engineering provided by Martin McGregor.

Pieces - First song

This is the second song recorded by my current band, Pieces. It does not yet have a title. This was recorded using Ableton Live in our drummer's bedroom on 21/12/2011.

Pieces are:
Mark Brannan - Guitar
Billy Robertson - Drums
Gavin Cheung - Bass

Recorded by Mark Brannan and Pieces.
Edited and mastered by Mark Brannan.
Additional engineering provided by Martin McGregor.

Popular tracks by markbrannan