Another collection of genre-fluid electronica from Singer and the Instruments.
Music is just music...

Buy it on Bandcamp

Genrematic

Fuzzball began life as a tiny little ear worm, courtesy of a certain hairy giant in the middle film of a classic sci-fi trilogy.
It just had a really nice ring to it, so I built a whole track around it - then decided there was too much of the sample itself and removed it from most of the track! But it did inform the melody and remnants of it are in the baselines and sparkly, echoing synths.

It was originally meant to be a drum and bass style track, but at an intimate gig a few months back, standing right next to the speaker stack, I was reminded of the awesome breakbeat that I subsequently stole and littered throughout it, drastically altering the vibe - but for the better I think.

And I can thank the hairy giant's best friend for naming the track for me too...

Genrematic - EP

Fuzzball

Buy on Bandcamp

The Three Ts is all about me playing around and learning how to play my new Novation LaunchKey workstation...
Tinkling the ivories
Tapping the beats
Tweaking the knobs 
As well as using the cheat mode chords and scales to help create the most melodic track I've ever made. 

I thought the electric piano was the perfect preset to use for this and I basically just played it live with very little practice, learning what worked as I went along and finding out the nice little hooks bar-by-bar. 
Of course, there was plenty of quantising and velocity variations to fiddle with afterwards, and I moved a few bits around afterwards to help with the flow into the breaks.
It was the same for the 808 baseline, playing it live and getting a feel for the ups and downs as I followed along with the other tracks, then tidying it up a bit afterwards.
I had so much fun tweaking the knobs on the buzzy synth, really pushing the cutoff, resonance and LFO to create some mental sounding variations, but in the end they were too much for the rest of the vibe so I had to tone them down a lot.
The drums were also played pretty much live on the Launchkey's pads, but then split into defined sections and copy/pasted along the timeline, before chopping them up again to add in the breaks and fills. Tried very hard to keep them in check this time and not using the V-Drum kit certainly helped stopped them getting too crazy!

For the 'Short Lesson', I took out one 'verse' and removed most of the intro and outro. Still like it, but I think I prefer the full version.

The Three Ts [Short Lesson]

The Three Ts (Short Lesson)

The Three Ts is all about me playing around and learning how to play my new Novation LaunchKey workstation...
Tinkling the ivories
Tapping the beats
Tweaking the knobs 
As well as using the cheat mode chords and scales to help create the most melodic track I've ever made. 

I thought the electric piano was the perfect preset to use for this and I basically just played it live with very little practice, learning what worked as I went along and finding out the nice little hooks bar-by-bar. 
Of course, there was plenty of quantising and velocity variations to fiddle with afterwards, and I moved a few bits around afterwards to help with the flow into the breaks.
It was the same for the 808 baseline, playing it live and getting a feel for the ups and downs as I followed along with the other tracks, then tidying it up a bit afterwards.
I had so much fun tweaking the knobs on the buzzy synth, really pushing the cutoff, resonance and LFO to create some mental sounding variations, but in the end they were too much for the rest of the vibe so I had to tone them down a lot.
The drums were also played pretty much live on the Launchkey's pads, but then split into defined sections and copy/pasted along the timeline, before chopping them up again to add in the breaks and fills. Tried very hard to keep them in check this time and not using the V-Drum kit certainly helped stopped them getting too crazy!

I also made a 'Short Lesson', where I took out one 'verse' and removed most of the intro and outro. Still like it, but I think I prefer this version.

The Three Ts

After 8 is a kinda cover version of a track a bunch of friends and I made on an old Atari ST nearly 30 (yikes) years ago. We put it all together in one evening, with everyone chipping in a chord here or a break there. At the time, we were really into Trance - Rising High Records, Harthouse, Tribal Gatherings and so on, so that influence was definitely present in the original.

At the end of the evening we all got a copy of it bounced down to a C90 tape and mine was certainly on heavy rotation in my Beetle's tape deck. But times change and eventually I would soon reach the point where I had no hardware that could play it anymore, so I made the effort to rip it into the computer a few years back before it was lost for good.

The tape was very warped and worn out by this point, so the quality was terrible. When I decided to try and recreate it, I was relying on my memories of it, much more than the mp3. The drums in particular were very muffled and sounded a bit 'crushed' so I decided to bring some of that through to the new version, but also adding more variations and fills.

I kept the simple pluck sound and chords pretty much the same, but extended and accentuated them more as the track builds up.
The synth strings are a reinterpretation of some sparkly stuff that I might have imagined as it was buried so deep in the muffled tape recording. And I'll admit that the acid-sounding synth was a total fluke I found whilst flipping through the presets trying to match something from a long ago musical memory.

After 8

music to listen to, mostly made without any singing and not really with any actual instruments either...