Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Track Featuring Hank Drum

Today I created a "hank drum" sample set for Propellerhead's Reason, and made this to try it out.



The first thing heard is a hank drum with a lot of delay, and processed so it's missing the slap of the attack. Then I add some basic drums with another hank drum, this one much cleaner, so you're basically just hearing the hank drum played on a keyboard. Flanged drums, bass and piano round it out, but it's really all about the hank.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

New MFTPMN Track

It's been quite a while since I did any serious work on my Music for the Postmodern Ninja project, so I'm very happy to report I sat down and produced an entire track this past weekend! I suppose I can't say I made the whole thing... I recycled the intro from one of my Diploma in Sonic Design portfolio pieces. Though the whole thing sounds pretty different now.



It took quite a bit of work to wrangle the bass/synth/choir thing that dominates the second half of the track (coming in just before two minutes). I had this thing that sounded great on one set of studio monitors, but almost exploded the sound system in my car. And on a pair of earbuds, you just couldn't hear the bass at all. You might just think it was too heavy on the super low sub bass frequencies - but at least half the problem was all the crazy resonant filters and distortion together. That combo can make strange noise that different speakers will simply not like. It's way to easy to make something sound great on one set of monitors, and gradually ruin it for most other sound systems. That's why it's important to try your music and sound effects on different speakers, and always start at low volumes.