MUSIC FOR ANIMATION: WORK IN PROGRESS

Some recent music composition for an experimental animation piece. The film is all about imagery that shifts, drifts, and dissolves. The visual presentation is somewhat lo-fi, yet expansive and abstract.

After watching and thinking about the animation, what seemed appropriate was to put together some conventional music— something jazzy and “vintage” made sense (made 100% with virtual instruments)— and then, as I often do, use the individual tracks as source material for audio collage. As ever, it’s like crafting a stained glass window, shattering it, and then reassembling the shards in some new configuration.

At this point I’ve “futzed” the sound of the music to make it resemble something coming out of an antique radio. Eventually I’ll probably add some vinyl pops to make it sound more like an old record player. I’ve already started scrambling the elements to pull a score together. It’s been a lot of fun so far.

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MINIDISC REDUX!

Recently I’ve been resuscitating a “sinner-songwriter” recording project I started almost 20 years ago. Engaging every lateral move I could think of between CPUs, CDRs, operating systems, DAWs, and dongles, I finally managed to unlock all the sessions and revamp them as projects in my current Nuendo system.

There was only one file I couldn’t find, which was a piano performance I tracked in my friend Ben’s living room, back when we were housemates. I wrote it off and redid the performance using a virtual piano, which was fine, but it still bugged me because it just wasn’t the same.

Finally I remembered that what I was sifting through were WAV files, but that the many of the source tracks-- including the piano-- had originally been recorded to minidisc. Minidisc, folks! And do I still have all those minidiscs from the early 2000s? You better believe it!

So I unearthed the boxes of MDs, and lo and behold, found the piano performance after about an hour of rifling through them. The disc was labeled and everything. I found one of my minidisc players-- my first one, not even the newer Sony that does actual digital transfer of files-- and was happy to discover that it still worked.

I input the audio into Nuendo-- complete with creaks of the piano bench and that annoying whir the MD recorder made every once in a while-- and I was happy to hear that I’d done a couple of mouth clicks to sync with the countoff I’d done on muted guitar strings previously. The session’s legacy tracks are now complete, waiting for edit and mix!

"REVERSE" EFFECT PLUG-IN

I don’t usually endorse commercial products here, especially if I’m not being compensated for it (hint hint), but I do want to give a shout-out to the Reverse effect plug-in, especially since it’s only ten bucks… I was a bit skeptical if it would work, especially with virtual instruments, but I figured for that price it’d be worth the risk. And it indeed it was!

It’s pretty simple, of course— you plop it on a track, and it reverses the output, playing it backwards within a certain time frame. Here’s the promo video that explains what little there is to explian:

And best of all, it actually works! As far as I can tell, it processes virtual instrument signals in real time, without hiccuping or anything. And as dude points out in the video, you can even apply it to FX auxes to create reverse reverbs and what have you, which is super cool.

Maybe there’s been a plug-in like this in the past, and I just haven’t been aware of it— which would not be a shocking state of affairs. But I’ve wanted something like this for a long time, since as we all know, backwards stuff is cool, and when working with virtual instruments I’ve often had to go through the whole rigamarole of of bouncing a soundfile, re-importing it, flipping it around backwards, etc (and then not liking the results half the time anyway). This way I can hear results instantly in real time, and I can tweak the sound without having to re-export, re-import, and all that.

Pretty cool.