Amberwolf's Music Studio Technical Stuff (and the sonic products thereof)

[amberwolf]

I've updated the Aftermath of Sunlight:
A slightly remixed version 052325 000001 000073u is here:

Aftermath of Sunlight [1] by Amberwolf



BTW, this (Pre-Cast Shadows) is it's companion track, still very much a WIP more even than Aftermath of Sunlight:

Pre-Cast Shadows (Aftermath of Sunlight Pt 2) by Amberwolf

It's built on hte percussive section from Aftermath of Sunlight; so far only has the first minute or so of what will be something longer.

Most likely these will become a "single track' at some point, or a matched set, or something...whatever they call it in real music when there's several related pieces of music that go together but can be listend to separately. Movements?

 

[e-beach]

I've updated the Aftermath of Sunlight:
A slightly remixed version 052325 000001 000073u is here:

Aftermath of Sunlight [1] by Amberwolf



BTW, this (Pre-Cast Shadows) is it's companion track, still very much a WIP more even than Aftermath of Sunlight:

Pre-Cast Shadows (Aftermath of Sunlight Pt 2) by Amberwolf

It's built on hte percussive section from Aftermath of Sunlight; so far only has the first minute or so of what will be something longer.

Most likely these will become a "single track' at some point, or a matched set, or something...whatever they call it in real music when there's several related pieces of music that go together but can be listend to separately. Movements?

A movement is an appropriate term for it so long as they have linking ideas. Think of any 1970's rock opera you can remember. Queen, Pink Floyd, Yes, Alice Cooper, The Who, they all had albums which kind of had movements. Plenty of opera is like that but they have acts. A classical peice like Vivaldi's Four Seasons comes to mind.

As far as listening to the "songs" separately that has become standard for a couple of reasons. One, the obvious one is due to the need for radio stations to sell advertising space. However since radio stations are now competing with streaming services the other reason comes into play, the listeners attention span. If the goes longer then 3 1/2 minutes people get board and look for something new.

 

[amberwolf]

BTW, this (Pre-Cast Shadows) is it's companion track, still very much a WIP more even than Aftermath of Sunlight:

Been trying to work this one out; feels like every change I make pushes it farther from where I originally intended it to go. Not sure where it is headed now....

Pre-Cast Shadows (Aftermath of Sunlight Pt 2)




Also added both to Bandcamp:

Aftermath of Sunlight

Pre-Cast Shadows (Aftermath of Sunlight Pt 2)

 

[amberwolf]

Listen to the new epic cinematic hit

No Bigger Than The Space Of Time

No Bigger Than The Space Of Time, by Amberwolf

track by Amberwolf

amberwolf.bandcamp.com

Is still kind of a sketch of what it will become, but it already sounds like something from an epic movie trailer.

\

06-14-25: 061325 000001 000021d -- first public version; still highly experimental and subject to major changes at any time.

06-15-25: 061325 000001 000040j -- mix changes, added intro sounds, accents throughout.

06-15-25: 061325 000001 000061m -- extended with new dramatic section

06-16-25: 061325 000001 000071p -- added backing synth and other parts, assorted mix and timing edits.
06-17-25: 061325 000001 000096u -- extended with another new section, plus assorted timing and mix edits throughout.

 

[amberwolf]

A copy of a post I made elsewhere (on the bandlab/cakewalk forum) in answer to a question, in case it's useful to anyone reading the thread:

Regarding beatmaking....

I use a number of methods.

For MIDI controlled samplers (hardware or software) I have used the ancient MFX Musiclab SlicyDrummer Lite, set the track it's in up to drive SessionDrummer (or whatever) with a kit of the sound type that I'm generally after, and hit the random button, playing the loop it gives and shifting each pattern in SDL up or down to drive different drums, until it sounds something like what I want. If it doesn't work on all the patterns, I'll turn the random-lock on for the ones that do, and then use random again for the ones that don't until something emerges that I like. Sometimes I'll just turn one or more of those off entirely, so no drums are driven from them. If SD is still available from ML, I'm sure the full version is more powerful and versatile.

