My friend Darren Bachynski asked me if I’d like to do sound for a super-short animation he had made. I said yes of course.

Death Wish from Darren Bachynski on Vimeo.

After numerous weekends of trying to figure out how to finish this remix I finally got it done. Pretty happy for the most part and I think I like it better than the original. I had the base line in from the start and it’s been stuck in my head every weekend.

These are last two singles of the summer, so I wanted to do something special. I was starting to think about some kind of an animated music video, but I ended up creating a short arcade-style computer game as an interactive music video of sorts. It’s more of a proof-of-concept than a really polished game, but it’s something I’ve been wanting to experiment with for a while now. At some point I’d like to do an entire album in an interactive format. I used Blender to make the game, which worked pretty well for rapid prototyping.

I also really like the two singles. Have a listen to In The Night.

Two new singles. Had a lot of fun playing around with some new sounds and styles.

My friend Darren provided me with another short animation with which to do accompanying audio. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do but I happened to learn about the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra just this past week. It’s an awesome free collection of orchestral samples. As far as I know it’s also the best orchestral instrument solution available for linux. I spent a bit of time setting up some samplers with a few instruments. I used both Hydrogen and Specimen. I realized this animation was a good opportunity to record something simple using some of the samples so I made a very short score for the animation. It was a lot of fun working with orchestral sounds.

Cinema from Darren Bachynski on Vimeo.

Two new tracks that I put together in the last week-and-a-half. Feels like it’s pushing some new sounds and ideas that I haven’t really tried before. Following Oh No Oh My‘s example I’ve decided that doing sets of two singles is the best way for me to make music at the moment. It lets me do whatever I want in terms of sound and content without feeling like I need to adhere to some over-arching album theme. Check out the music on my bandcamp page.

Here’s the first track.

My friend Darren Bachynski offered me the opportunity to do sound for this ad he was contracted to produce for YouthRISE. I had a lot of fun putting everything together. It was my first time doing any kind of real sound work in a long time and it really got me excited about it again.

Protect Our Youth from Combination Films on Vimeo.

My friend Darren Bachynski asked me to do the sound for this short 9-second animation he created for an online contest. I coincidentally had just recorded a bunch of new sounds for my sound library so I was able to use a bunch of them for the animation. It was a lot of fun. Hoping to do more of this kind of stuff. Doing audio for animation is especially exciting because it all has to be made from scratch, and it’s up to me exactly what makes a sound, and what that sound is in each case and how I’ll create it. It’s like an open ended puzzle. Definitely gets me thinking about sound.

Diamond Factory from Darren Bachynski on Vimeo.

I was able to take some vacation time for the first week of April so I stayed at home the whole time and managed to make two new tracks from beginning to end. It was my first chance to do some songs using some of the Loomer instruments and plugins that I recently bought, and I was really happy with them. It took me a while to find my footing at the start of the week but once I got going I had a really fun time working on these tracks and was very happy to have everything finished by the end of the week. Other than the Loomer stuff, I also used some LinuxDSP plugins in Mixbus. Hydrogen was also extremely useful for doing the drum parts.

Overall it was a successful week and a great chance to just sit down and experiment and explore some new sounds. I’m hoping this project will help grease the wheels for the next album I want to do.

Here’s a link to the bandcamp page for the A/B side singles, April, Dreaming of Summer.

I put this patch together in the hopes that it would help me in my next musical project. It gives me five different instruments that can be triggered by MIDI, but each instrument can use an unlimited collection of .wav samples. Each MIDI hit will trigger a random sample from the collection, allowing an unpredictable rhythmic texture to be produced. To be used as a partner to an existing drum machine as a way to add a bit more ‘realism’ to the sounds.

Download randomHITS. (needs pd-extended)