Living With a Nerd

After listening to both Stasis Dreams and Light Horizon continuously for the past week, I have concluded that both tracks are unsatisfactory in their current state.

Stasis Dreams is supposed to be a fairly simple song, however I fear that it may be TOO simple.  I need to adjust a few filters on the synth roll that appears about midway through the song, and I think I need to add another layer to the entire track just to beef it up a bit.  The song itself invokes the images that I intended it to, however the images it creates are fuzzy and a bit bland in the colour department.  The extra layer added to the song will likely be somewhere midrange.

As for Light Horizons, I need the make the sound “fatter” as a whole.  My intention was to provide a massive soundstage when wearing headphones, and currently it is merely a “large” soundstage.  The ending needs to be tweaked a bit as well.  I think this one has the potential to be my personal favourite off the entire album;  the feelings and images it creates within the mind are amazing, and embody my entire goal for this album.  Light Horizon also has the ”hardest” sounding synths, something I am trying to perfect prior to the start of my next project.  Despite this, I still feel that Cold Signals will be the “flagship single” from The Transient Unknown. 

The next track, which I shall begin work on at some point this weekend (and possibly tonight) is, as mentioned in a previous post, going to be named IC-443.  IC-443 is the official name of the Jellyfish Nebula, and as such multiple self-oscillators as well as phaser and arpeggiator effects will be employed.  I have almost zero experience working with arpeggiators, so the results should be interesting.  I haven’t decided a key yet, but it will most likely use C2, the same as the rest of songs on the album (with the exception of Light Horizons, which is based around C4, or “middle C”.)  I am also going to employ a similar method that I used in Omicron Ceti: every synth is going to have a clone of itself, one with a low-pass filter enabled and one with a high-pass filter enabled.  This seems to provide more freedom in the overall mix, as well as giving the track a more layered feel.  (I’m aware of the fact that this seems to be very obvious, but please keep in mind that I’m a noob when it comes to producing Ambient music.)

Overall, I’m quite pleased with how the album is turning out so far.  It has become less active than I originally envisioned, but the path it has taken is fantastic.  As much as I am enjoying working on it, I cannot wait to begin production on Lost on the Way to the Laundry.  It will require a lot less precision and involve a lot more experimentation…and the implementation of a USB microphone used to record odd, everyday sounds:-)  Always fun stuff.