Sometimes I'll use MIDI loops, either stuff I've made before that turned out well, or ones from various companies (especially the ones that give some away for free now and then, as I don't have any budget for this stuff, and probably haven't made a dollar a year on average from music sales). Then I'll put those into tracks driving Sessiondrummer or another synth (not always a true drum synth; depends on what I'm doing). Then I poke around at the "tracks" and may use the kick notes to drive some other thing, and the snare to drive the kick, and a hat or whatever to drive a snare, etc, just to see how the patterns work out. Sometimes there's an instant winner when doing this, sometimes a long while of working gets me nothing I like. I'll save it anyway in case I decide it fits something else later....

Then other times I'll use audio loops--there are a LOT of free wave files out there, many of them very good quality. Ghosthack has an annual "advent calendar" full of wave bundles, some of which also have midi files. (many of their purchasable bundles have midi files for the wave files in them, making it easy to use your own sounds to add to or replace theirs, and many of their bundles have everything tracked out to separate stem files...and all of them are "pre-mastered" and generally mix well together without messing around (though I pretty much always mess around with things; it's part of the fun).



Other times I'll just draw everything into a MIDI track to play SD or some other synth. I also have a yamaha tabletop drumpad thing (m55? ) but I'm terrible at actually playing anything, not enough control over my body in realtime, so I don't do a lot of that anymore.

 

[amberwolf]

also posted on that forum, info about this most recent song

As one example of the audio loop / sample method, the most recent WIP No Bigger Than The Space of Time over here:

No Bigger Than The Space Of Time, by Amberwolf

In the fourth "movement" it has some Planet Samples stuff from The Sound of Tomorrowland Electro Edition (a free "14-kit" bundle) for kick and snare and bassline, that I turned off snap in SONAR then dropped these in, not aligned. I also have them stretched out to I think half ish their original speed, because this is a slowish piece. Hit play, then began nudging them around utnil they sounded the way they do now (whihc isn't how they're supposed to sound). Stuck in some of the other noises and percussion from earlier movements in the trakc to reprise them and unify this movement with them, and give the feel it now has, to underlie the rest of the piece.

The ohter movements' percussion is also mostly made up of either pieces of loops (almost all from Ghosthack) or individual sounds cut from loops, or individual wave samples (mostly I don't recall the sources, had some for many years, edited and tweaked and resaved over and over) placed around the tracks. here's a screenshot of the piece

 

[marty]

movie

Add some video to the audio. If you were to make a movie. What would the story be?

How about a movie about a nut case named Marty who is freaking out about people making movies with their phones in the vertical position. Look around. The world is horizontal.

 

[amberwolf]

(I was making this list for someone else, and thought i should posting it here as well. I left out some parts of the post that aren't relevant here.)



It is *all* experimental.

There is a spoken-word song "The Beaten Dog"

The Beaten Dog, by Amberwolf
though most don't have lyrics they may have vocals or vocalizations. The "hardest" song there with vocals (English) is probably "Back To The World".

Back to the World, by Amberwolf

A couple have Elven vocals,
Behind You Lie Many Unseen

Behind You Lie Many Unseen, by Amberwolf
Gareki II (Alternate Version, Cinematic Feel)

Gareki II (Alternate Version, Cinematic Feel), by Amberwolf

and one has Indian chants:
Less Like A Whisper

Less Like A Whisper, by Amberwolf

and one has wolves rather than humans doing the "singing"
Ookami no Kari no Yume (Wolf's Dream of the Hunt)

Ookami no Kari no Yume (Wolf's Dream of the Hunt), by Amberwolf

A Peek Over The Wall is "set" in Guri

A Peek Over The Wall, by Amberwolf

And this older one features Lauscho on the lead guitar:
Convocation of Lies (feat. Lauscho Remix), by Amberwolf
The most recent ones at the top of the Amberwolf page are generally more cinematic, and the older ones at the bottom generally more electronic. There's a variety of styles / types on there, so if you don't like one try another, and more than a few change styles within the track itself over time, so you can just wait for it to change too....

 

[A-DamW]

A Peek Over The Wall is "set" in Guri

A Peek Over The Wall, by Amberwolf

Thanks for this Amberwolf, I enjoyed listening, and the cover art strongly reminded me of: My Neighbor Totoro, director Hayao Miyazaki, from
Studio Ghibli.

Beautiful piece and artwork.

