Interstellar Bump

Thanks much to UnitOvOne for a lovely and fruitful evening. My index finger bled.

Here’s some stuff that came out nicely:

lektrostatic Pulse
lektrostatic Propulsion
Pulley Wheel
Blocks
And here’s a free hi-q (320 kbs) download of Blocks.

What do you think about the way I left the last few notes of the previous song? Is this the techno equivalent of a band’s intra-song banter or is it just distracting? I wanted to leave a bit of live context, but now I’m not sure….

“You f***ing rock, St. Louis!” as they say in certain circles.

Here’s the set I played last Sunday for Thump.

First four songs were not so good, so they’ve been excised.

Here’s the list with links to individual song posts elsewhere here:

• Oticular
• Erzatz Gnomes
• Peru
• Cygnus X-1 Trawler
• Pulley Wheel
• No. 10 Now
• Envelops You
• Sweeping Hot Coals

low bit rate mono preview of entire song:

OoPs. Spent all afternoon yesterday trying to switch the bassline from the old recorded Supernova audio bass to a virtual 303 sound (using the ABL of course), but it just sounds awful in the song. I think what happened was that the 303 bass was fun to work on by itself, but then it clash with the lead when I finally tried to put it all together.

Back to where you were, please.

But then again, maybe I can just bring it in when the lead is not going. Be nice to automate the cutoff/rez.

A too-long and self-indulgent intro is filled with a nifty Wusikstation pad:

Gotta cut that intro down shorter. Actually the outro is similar and needs trimming as well.

Pulley Wheel is really fun to play. I’m doing some crazy pitch bending in the lead, which is the daHornet plugin running through a VST guitar stomp box called Buz. Very gritty & the BUZ plugin has a very cool look.
The backing chords are from a Synth called “EZ-poly“.

I’ve discovered it’s one of those VSTs that does this self-oscillation thing that fills up Ableton Live’s undo buffer. Very frustrating since I had to resample the EZ-poly clips from nice flexible MIDI files into audio clips, but at least I got my undo buffer back. Working on a song with no practical way to undo bad changes is just nerve-racking.

Hint: if you’re working in Ableton and you go to make an undo and it doesn’t seem to work, and you see these mysterious entries like “Change parameter #17″ in the undo menu, then you’ve probably gotten into this corner.

To verify, open up Live’s parameter panel for each of your VSTs and look for one or some of the little parameter sliders to be moving on their own. Then you’ll have found the problem VST. If you’ve discovered it early enough in the songwriting process, then you can probably just delete the VST and replace it with something else.

If, on the other hand, you’re married to the plugin, you can try to get VST vendor/developer to change the behavior. I’ve had some luck with this approach.