I wanted to make a slower track that seems to pull the drums into and out from underwater. Playing with random automation on the FM synth tied to the carrier end of the Orange Vocoder makes some interesting drum sounds. It's tough to keep track since it's so easy to flip carrier/modulator in the Orange plug-in.

The driving baseline is of course a sine but the drums we pushed through the FM/Vocoder wringer just as the dislogic drums were. Adding distortion and compression to keep the results in check was essential. The drum programming is a little lazy compared to my earlier stuff, where I would have programmed each hit by hand. Now that suppertrigger is out there, I tend to cut corners. I'm not proud of using this crutch as I feel it is a little disingenuous. I'm sure nobody cares, or hears it, but it can and it bothers me.

This was my first real, down and dirty use of the MicroTonic synth drum plug-in by Sonic Charge. I love the plug-in but in my writing haste I left the default drumset playing in a new track, which you users of MicroTonic will instantly recognize. That drives me crazy, but I liked the way supertrigger randomly scrattered some of the beats and synths so I never re-exported it. The last note is a tip of the hat to Autechre. It's not sampled, it was created using Vanguard and a bunch of other effect plug-ins, but it just turned out very similar to a synth on Autechre's tri-repeate album.

spectrum was originally a Jason Trauer track that got pushed into the modal fold due to some of the effects and layering. It's not as atonal as the rest of the modal tracks, but it seemed to have that "tiny, sketchy" drum treatment. My favorite drums in the track are built using a standard patch in Battery 2 by Native Instruments. I sequenced a midi loop using MicroTonic, then replaced the source plug-in with Battery. I then rearranged sample blocks until the beat sounded interesting. I mass pitch shifted and enveloped the samples to make the hits sound smaller (for lack of a better term). The verby melodic synth was Vanguard, my favorite subtractive synth plug-in.

Roughstart's name means exactly what you think it means. I wanted a darker theme to this track and tried my damnest to program a mean-sounding synth patch. One that could carry a darker, more aggressive melody, but I failed numerous times. Since my days programming patches on my MKS-80 Super Jupiter I've favored (and been good at) making tiny little tones to make cute little melodies that juxtapose a tougher beat. That's what I settled with on this track. Whether it stands up to the challenge of being freaky as planned, I don't know, probably not. I wanted an unpredictable scream to pop in and out of the track and for the entire mix to stop in the middle only to have a distracting noise distract the listener into be scared by the scream that followed. I feedback loop carried the first scream throughout the track, which was unplanned, but welcome.

This track is more new and it was an experiment with using a pad on my TriggerFinger as a loop length automation tool. I would record the pressure of this pad as an automation track which would modulate the loop length of a preprogrammed drum roll. I used a foot pedal to sustain the loops while recording, so I could control when the effect would become evident. Like most of my other tracks, repetition keeps this one out of my favor. This all stems from laziness and lack of dedication. To me, once I got the effect I wanted it was all downhill with the track. At one part of the song the loop goes into "grainville", which put a smile on my face.

One minute of Joy (which runs two minutes) was an experiment a long time ago, where I wanted to create a track using agmentations of a single noise that had eminated from a custom effects pedal, created by my friend from Efextek, called the Phazix. It made a little electronic squish noise as it powered down. I sampled this, and proceeded to make drums and little wiggley percussion samples out of it. Most of the sounds were twisted around by me playing a loop of the sound in CoolEdit, then randomly adjusting the endpoint of the loop by hand into a CD recorder. I would then rip the CD to my PC and cut up the useable results. I first used this technique when making the song Syntography. I was going to replace the main synth as heard in the track with a sample-based "synth" (following the guidelines of the experiment) but alas, laziness won out again. I used the dummy Super Jupiter track instead.

Using the same techniques practiced in Syntography and One Minute of Joy, I created the meat of this track's percussion from a stupid audio clip of my cousin saying something unintelligible. I had, at one time, a recording studio set up at my mother's house, and the microphone was in the bathroom. I was showing my cousin some reverbs and effects through his headphones and recorded the result. Some drum parts also came from the Super Jupiter.

This is probably my first usage of the SuperTrigger plug-in. I wanted to combine a fat 80's style beat and studdering, playschool melodies. The clumsey result was this track.

Strangely enough, this jazz inspired track was built using the "old Jazz kit" from Battery two, played live with a lot of treatments. I added some odd beats to the track and processed them using the FM/Vocoder technique described earlier but this time it resulted in a breathing brush sound that I really liked. It added an almost human/organic sound to the cold electronic sample behind that rhythm. The original version of this song was 4 bars shorter with the main jazz drum beat and actually ended better, but I wanted to shoehorn more content into this brief experiment so I kept the slightly extended version.

After seeing a video from Compuer Music magazine, showing some artist (who's name escapes me) using multiple instrument tracks to make a single bassline, I had one of those "smack your forehead and go 'duh'" moments. I really didn't have to worry about conserving CPU time with limited tracks, and never dared imagine such a simple technique. I made this track in celebration, bitches. The studdering vocal was originally a full voiced vocal but I didn't like the result and laziness (aka. SuperTrigger) took over.

I built most of Orchard5 (all other iterations were very slow with delayed acoustic guitar) from SuperTriggered RMIV synth beats and a lot of Arpeggio'd Vanguard tracks.

Drop the Lies is an older track that maintains a nearly complete vocal track that fades in and out of intelligibility through the use of an autofilter and VOC20 in Logic 6 Express (you read that right). I like this song starting at the middle when the hihats go full force. SuperTrigger provides a little variation, along with some automated filters.