 

[amberwolf]

Thanks for this Amberwolf, I enjoyed listening, and the cover art strongly reminded me of: My Neighbor Totoro, director Hayao Miyazaki, from
Studio Ghibli.

Beautiful piece and artwork.

Thanks; it's meant to represent a (forbidden) journey of a Haibane climbing the wall around Guri (Glie) in the anime Haibane Renmei (charcoal(grey)-feather-federation). Some images from the show itself.
View attachment 372333



I originally intended a much longer piece, with a longer quieter more gradual intro starting from the forest at night, sounds of climbing the wall, a near-fall, etc., but things intruded into life at the time and so what you heard is all I have so far managed to create of it; the ideas are still there in my head, but I have had enough time between when I wanted to make them real and now that they are a bit blurry, and other music has overridden some of them as well and come out as other songs posted on that page after it. Would probably be about 15 minutes long instead of two and a half, done the way I was thinking of, and bore everyone to death like my eight minute Ookami no Kari no Yume did.

 

[amberwolf]

If anyone has ever read Windhaven (by George RR Martin and Lisa Tuttle), this is The Last Flight:

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-last-flight

Since Windhaven is an ocean world, with what amounts to an archipelago of islands for it's land, I went with what I hope is a mediterraneanish sort of sound, in my own wierd way.

 

[amberwolf]

I updated The Last Flight with various edits, mix, fx, etc. Added "lute solo" to final reprise section...might surprise you, might not. Worth a listen if you heard the original.

Several edits later...the track is even better,

The Last Flight, by Amberwolf
https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-last-flight


EDIT:
Wierd...somewhere in the last few edits leading up to the previous export/upload, *all* the busses were somehow set to feed the hardware out. I don't even know a way to do that on purpose except one by one, and I definitely didn't do that. Fixed by referring to a previous save version easily enough, but...weird.

Also fixed the awkward placment of hte cliff jump / start of flight effects. I thought I had it down, but when i listened to it today, it sounded terrible, where i had had to alter the music around it, especially the lute part. So I reverted that section back to original, and moved the jump back a few measures and it fits MUCH better there.


07-19-25: 071825 000001 000042a-- first public version
07-20-25: 071825 000001 000055f -- Various edits, mix, fx, etc. Added "lute solo" to final reprise section.
07-21-25: 071825 000001 000067k -- further fine tuning, added bass grace notes and fills, some mix changes in spots. Reworked the intro percussion, turned it way down along with the intro vocal notes. Moved some percussion bits around, added a few more shakers here and there.Altered the "trap style" pre-measure bits in most places to fill with shakers or tambs or caxixi, or leave empty for expectation of a note that isn't there this time so the next one has more impact, etc. Also automated more of the amp / eq controls on the lute solo in the final section for more dynamics.
07-22-25: 071825 000001 000075m -- added environmental fx, widened part of the lute solo to fill space.
07-23-25: 071825 000001 000077n -- had forgotten to widen the space for the rain
07-23-25: 071825 000001 000093q -- Added wind, walking and hten running footsteps in the clifftop gravel, the sound of flapping clothes, etc.
07-24-25: 071825 000001 000109u -- Fixed program failure (all buses mysteriously set to hardware out instead of chains they had been in) and fixed awkward placement of cliffjump / start of flight.


Original version here:
https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=15058975
07-20-25: 071825 000001 000042a - first public version

 

[amberwolf]

Depeche Mode meets...Amberwolf?

Messing around, this is a start to a new piece that I have no idea what style to call it. Only a couple hours into the creation process. ( EDIT: now about 12 hours in)

[strike]Still working out the main "melody" or whatever it would be called, so that's not in there, [/strike]but even as-is it might make a useful background piece to one of those movies of the mind.

EDIT: This track (still untitled) has now undergone extensive editing, recomoposition, mix, added vocal tracks, accents, etc. and is definitely ready for public listening and feedback is desired. Now over on bancamp as 072425 000001 000064k
edit: 072725: 072425 000001 1001114u -- Reworked intro, assorted minor edits throughout

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/even-if-i-could-tell-you

Orignal version still over at

World Song | Even If I Could Tell You -- (original version) by Amberwolf | Stream Free

"Even If I Could Tell You -- (original version)" is a World song by Amberwolf. Add this high-quality song to your creative workflow. Available now on SoundClick.

soundclick.com

 

[amberwolf]

For those interested in the process of creating the above track:

I'd guess I have about 24-26 hours total into editing this one, over the last three days. Not as much as I've spent on some good tracks, but this one has turned out pretty good. Might still be some changes coming here and there, but probably only tweaks to timing of certain bits of percussion and adjsutments to some note volumes here and there.


