Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Hip Hop Work In Progress

KidsPiano Hip-Hop In Progress

In an effort to keep updating and to keep an eye on the tracks I'm working on, I'm uploading an in-progress hiphop track i'm in the middle of.

Software Used?
- Ableton Live 6.0.1 (I could go on a rave about how excellent Live 6 is, but I'll spare you.)
- Native Instruments Absynth
- A bunch of free samples from CM Magazine

Yay verily. Comment, plz, and let me know what you think.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

i really like how ambient and spooky this is, though i must say that i think the symbol is out of place. i think it detracts from the rest of the song. i think it maybe needs to be subdued.
that said, i really like how the sounds oscillate from left to right speaker. and i really love all the weird noises in it and listening to them change and fade.

skinnyghost said...

The cymbal is a tricky bit of business, because I feel like in some places, it works as a grounding focus. It's like a piece of reality breaking through all the ghosty layers I put down. On the other hand, in other places, I don't like it. I think maybe I'll muffle it a bit more.

The oscillations are all courtesy of a plugin called PSP Nitro. I just got it a little while ago and have been playing around with it quite a lot. It took some tweaking to get the sound the way I like it.

Marielle said...

i like the fading work very mucho. at the 1:08 mark, i hear a faint noise in the background that sounds like mario going down a pipe. what's that from? the handclaps get a bit too repetitive at some points. i notice that they change up a bit, but maybe there should be a bit more variation (in regards to the clapping of the pre-programmed hands)

skinnyghost said...

the pipe noise is the product of an audio effects generator called "beat repeat" that i installed onto the kids piano i'm using in this bit. i turn it on there and what it does is repeat a single note on sequentially lowering scales. so, that's why it sounds like pipe. *laugh*

the handclaps are only on one drum sequence and that sequence is only three bars long, so that's probably why it seems repetitive. i'm goofing around with the drum kit RIGHT NOW so maybe i'll have a look at that. thanks!

Unknown said...

I LOVE psp nitro. That piano sample is wicked, where did those loops come from? 2 things about the drums, maybe a few more spaces between hits, and since the lovely job you did with the bitcrush on the piano in parts give the tones a sense of arriving at the ear from great distances away, a little reverb on the drum track with a tight decay would blend them really well with the overall ambience. Well done indeed, though. We're actually working on very similar stuff right now, you and I. A show... very soon.

skinnyghost said...

nitro is really great. i recently re-found it, as well as absynth, and have been doing a lot of work with both. the piano loops are actually ones i wrote. i used sampler set to a middle-C sample of a single kids piano note that came from an old issue of computer music whose DVD i snagged from the discard pile at work.

the reverb on the drums was a good idea. it takes some of the immediacy out of them, which i like. i'm toying with a dblue Glitch'd version of one of the crowley samples as a final topper track, but I'm still not really at a place where I can find a good balance for it.

anyway, it means a lot to have to critique this stuff. thank you, ian.