the production thread

IndustryStandard I have all the synths going though a basic mixer ( Edirol M-10DX) which isn’t a sound card. Could do an out from that back into the synth as its a 2×2 sound card too. Will have to putz around to see how it all jives

That’s probably the easiest way to start out then. Pick the synth you want to be your main clock (I like a drum machine for that, but I’m not sure it really matters), run midi out from that in a daisy chain. Pick you audio interface (could be a stand alone or a synth that acts as a sound card) and run your audio into ableton from there to record.

That should get you started, then you can tweak it once you figure out how you like to work and incorporate more complex routing if you need it.

The new album is out today, myself and Essentia Sound (also Canadian). Here’s the bandcamp link and it’s available on all the usual streaming services too. Give it a listen if you’re into it, I’d love to hear what everyone thinks.

A quick write up on the inspiration behind it …

Atmospheric Rivers is based on a series of record breaking rainfalls that swept through British Columbia in the fall of 2021 washing away homes, bridges and highways, causing landslides and loss of human and animal life. The weather system identified as an atmospheric river is a large, narrow stream of water vapour that travels through the sky. Usually originating in tropical ocean regions near the equator, these rivers bring masses of warm air and water from the ocean to land, sometimes dumping a month’s worth of rain or snow in a matter of days.

Morty-C-137 I’m happy to go through what I can. If there are any specifics you want, let me know and I’ll check the project files.

We wrote the album by exchanging stems (except the two tracks I wrote by myself), we’ve actually never met in person, just communicated over facebook. Stephen was using mostly hardware (I’m not sure exactly the configurations, but I can ask if you want), so I went mostly in the box to add some digital balance to the analog sounds. Mostly, one of us would do a rough basic arrangement, send the stems back and forth a couple of times and I’d do the final mix (with me working more in the box, that just worked better for us). Once the mixes were done, we had them mastered by Wayne at Obsessed Audio (he’s done pretty much all of my mastering for a few years now and he’s done some of Eterna’s tracks too). I can’t say enough about how much good mastering helps.

On my end, I used a few soft synths and a lot of creative fx plugins to add textures and ear candy. The main soft synths I used were pigments and diva. I used so many plugins I can’t even remember them all, but here’s a quick list … arturia fragments for spectral delays and their space delay is all over the album, modnetic and echoboy are the other delays I used a lot, panman for movement, unfiltered audio stuff for grainy textures/delays, 4 or 5 different tape emulations (I like to stack them until I get the overall aesthetic I’m looking for), all the bass is run through kush audio’s blyss for saturation and novatron for compression, pro q3 is my primary eq. I wrote 95% of River 4 on the digitakt in about an hour, but that’s the only track that’s heavily sample based.

That was a bit long, sorry. If you want to know how anything specific was done, just ask and I’ll try to track it down. Thanks for checking out the album.

Dubman Haha there’s some heavy bass in a few spots and sounds floating around, works well on good headphones too. This one is hopefully right up your ally.

Morty-C-137 No problem, I find that stuff interesting too. We’ve started compiling tracks for a 2nd album and the process is different this time. I’m leaning heavily on the digitakt/syntakt combo to start tracks or add grooves to Stephen’s ideas. I try to change things up regularly, I find it helps me come up with new ideas so I’m not just making the same tracks over and over again.

Henry Thanks so much, I always respect your opinion. It really is a 50/50 effort, with maybe one of us doing more to get a track started, but it’s definitely both of us on every track. River Two was the first track we did together and he had 13 or so minutes of the arrangement sketched out when he sent it to me. I added the drum/perc grooves and some atmosphere/textures. I actually finished alive for my last album, but it didn’t fit with the rest of the tracks. That one took me 6 months to get the mix right, but I always liked it and wanted to finish it.

Our sounds compliment each other really well, plus (unlike me) he’s a proper musician so he comes up with things I couldn’t on my own. Stephen is really great with coming up with bass lines and chords that play nicely. Check out his album from last fall, I think you’ll like it too. I listened to it and thought it sounded great and fit well with what I do, so that’s when I reached out to him about working together.

Dubman Nice, I’ve got a saturation plugin that I love on bass, it’s just adds some magic to the sound and it’s all over this album. And yeah, that’s Alan Watts in the original mix, Still Alive is all clips from the BC flood victims.

Dubman Yep, the heavy bass is my favorite part of the dub aesthetic. It’s a really difficult balance to get it right, but it sounds so good loud.