There's almost none of hte orignal clips I started with left intact in there. Most of them have been seriously chopped up, stretched, squeezed, pitch shifted, processed, etc. The "weird" bassline sound at the beginning was from some Neurofunk collection at BlackOctopus that came free with something else. I can't stand the NF stuff in there, but the sound was interesteing, so I cut out all the glitches and wierd stuff, and reassembled the pieces into my own bassline starter. Some of the wierder short bits ended up as tiny "distortion guitar" hits, though it isn't a guitar, you can hear them quietly in the background of the slower part of the intro a couple of times. They also underlay a couple of points in the early vocals to help with the character.

The early vocals, especially the middle-deeper phrases just over a minute and a quarter in, are not male vocals, they're some operatic-style stuff from I tImage Sounds - Cinematic Choir, chopped up and pitch shifted down almost two octaves, with other pieces less shifted in parallel with them on a different more reverbed track. The super shifted stuff sounds AWFUL and completely unvocal like on it's own, but it sounds exactly like I wanted it to in the mix...wierd. The rest of the parts were only shifted down a few notes after being chopped/stretched/squished.

The later vocals are from antoehr Ghosthack bundle, Origin - Arabic - Kit 06 - Ghosts Of The Past, again hacked and chopped and shfited etc.

The end vocals are from a different set, I think some of them are from a Ghosthack bundle "Alley" in the adlibs part.

Some of the really deep almsot growly throat hums that start it all off were also from Ghosthack bundle, Origin - Arabic but were from the "male vocals low throats" section.



I prefer using Ghosthack stuff because they provide wet and dry for most things, so I can use the dry ones to chop up cleanly for pitch/etc changes. The ones with fx already in them are really hard to do this convincingly, so there are a lot of especially vocal bits in other companies' libraries that I eitehr have to use as-is, or hide the transitions in changes with a lot of other stuff going on, etc. Some I can't use at all unless I use them whole.


I think most fo the orchestral percussion started out as a loop in one of the Shymer packs from Ghosthack, but it didnt' fit any of the bassline I ended up creating, so it's completely chopped up and rebuilt to fit the various parts of the song, so it changes a lot throughout.

Some other parts I used for pieces of the bassline were from Ghosthack's Cinematic Essentials. The main pulse bassline that begins maybe halfway thru startted from there, then was run thru Bifilter2 with various automation to help it fit around the other parts I'd already made. Same with some of hte other background "synth" parts chopped up into bits to stick behind things to give me the sound and notes I wanted.



The main "arp lead" is actually an ostinato string part from Ghosthack's Cinematic Essentials, that was made for a lower tempo, so when I stretched it to fit this project's 140bpm it ended up grainy and wierd, but it fit the style. To get rid of the worst of the high end harshness from that process, I fed it to the bass2 buss that isn't filtered as heavly as the main bass buss, which results in the sound you hear in the first half. In the second half I copied it to another track that feeds a "normal" bus but has all the bass filtered out with Sonitus Multiband compressor by turning off the bottom two bands. (becuase these are the bands left audible in the other track). Then I crossfade between the two, neither going completely in or out, to change the sound for various parts of the last half of the song without having to recreate the part in a different instrument.



The secondary intertwining bits that sometimes sound like pizzicato strings, sometimes like banjos or whatever, are celli pizz string bits from the same bundle as the above.



There's quite a few little sounds and transition FX that came from various parts of the SampleTraxx bundles, though none of them were used as the original clip; they were either mangled or thye were overlaid with others from other places, or other sounds I had or made.

