Adventures in the virtual studio: February 2007

The intro chord is three identical samples of a clean guitar picking an Am triad chord. The 1st panned slightly to the left, the 2nd is in the middle and is reversed and finally, slightly to the right, the riff ends a 1/4 bar early and very slightly delayed. This gives a four bar variation, it's loosely based on a technique called "phasing patterns" which I learnt about in an episode of the South bank show a while back about a composer called Steve Reich. The main drums are a pattern taken directly from the Groove agent pattern bank, they sound a bit like Air's Sexy Boy. The intro electronic sounding drums are an impulse preset I got of Computer Music "Live Special" DVD. The descending harmonic minor scale melody was recorded clean through my alesis multimix and then through NI Guitar Rig on one of its trippy presets. The rhythm guitar was again recorded clean then fed though the Steinberg Warp amp modeler VST. The speaking sample at the start was off a recent documentary about the LA music scene in the 70's (recorded on my mobile phone), I time stretched it a bit to give extra trippyness. The synthy sound at the end is one of the free 8bit chip emulator VSTi's I have, can't remember which one now. I quickly laid down the arrangements using Live arrangement recording which can be tricky using only a mouse. Will have to revisit the arrangement really.

Labels: Song - More Together