Timelapse Workspace

Been dying to post *something*, even though all the projects I'm working on (a song using my new APC, a game prototype using GameQuery) aren't complete yet. So I thought I'd quickly show you my new setup in the living room, where I'm doing most of my work.

My camera gave up after 30 mins of recording because my 4gb mem card ran out of space (lol), so we'll see whether or not video recording myself becomes a trend.

Oh, and the music is a reject of mine that never made it to SoundCloud :P

It's still winter, but at least I have Cubase!

Happy Belated New Years!

I tried to write some music over the holidays and was totally creatively blocked. Partly because I was busy coding the video editor that palm demo'd at CES (minute 30 of this very long video if you're curious), but also the stuff I tried to compose was just coming out... not right.

Clearly this means I need more gear.

So I bought a lexicon USB preamp. Not because I like Lexicon, but because it was one of the cheapest preamps on amazon, and it came with Cubase LE4. Cubase is my DAW of choice, so this seemed like a nice, inexpensive way to get a copy.

I also bought an analog synth from ebay: my first analog synth ever! But I'm still waiting for some cables from Sweetwater before I can play it, so more on that next time.

So I wrote this in Cubase, using some samples I had taken in Ithaca of me stepping on the ice-covered sidewalk to my apartment. The instruments are from Reason, as usual, but this time I thought I'd try the Thor patch. Usually I head straight for the NN-XT.

winter solstice phoenix hatching  by  esbie

I considered creating a whole song out of this with bells, drums, etc but

1. I didn't want to ruin a good thing haha. And
2. soundcloud is now limiting user accounts by hours of content (BOOOOOO) and I only have an hour left to use on my account ^_^;;

Alright that's it for now!

Reason Season!

So I finally got around to sampling that music box I got a while back. Eventually I plan to dissect it and torture some more unique sounds out of it, but for now I did the basics and now I have a virtual musicbox to play with. I arranged all the samples in an NN-XT in Reason, and posted it up on ReasonStation... so if you use Reason and want a musicbox, go there and download it for free! I didn't wrap it up into its own refill because I'm lazy (maybe one of you can do that for me ^_^)

I used that Reason instrument in this next song, although it's impossible to tell because it's so subtle. At any rate, this was a song I've been singing in the shower a lot, and let me tell you it's hard to sing chordal progressions with yourself. Hence I figured I'd compose it out in Reason. The song is sorta cheesy, but that's part of its charm, haha.

Respite  by  esbie

Philip Glass meets Lord of the Rings! That's what I think it sounds like anyways.

Click Tracks, Awesome Mashup, and More

Learned my lesson the other day that any on-the-fly recording I do should either be done with a click track or edited in Abelton Live (Live has a fantastic warp tool) afterwards. Otherwise the tempo just goes everywhere. Still posting this just for posterity:

Kitchen Song of Storms by esbie

A while ago, Phil and I made a papercraft keyboard cat. Pic below and the instructions are online here

Btw, the keyboard cat you see here is chillin' in Phil's new Paul Mccobb dresser thing.

I'm going to be entering yet ANOTHER remix contest, this time for Little Boots' "Earthquake". So, while I was downloading all the stems (unrelated: why on earth did they split up the stems by stereo left/right but not by individual instruments? how annoying ~_~) I was listening the the electric guitars and realized that it the chord progression was eerily similar to a very famous song... can you guess? Here's the elecguitar stem:
Elecguitars RIGHT by LittleBoots
Any theories? Well, fastforward 5 hours and I went from the elecguitars stem to this!
Earthquake vs. Otherside Remix by esbie
Red Hot Chili Peppers FTW. Turns out the two songs are only 2 semitones away from eachother, so I warped, transposed, and edited it all in Ableton. Matching tempos was actually not an easy feat... it's now obvious to me that RHCPs don't use click tracks either ^_^;;

This mashup was also difficult because I only had stems for one of the songs (Earthquake, naturally) and so that forced me to use all of Otherside's voicings. Since both tracks have a lot of bass, I had to make sure only one bassist was playing at a time.

Unfortunately I won't be submitting this remix to the contest because of inherent copyright issues (sry, you can't dl this remix from the soundcloud player either), but it sure was fun to make!

APE + Roomba

Last weekend I went to the Alternative Press Expo 2009, where I got to see lots of indie comic book artists showing off their stuff. Way cool.

Also, I shot a video of my roomba, since my mom was curious about it

Tricky Tricky Remix Completion!

I like Royksopp's music, so their remix contest was a total 'yes please, sign me up'. The original track is called Tricky Tricky and you can listen/download it on Soundcloud. My remix turned out pretty eclectic and unfocused, but eh, music is music.

Tricky Tricky (Remix de Esbie) by esbie

Also: since I've only had this mac for a few months, this is the first time I've had to compose on it.  Let me just say that Logic Pro and I don't always see eye to eye, so this remix took longer than usual. Anyone have a DAW on mac that they know, love, and would recommend? I'm open to suggestions.

Some stuff I thought about while making it:

• The original has 2 different chord progressions, one major, one minor. If you take a hard look at the track stems they gave out for remixing, you'll find they never gave us the stuff in the major progression. That blows. The major progression was my favorite part. So you'll find I tried to do a lot of recreation of that section (ie, a lot of my remix is also major)
• I absolutely loved the synth lead that came with the track. I harmonized it, used it in different instruments, and transposed it into a major key.
• at 143bpm, Tricky Tricky was definitely a track that could be taken at half tempo. 
• Karin Deijer-Andersson's voice is awesome. In some parts I vocoded it and pitch shifted it. Although in retrospect I liked her original voice more :) The lyrics are not bad as far as lyrics go. And "over and over" is easy to exploit with musical word-painting
• I had to EQ the bass frequencies like crazy... too many of my samples had a lot of low end rumbling

If I could do it over again... I'd do an entirely acoustic version. Mostly because I added the violins towards the end and realized that was my favorite part. Ah well, maybe next time.

Basically Famous

Hey so if you haven't seen my facebook wall recently, my friend Jason Turer put up a trailer from a student film he produced a couple years back... and I'm in it! I'm playing a character named Mary who thinks her roommate is crazy for hearing weird noises at night. The best part of this is that Jason put the trailer on IMDB! Yes folks that's right, I'm now considered an actress on IMDB ^__^ do you think I should fill out my profile? (Although in all seriousness there are hundreds of Sarah Browns there). Go ahead and clickthrough to see the trailer on IMDB (oh and warning, it's a little cheesy :P)