There are some muted-sounding sections, like under the intro...those came because when you solo a track, it also has to open up any busses that it feeds to the mains thru, and when I soloed one track to hear it, I found that sound,w hcih was perfect for those places. I just left the track soloed, muted it's clips temporarly, and exported the whole project as just that mostly-muted and quiet to a wave file to keep as a "knocks and ticks" track to bring in for certian parts of the whole thing. Then improted it into a new track that feeds the master bus as-is, though I also put an eq on it to filter some bits out in places, and automated volume eerywhere to turn it on and off and fade it as needed.

 

[amberwolf]

Now has a title "Even if I Could Tell You", so updated the artwork


also potentially lyrics if i can find the rest of the story in my head

I could tell you everything
xxand it still wouldn't matterxx
xxwouldn't matter at allxx
i could tell you everything
and it just wouldn't matter

even if i could tell you
I wouldn't know how
even if i could tell you
wouldn't believe me anyway
even if i could tell you
I would never get it right
even if i could tell you
tell you tell you tell you tell you tell you tell you
even if i could tell you
the difference would be slight
in how you would see me
in whether you would care
in how that you'd treat me
in how that I would fare
I could tell you everything
and it still wouldn't matter
even if i could tell you
there still be nothing there
If I could just keep you in the dark
If you didn't know the things I do
then maybe i could join you there
and peace could come to me

Even if i could tell you
I'd still just walk the line
between life and death
that lies between us
between me and the rest of you

even if i could tell you
how would i achieve
anything of value
because i know you see
you see you see you see you see
nothing in this face
nothing in these eyes
nothing that is me
reflects in your mind
your mind your mind your mind your mind

 

[amberwolf]

At least the AI likes it :lol:

 

[amberwolf]

While making a milkshake in the kitchen, and using a vintage hand juicer as a strainer to get the strawberry powder out of an oatmeal packet into a bit of tupperware, the sound it was making begged to be percussion, so I took it into the quietest room and recorded it with my phone, transferred those to the computer, and edited bits of them into this project here and there.

Bonus points if you can find them.

073025: 073425 000001 200148z -- added oatmeal tupperware shakers and vintage juicer percussion, other tweaks, etc.
EDIT: apparently it's not actually a juicer, it's a potato-ricer.... :lol:

 

[Diggs]

Hey @amberwolf I check this thread now and then to see what you've been up too musically. I enjoy your musical wanderings even though different than my own. I've recorded in the past but not so much any more. I think I saw you were using Cakewalk Sonar for a DAW? Still current? Any experience with other DAWs? Most of what I did was using Mixcraft in Windows but would like to move to Ardour on Linux as I get back into it. Any other DAWs you've tried and liked?

...any experience with live looping? I loop in my recordings but never tried it live. One of the masters I like to listen to is Reinhardt Buhr.

 

[marty]

milkshake in the kitchen

Plastic gallon jar. Like restaurant size mayonnaise jar. Half gallon of ice cream + milk. Shake.

 

[amberwolf]

Hey @amberwolf I check this thread now and then to see what you've been up too musically. I enjoy your musical wanderings even though different than my own.

what do you think of each of hte last several tracks i've posted up recently? the good, the bad, ugly, etc?

I've recorded in the past but not so much any more.

got any links to your stuff online anywhere? (bandcamp is a good free place to put stuff up and you can either put it for free downloads or paid, etc).

I think I saw you were using Cakewalk Sonar for a DAW? Still current?

i use a verison from a couple decades ago. no reason to upgrade, and the current one is all subscription so if you stop paying you lose your stuff (can't edit, save, export, etc., so same as lost). never ever do those subcription software things, really bad idea

Any experience with other DAWs? Most of what I did was using Mixcraft in Windows but would like to move to Ardour on Linux as I get back into it. Any other DAWs you've tried and liked?

no, i've not really tried much of anyting else since getting good at cakewalk and later sonar. get good with a tool, and use it till it is just a part of doing stuff...keep chaging tools and you hae to relearn everything and you spend more time doing that and fixing things than making art / music, etc.

been told reaper is good but didn't get much past installing it on hte linux laptop so far, that was a while back. want to make music not waste time getting things to work the way i need them to again and again.

