I recently decided to take the plunge and get a hardware synth to stop my dallying and futzing around with software emulation of synths.
For several years now, I’ve intended to lean less on pre-loaded patches and work on an understanding towards how a patch is created from the basic soundwave (sine, saw, square, pulse, etc.) and massaged into the sounds you hear in music — whether it is someone like Depeche Mode or cinema’s Vangelis.
I have played with the software synths on my digital audio workbench (DAW), and purchased a few other software variants in an attempt to find something that “clicks” with this wee walnut I store where most folks store a brain.
Yes, another assault on your senses and sensibilities for about a minute and a half — time, I might add, that you can never reclaim.
This one is more of my playing around with soundwave creation, this time using the demo version of a new emulation of the classic synth, the Sequential Prophet 5.
Name a band from the late 70s to the late 80s that had synths and you can bet that they wrote at least one song with the Prophet 5. While there are other emulations of this classic synth out there, GForce worked directly with Sequential to get as close as they could to the original and revised sound of the analogue synth. And then they added more optional stuff for funsies.
I recently upgraded my DAW and have been meaning to play around with it AND get more familiar with synth soundcrafting rather than using the synth presets.
Some of this is crafted sound, some of it is presets, about half-and-half.
I’m just playing around, not sure if this will end up as something.
Detail free description: I was looking for a mid-speed darkwave sound that was upbeat enough to dance to with an emulated classic Roland 808 drum machine sound (although I may modify it).
Slightly more detail: The arp and one layer of the pads are crafted sounds and the original bass sound was as well, but I wanted something punchier and livelier than what I was getting, so I went with a preset and tweaked it. The guitar is a great preset I live for guitar, so I did almost nothing with it. 134 bpm, for the curious.
This is two sections, repeated. If I were to flesh this out, I would add some bridges and empty space between. But this is something just cobbled together in about two or three hours and, while it was interesting to play around, I’m not sure how much mileage I can pull from it (it would need lyrics, singing and full engineering work to make it sound better). We’ll see. I can already hear the arp levels were lower than I intended. And there is zero panning.
Anyway, another one of my songs in less that two minutes thingies. This one clocks in currently at around 65 seconds, so you’ll only have around that much of your time to demand back from the timelords.
It was a bit of a surprise when an old song I had written way back when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth came into my head yesterday and wouldn’t get out. Much to my amazement, when I pulled out the guitar, the chord progression and rough playing style came back to me almost instantly.
For a bit of perspective, the song, “May Faire” has never been performed. So, it’s not like I spent uncountable hours rehearsing the song. I may have toyed around with it whenever I could not come up with something new for a few years, but it was not on the forefront of my thinking.
The song below is not a new song, but one I posted a short while ago. I am trying to create a reusable set of Gutenberg blocks in-post to borrow from for future audio-oriented posts to make the songs/spoken-word stand out better as an audio file.
I have a few other formatting ideas that I want to play with, but if you have an opinion, please let me know in the comments (on either music or player design). Let me know if you are having problems rendering. If so, let me know the platform (WordPress Reader/web), device class (mobile/laptop/tablet) and browser (default for your device if you use the WP Reader app) .
Thanks!
[07 dec 25 update:]
Yesterday’s attempts didn’t have the intended appearance when it comes to viewing on WordPress Reader,. I can still leverage what I learned, but I’m going to attempt a new approach here and see how it looks dark, (stack on mobile, header large font not H4, copyright no-call):
Yeah, no matter how you tweak it, the appearance is the same on WordPress Reader. A bit broken with “no-stack” on mobile, but looks good stacked. Seeing as it matters not at all for WordPress Reader, I will just decide on a favorite when I set it up later (and avoid using rows on the copyright line, because it breaks in feeds and WP Reader, but I’m just trying to be fancy there and the fancy isn’t required).
I’m leaning towards the dark variant above (using “media and post”), feel free to pipe up if something absolutely does not work in your mind.
For new visitors: I occasionally set myself up with the challenge to write, record and produce a songlet (not a full song) in the space of 120-minutes, starting from scratch. I try to limit the song to about a minute in length.
As a result, quality varies greatly and I don’t promise that there are any hits that will arise of this personal challenge. The quality over time will vary dramatically, depending on how my creativity level is faring for the day.
I decided that I needed something to shake up things a bit, some incentive so I didn’t keep dithering around when I was creating music. I often catch myself playing around and never actually writing anything while I was horsing, so I said to myself: “Self, you need to have some motivation to do more than press buttons and listen to sounds.”
As I mentioned yesterday, I was needing to get out of my writer head, who wants nothing at all to do with writing (for whatever reason). So I have.
I had previous mentioned my intentions of buying virtual synth and maybe upgrading to the subscription model for my DAW. Then I read the fine print: that subscription price on the DAW was only good for a year, and then the price would double. Great deal at the half-off price, terrible at the standard price.
Well, the last thing I want to do is lock myself out of my own music when I decide to no longer subscribe, so I opted out of that plan and redirected those earmarked funds to the second virtual synth I had my eyes on, thereby saving myself some money in the process.
One of the things I have been considering is futzing about with music again. Like creative writing in my previous post, that also has a well that dries up, especially as I don’t usually have collaborators to bounce ideas off anymore. And my tooling around is more for the purposes of learning new recording, engineering and playing techniques than it is for performance. Much like publishing my writing, I am more interested in the joy of creation than I am in the idea fame or profit.
[Trigger Warning: Musician-speak ahead and I don’t explain the terms I am using. Enter at your own risk.]
Well, that would be two recent projects that just don’t have what I think is needed for prime time.
First, the song I was working on as an experiment where folks write the lyrics in a certain genre to a song of mine they never heard… I tried to make something of that last week and the initial takes just felt awkward. It’s not for the lack of Chris and Sandy’s lyrical talents; rather, I just couldn’t find a way to make either of them work well. Close, but no banana, as they say. It ended up feeling as if I should be doing less, rather than more, on the lyrics front. And my mind is blank for what would work, if you can believe that crap.
As an experiment, it was fun, but I don’t think anyone would thank me for putting the result out with their name associated. So, I’ll let it rest a bit and see if I either get a better sense of rhythm and flow to the lyrics, or if I come up with some of my own.
