'BFF - Chat Room Fever'

Shortly after creating the WEAK13 DNA remix, another good friend and musician got curious and very supportive about my interest in music/sequencing/remixing.

It was a matter of days until he picked out a track from his (then) planned ‘Soft Tools, Vol. 2‘ album for my listening pleasure and I liked it… he promptly stated that he can let me have access to the original 24bit quality stems if I was interested in having a go at a remix.

Knowing that I did not need to attempt to extract the vocal and just use the stems made the whole thing seemingly easy – so I got to work!

Within no time at all, I had a draft version containing a few bars of music awaiting approval and after a day or so, I realised how difficult it is to work with organic style music and vocals with digitally sequenced tracker music.

I have been pretty happy with the resulting remix and the occasional slip in timing still gives the track its raw organic ‘Mossy Rock‘ feel but with a DP110 touch!

Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments section below!

I stumbled on a great site for fun filled online photo editing called PhotoFunia!

PhotoFunia is free and very easy to use. Just select an effect you like from over 100 different effects, upload your photo, and PhotoFunia will handle the rest for you.

With a few clicks of your mouse, you can create all manor of effects – I could add more… but… guess what – PhotoFunia have their own theme tune!

Here are some of the ones I created using the DP110 logo (click on the images to enlarge):

Stencil

Broken Glass

Three Colours

Not only can you create pretty nifty photos like I have, you can also create jigsaw puzzles, posters and calendars to save and print from the comfort of your own home!

Back in September 2009, I started to really like the idea of remixing tracks for others and decided to surprise a very good friend of mine by remixing one of his tracks.

WEAK13 creator Nick J Townsend was away on holiday so I ripped one of his tracks from a good old YouTube video and set about extracting his lyrics into smaller samples my music tracker could use.

The hardest part of remixing this track was finding ways to extract the lyrics from the rest of the music – and …yeah… that is a complicated process… there is no single application on a computer to do this for you.

After using many many different applications/plugins/techniques, I finally had the voice of Nick J Townsend (I now prefer to work with vocal stems – seriously!) and set about writing the remix.

People that know me and my previous musical creations will understand that I try to use a piano in every track and WEAK13′s DNA remix was no exception.

I have tried to stay close to the original track as much as I possibly could with this remix as to put a new spin on a classic WEAK13 masterpiece.

You can watch the original WEAK13 – DNA YouTube Video below!

Using a great little web service called Xtranormal (text-to-movie), a DJ since the late 80′s and music producer since 1994, Louis Gaston has put together an excellent tongue-in-cheek account of his experience in the music industry.

Back in November 2009, I was surfing around on good ‘ol YouTube and stumbled upon several tutorials on howto get started using Modplug Tracker. It was good to discover that Modplug still has a following but unfortunately it would seem that its users are unaware of its powerful features.

In the early days of trackers, all you could use for sound was internal wave synthesis and eventually samples (starting with 8bit mono). The biggest setback for users following these tutorials is they misunderstand the difference between adding samples and instruments from within Modplug favoring the use of adding a sample to the sample section rather than adding a sample to the instrument section.

The difference between the two methods can restrict overall control of your sounds and maybe cause the user to never discover that Modplug is capable of much more than playing single samples in a sequence.

I was then inspired by a tutorial I watched that was put together by a young chap called Lowtone10 and even though he also used the samples tab to add samples, I was very impressed that someone of the younger generation had an interest in music tracking and found the time to write a good basic tutorial for YouTube (watch Lowtone10′s Tutorial on YouTube).

Modplug Tracker Intermediate Tutorial Part 1

Following on from Lowtone10′s tutorial, the next step in Modplug is getting out of the habit of using the samples tab in favour of using the instruments tab.

In this tutorial, I briefly explain more about using Samples, GM DLS Midi Library banks and introduce VSTi’s to be used as Instruments.

I wanted to provide a voice-over for both these tutorials but didn’t have the time so feel free to pause at any point if some of the text moves too quickly!

Modplug Tracker Intermediate Tutorial Part 2

In the first tutorial we briefly looked at VSTi’s (Steinberg Virtual Studio Technology) and so the second part in the tutorial looks at controlling aspects of the VSTi using MIDI and Plugin Control parameters.

…and Finally

I would have liked to make a third tutorial to go deeper into VST effects and Instruments but now its up to you to discover what you and Modplug can do.

With plenty of websites hosting free VST’s and VSTi’s, there is a lot to get started with (my favorite free VST site is VST 4 FREE), the only thing my tutorials do not cover is a howto record your final track.

Modplug’s built in wav/mp3 recording does not seem to play too nicely when using VST’s so I make use of a free VST called HGS Wav Recorder to create a high quality master Wav of my finished music tracks.

I have been working on a remake of Click It (from BFF’s The Mossy Rock Album). In this YouTube video, you can see some (stolen) rare behind the scenes footage.

I (honestly) do not know how it got on the tubes or even who filmed it but it is odd that the length of the video is 1:10!

Enjoy!

Welcome to Site 4 Fans. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

To kick things off on this blog, feel free to download and listen to a track I have written after being away from writing music for almost 10 years.

This track is called ‘Take Me Higher’ and was written to purely test out my music tracker software.

The vocal samples came from a sample CD set I purchaced about 12 years ago in the UK.