...any experience with live looping? I loop in my recordings but never tried it live. One of the masters I like to listen to is Reinhardt Buhr.

no, i'm not really a live player; not a musician. i create sounds and soundscapes and stuff that might be musical in nature.

i have played live at various places over the years but probably not in the last copule decades now. too hard to move the gear and set it up and nobody pays for people like me to sit there and make ambience, i'm better off using my time and energy to just create stuff here at home even though almsot no one ever listens to it or probably ever will.


only looper musician i can remember having listend to was way back, kt tunstall; liked that and thought it was kind of amaizing that she could do that, but i couldn't kepe it all straight whyile tryhing to play.


i *use* loops and stuff to create things sometimes, but i usually chope them all up and mutate them and whatnot, till soemtiesm tehy're unrecognizable from their original states. :lol:

 

[Diggs]

what do you think of each of hte last several tracks

Your music has way more imagination in it than I could ever come up with. Like you've stated, a soundscape. Some perfect for the soundtrack on a SciFi movie. I'm a guitar player that's tried to pull in a few different sounds to fill things out.

got any links to your stuff online anywhere?

I just looked. A decade ago I stashed some stuff on Broadjam. It's still there - heh! So-

(Hmmm... Music links below aren't working through Broadjam(?) so redirected them to a Google Drive account.)

This would be a completed song with vocals even though I hate to sing. (About losing a friend on the net.)

Here is me experimenting with keyboards even though I don't play keyboards. I put my fingers on the keys and if it doesn't sound good I move them - chuckles.....

I'm pretty conventional but get a little disjunct and wandering on this song.

...and sometimes I record things just to try out effects, techniques and sounds.

...and one more just for the heck of it (you don't want to listen to a whole album of stuff) called Plains. (Think running horses!)

Here is the Broadjam page.

...and I see Broadjam has moved to a strictly paid membership. Explains why the song links didn't work. Still, can't believe they hung on to my stuff for 10+ years.

keep chaging tools and you hae to relearn everything

Agreed! A big part of recording is how good you are with the tools you have. I have Ardour installed on one of my Linux machines but struggle to use it because I don't know it.

 

[amberwolf]

Gotta reply to your post, but still typing that up. In the meantime

Nine Thumbnails On A Dark Screen
first draft, fairly grungy dark piece.

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/nine-thumbnails-on-a-screen

The name came from something my brother was saying in an unrelated conversation about something someone else complained about online how all the little thumbnails on the screen were too hard to see, and my brain went somehwere completely different with both screen and thumbnails....you probably wont' like the cover art once I get that done becuase it'll be the other kind of thumbnails and screen.


the sound itself was an accident, i was trying to get something setup that would have been in the same vein as The Last Flight
but accidentally dropped the bas line and some other bits into a track with grungy distortion fx, and when i hit play it sounded too interesting to let go of. so it's still a WIP, still building the vocalizations track, gotta figure out chored changes, etc, might get longer (only a couple minutes so far), but it's still interesting. Probably a ways to go before it's "done", but feedback would be useful.


Also,

I uploaded a couple of short edits of Behind You Lie many Unseen with just the "Elven rock" part, one with a bit of intro from teh previous section, and one without, for the listeners I've had on Bandcamp that the stats show did not listen far enough to hear that section, since it's so totally different from the rest of it, and I think that section is cool.

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/behind-you-lie-many-unseen-just-the-elven-rock-section

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/trac...-unseen-no-really-just-the-elven-rock-section

 

[amberwolf]

While working on the above Nine Thumbnails On A Dark Screen, I ran across some sounds from the ancient Ensoniq Fizmo, and used a couple of them in it as they were suitably dark in the lower range. (the rhythmic synth at the intro, and underlaying much of the rest of the track. The deep growly bass under everything is a "virus" patch I had a long sample of).


The Fizmo is one I had never heard of until recent years, but back when i was doing stuff live before I began composing entirely in the computer, I would have loved to have one for the evolving nature of what it was designed for. There's at least one VST designed around it's sounds, but they are fixed in nature, being sampled from it with specific knob settings, and don't have any of the synth's abililty to take the basic transwaves it had built in and modulate and filter them in the various ways it had, so it's really nothing like the Fizmo itself. There's at least one pure audio file sampleset (like the one i have here) that someone used Samplerobot to auto-sample some patches, but again, they're just samples....

