My friend Clara Holmström’s brilliant songwriting skills and magic voice in symbiosis with my synths and machines results in a somewhat dark but dancy soundscape. Hit up Soundcloud and turn up your soundsystem!
A process where…
Clara sent me a (non-quantized) phone recording of her song with vocals and guitar.
I warped and stretched in Ableton Live so that I could…
…make a rough arrangement on Analog Keys and Rytm.
Clara made a new vocal-only recording (on her phone) with my new arrangement on headphones.
She also added a couple of harmonies.
Using only Analog Keys and Rytm, I composed music to support the vocals. Relying only on trig conditions and transpose for variation and harmonic progression.
I recorded “live” to Clara’s vocals, by playing patterns w/ direct change on Keys and recording separate tracks through Overbridge.
A second “live” take of the Rytm patterns. Pattern variation w/ direct change also here.
Impressive stuff Carl well done. My only comment would be the evolving bassline is at some points a little too punchy on the low end (listening through headphones)… is that intentional?
I do think it’s hard to mix. My room is small and with a slanted ceiling. When I listen through speakers there is excessive resonance in some of the low register, that I have to ignore. Then I mix some on headphones with its quirks.
Listening in my car, I quite liked it. Listening on my living room stereo I found it a bit week.
But. And I think this is what it comes down to… I mostly enjoy the sound design and the arrangement part of the production process. When I have something that I find OK, I choose to let it go. Because the mixing (although I find it interesting) is not what I find most enjoyable in the creative process. And since this most likely is never gonna be played on the radio or be released commercially - I’ll move on to other more pleasurable and creative tasks.
That said - I kinda enjoy the constructive critique.
Story of my life… im generally drawn to dark or “muddy” soundscapes and all my musician/engineer friends always come back telling me “my only critique is you could clean up some of the low end”.
It is intentional for me, and I quite enjoy the mixdown process also if I’m honest. Sonically the vocal is crystal clear with nice mids But am a huge fan of deep muted beats in general and I really liked them.
I sense you are using the Heat extensively to get that sound - I may just have to go and buy one… been thinking about it forever but always found it expensive for what it is…
