Hello, my name is Looptron.

Burn the witch.

As promised, a sample of "Witch". Or at least the cheesy piano "A" part of it. Which may well get ditched.  Couldn't be arsed to fix the shitty vocals (recorded after midnight Sat PM/Sunday AM, didn't wanna wake anyone so they're a bit quiet and I was just making it up as I went) plus the incredibly loud thunderstorm going on outside at the moment might make it tricky. Enjoy:

Witch [demo 001] [MP3]

Comments/laughter appreciated. It's really bad. :-) One thing I need to do for sure is get the "witch" harmony in time. Those "TCH" sounds really clash. New watered down cheesy pop lyrics are as follows:

at the end of the world
where the mountains tumble down
stood an army sanctioned by the Crown
picked me up, dragged me down
to the river
threw me in, watched me drown

drown the witch
burn the witch
I wish I never showed you
all the funky things I can do
if I'd known just what you'd do.

(At this point the banging dark techno comes in. Possibly.)

Drown the witch.

Well. Um. Things are going in unexpected directions. On Saturday night I was working on a tune that's currently called "Witch", a nice cheery piece about how we tend to kill anything we don't understand. Now given the subject matter and shape of the lyrics I'd been courting an A/B structured dark throbbing synthy techno type sound for this one. Something that Nine Inch Nails might enjoy. You know what I mean.

What I actually got (possibly as a side effect of recording the initial MIDI files using a sampled grand piano) is an A section that sounds waaaay too cheery and poptastic, with nice vocal harmonies in thirds and fourths. For example, it now actually contains the word "funky"...

I shit ye not.

I'll fix the the line I fluffed and post a sample later. It's. Just. Plain. Wrong. :-)

Idio-tech

You know those four looping lo-fi FM synth chords in Radiohead's Idiotheque? I always thought Thom or Jonny played 'em in the studio and Colin played 'em live.

Apparently not. It's geniune software synth from waaaaaaaaaay back  - it's sampled from a piece called Mild und Leise by a guy called Paul Lansky (on an old IBM computer at Princeton) and was composed two years before I was born.  (His full account here.)

Finding things like that is one of the reasons I love Music Thing.  (Another reason.) I hate it cos they keep putting up all sorts of really sexy musical gear that I covet...

A fully sampled grand piano has eaten several percent of my hard drive.

Oh look, it's the weekend.

"He's like a sort of internet Pepys or Boswell, except without the gout and the syphilis. For all I know."

Well bugger me sideways. I actually did some proper work on some of the tunes last night! The cheesy camera phone shot proves it. It would seem that doing everything on the laptop is a lot more conducive to Getting Things Done™. Limited processing power is forcing me to take it easy on the tweaking so I'm actually laying down, y'know, notes and beats. It also means I can laze about on the big purple couch in the studio which is far more rock and roll than sitting at a desk.... :-)

(Speaking of rock and roll, and by way of explaining the title for this post, Iggy Pop (and The Stooges) backline and rider request will be used as the template for all such things in the Looptron camp if this show ever gets on the road. Genius.)

Plan at the moment is to get all the stuff down purely in MIDI just using Ableton and it's built in instruments (which are pretty good) and then throw together some temporary arrangements. Next, get in and get some rough vocals down for everything because that's the part I'm looking forward to least. The thing I find with vocal lines is once they're sung the first time they'll get into my brain and just start evolving on their own. Then I'll lay down rough guitars, bass and the like.

And then?

Tweak, re-record, overdub, replace and then tweak some more.... eventually hone them into finished pieces.

Behold! Fear the cute little synthesiser!!

Yeah, so it arrived. At last!! Actually, I picked it up before the weekend, but I'm late posting. It is truly magnificent though. Pictures would have been forthcoming sooner but I've been really disgustingly squirtily sick, really busy and having computer problems (in that order).

In fact, the computer problems have led to me shifting album production entirely to my l'il G4 Mac laptop until such time as I can sort out a stability issue on the desktop PC which may or may not be graphics card (and the overheating thereof) related. Weirdly, the little bastid seems to hold up fairly well under relatively heavy Ableton load, but the lack of processing power is actually stopping me going off on some of the more distracting tangents that I found myself on.