EDIT: a poke around finds that *one* version might work like the Fizmo...but it is only usable in Ableton Live, so not useful to me Waveframe | Transwave Synthesis of the Ensoniq Fizmo


Thinking about Ensoniq (whose products I'd really liked back when they were around, and I own(ed) three of them (a soundcard (ISA!), the EPS16+, and the ASR88), I thought about updating my avatar used on my music pages Amberwolf and Amberwolf which has a wolf manipulating some random music gear, so that it was operating something with the Ensoniq logo (since you wouldn't be able to see the actual equipment / controls). So I took about an hour or so in Paintshoppro6 and figured out eventually how to take a logo off a picture of a Fizmo (whose rack version has a similar casing appearance to the item already on the avatar image)

and line it up for the right angles to match the existing stuff. Then had to blur and tint it to match, and while I was at it, to replace the Amberwolf logo with a new one I'd made for a recent cover art piece (also created in PSP6, using a complicated process). I am not sure I like the logo in hte avatar, so I may revert that part later....but the Ensoniq logo worked out great.

New avatar:

 

[amberwolf]

One of the plugin sales sites is hosting a contest for a remix of a song I don't actually like,

VST Plugins, Synth Presets, Effects, Virtual Instruments, Music Plugins from Pluginboutique

VST Plugins, Synth Presets, Effects, Virtual Instruments, Music Plugins from Pluginboutique

www.pluginboutique.com

but I heard something in the lyrics and had an idea, to change it from what it was into a spy-movie song instead, and went with that.

I dumped all the backing tracks except the kickdrum and some claps & snares in places (much of those went away too), and built my own percussion, bassline, soundscape, etc., and changed the effects on the vocals. Most of the vocals are left in their original arrangment, other than copying some of the phrases after the orignal end and building a version of my "rock drums" for them out of what I'd done for the Elven portion of Behind You Lie Many Unseen.

I'm still trying to figure out how to take the vocals I do have from it and use some of the phonemes to build some new words to replace some others, because I'm turning it from whatever it was before into a spy action movie "theme song".

I think that what I ended up with is eminently more listenable than the original, but that's probably just my own taste (or lack thereof.



Since we aren't allowed by contest rules to post remixes on any site other than the contest site, is there anyone here that would be willing to listen and critique by a private method?



The critique can be public...just not the remix, until I have it finalized to post it on the contest site (LabelRadar).

Long ago I wanted to try my hand at a remix back when Sony was doing them and they had a Berlin song I liked, but I didn't know anything about how to go about it. I've learned a lot since then, and even sometimes remix my own songs so have had a bit of practice.

 

[OkinawaJapan]

One of the plugin sales sites is hosting a contest for a remix of a song I don't actually like,

VST Plugins, Synth Presets, Effects, Virtual Instruments, Music Plugins from Pluginboutique

VST Plugins, Synth Presets, Effects, Virtual Instruments, Music Plugins from Pluginboutique

www.pluginboutique.com

but I heard something in the lyrics and had an idea, to change it from what it was into a spy-movie song instead, and went with that.

I dumped all the backing tracks except the kickdrum and some claps & snares in places (much of those went away too), and built my own percussion, bassline, soundscape, etc., and changed the effects on the vocals. Most of the vocals are left in their original arrangment, other than copying some of the phrases after the orignal end and building a version of my "rock drums" for them out of what I'd done for the Elven portion of Behind You Lie Many Unseen.

I think that what I ended up with is eminently more listenable than the original, but that's probably just my own taste (or lack thereof.



Since we aren't allowed by contest rules to post remixes on any site other than the contest site, is there anyone here that would be willing to listen and critique by a private method?



The critique can be public...just not the remix, until I have it finalized to post it on the contest site (LabelRadar).

Long ago I wanted to try my hand at a remix back when Sony was doing them and they had a Berlin song I liked, but I didn't know anything about how to go about it. I've learned a lot since then, and even sometimes remix my own songs so have had a bit of practice.

Hey man.

I'd be glad to listen and give you my input. Glad to hear you're into music too.

Actually I have a TON of gear. Sadly I don't use any of it. Been collecting for 20 years or more now.

Need to finally start making music with all this stuff. Seems like we have a bunch of the same gear.

I should take and share some pics of this gear hoarding addiction I have. It's all I have to show for it so far. lol.