No, I am no musician by any stretch of the word. For many years, in the meanwhile even decades, however, I have had an interest in synthesizers, patch programming, digital synthesis and the resulting music. And I happen to be the proud owner of two of these fascinating machines. So, if time allows and if I find myself in the mood, I sit down at the keyboard to doodle and toot. Sometimes the resulting sounds even resemble music. You can find a few examples down below.
But please be aware that, as much as I do know about the creation of sythesizer patches and digital audio programming, as much do I still need to learn about music theory, composition, production, mixing and mastering. Furthermore, no DAW was involved in the creation of these hits and misses. The following is defnitvely not for the faint at heart. Or faint at ears. You have been warned.
Professionally made music sounds so much better than anything that I can come up with. The question that has been bugging me for quite a while is: Why? What's the secret recipe to make music sound good? In order to pursue that question a decided to do a few cover versions and see, how close I can come to the real thing (minus the singing), when my pedestrian skills at composition are not the issue.
Here some 80's New Wave music made in Britain:
One piece of German Elektro made early in the new millennium:
And one recent piece of K-Pop:
The past few weeks and months I have been busy learning how to play the electric guitar. On my synthesizer of course. The sound is slowly improving. The lead melody needs still some work. Here is what my meagre skills currently sound like -- now using a flanger on the rhythm guitar:
Supposing Mozart was alive and kicking today, what kind of music would he make? This question kept me tossing and turning in my bed for the past few weeks -- while good old Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus was very likely rotating in his grave in view of the possible dire answers with which I would come up. But here we are: Mozart goes K-Pop.
The cleaning and mixing continues.... but I am still not quite happy with the result.
Is there a wolf in the house? Probably not. But still here we have a piece of 90s style house music. Upon listening to this more than one person claimed that this ditty evokes within their mental cinema the image of one heck of a crazy litte spaceship flitting from one planet to the next, sometimes leisurely slow, sometimes blazenly fast. If they think so...
Once more I listened too much to K-pop.
I have quite a collection of 80s pop music CDs. And I have quite a collection of original Fairlight CMI and E-mu Emulator II samples. What can go wrong?
The Korean pop group ITZY published their latest song Kill Shot. I am not so much a fan of this kind of wannabe rap. But the song is carried by a nice synth-bass riff. Can I come up with something similar? A coral riff... erhm... reef maybe? With deadly mermaids practising their musical kill shots?
For the first time I used a side-chained compressor to make the bassline duck under the bass drum. And I am using the ducky lead. And I finally managed to bake a convincing Pizzagogo on my Kronos.
I watched too many dragonboat drift race videos.