Epic Machinery – Cruise Liner Engines

Posted on by
5

While on holiday I routinely bring recording equipment with me. In Italy, where they have decided to make normal passenger cruise ships look like ferarris, they also have interesting engine sounds to boot. I’ve been searching for a sound like this for years and have finally nailed it with this sound.

I recorded this standing a few feet away from the harbour at the exhaust side of the ship. It was maneuvering into position away from the harbour, and you can hear the engines in some detail – the turbos are kicking in, and the engine goes through a few start up procedures. This sounds epic!

 

Ocean Liner Cruise Ship Engines Engaging Turbos Whine Bass Epic Rumble Rev Servos Awesome Cool Technological Sound FX

Pulverisateur Experiment by Ostraka on Audiotool

Posted on by
2

I made this ambient piece using Audiotool a couple of months ago thinking that I might add some more layers, but I’m pretty fond of it as is and thought I would share it here. My original goal was to try automating some parameters and processing in Audiotool, and learn about Pulverisateur in the process. Pulverisateur, which I unfortunately spelled wrong in my track title, is a modular style virtual synthesizer that I connected to a Tonematrix for Monome-like programming. It has an amazing sound and, to my ears, sounds as least as good if not better than Reason‘s Subtractor. The image above will give you an idea of the signal flow for the piece. Checkout the audio, or make a remix on Audiotool if you like what you hear.

Beyerdynamics DT770 Pro Closed Back Circumaural Headphones

Posted on by
7

Beyerdynamics DT770 ProI just got a set of Beyerdynamics DT770 Pro closed back circumaural headphones and now I’m listening like mad to familiar music in order to get used to them as quickly as possible. I wanted some better quality closed back headphones firstly for performing, but secondly for recording, producing, and listening while on the road.

So far I’m very impressed with the detail and bass response. They have much more bass and overall volume than the AKG K240s that I use in the studio, but I imagine that the open back K240s are probably more flat. The DT770s are a snug fit and surround even my abnormally large pinnae. The thick velour padding blocks a fair amount of sound and keeps your ears toasty warm, or nice and sweaty in this ninety six degree heat.

It took me a while to decide about these phones, but based on what I’ll be using them for I think I made the right decision. They are louder than I expected, given that many people prefer to use a headphone amplifier with them. I didn’t find amplification necessary with my MacBook Pro, but haven’t tried them with an iPod, or anything else yet. Feel free to chime in with your own experience or opinions on headphones.

The importance of intention

Posted on by
3

I have recently scored a soundtrack for a short movie that inspired me very much for its genuine content and powerful simplicity. I found the story so compelling and beautiful that at first I thought of writing something that could be defined minimal and very polite, with the intention of leaving enough space to the characters without overshadowing them and let the story evolve without too much distraction.

After a few days of work I realized what I was doing was ok, but was not exploiting the full potential of the beautiful message that the director was trying to convey. In other words, everything was fine to my eyes and ears, but my work wasn’t adding much to the movie. It felt detached. Why was that? How could that happen, since I felt so attached in the first place to the story and the characters?

The answer came to me the day after, when I asked myself (I often talk to myself): what is this movie really about? What is the sparkle that triggers all the events in this movie? What’s the primal dynamic? My answer was: intention. That was the only thread to follow in the story, the one element that I needed to translate into music. I kept ‘intention’ as my only reference and as soon as I started writing new music everything fell into place, magically.
Continue reading →

Grain Machine Update and Layered Experiment

Posted on by
19

Here’s a new look at the Grain Machine M4L device. Since last time I have updated the device to allow drag and drop samples that are stored with the Live set, and added a visual for the filter that’s controlled by the accelerometer on the controller (iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch).

The best thing about using this in Live is being able to live-loop and layer the output from Grain Machine into clips on different tracks, not to mention processing. Another advantage is saving the state of the device in the Live set so that one document has sample set X, while the next has sample set Y. Here’s a piece I created with the Grain Machine in Ableton Live using some samples I randomly selected from my sound library.

Grain Machine Layers