Awesome. 31%!!

Rewind a few weeks to my last post… the big day in question was in fact my last day at Design Reactor. After eight years with DR (and fourteen total working with colleagues and friends Dave and Jim) I decided it was time to fly the coop and test the waters elsewhere.

That elsewhere happens to be Web Associates. Web Associates is an “independent interactive agency that amplifies global brands”. In short, they rock. Their main office is in San Luis Obispo, but I’ll be driving the design team in their San Jose office. I’ve been here going on three weeks now, and I’m already neck-deep in more than a handful of projects. Nothing like hitting the ground running.

The new surroundings and goings-ons have slightly derailed my plans for the domination of the ambient/bass/looping/electronic world. I did bring a small mobile setup down for my week-long stint in SLO last week, but sadly, my eBay-purchased firewire interface was having some input distortion issues. Arrgh. I have a few more selections ready to post here… and I’ve started combing through the mountain of improvisations I’ve accrued over the last couple months. We’ll see if the chaff will separate.

More to come.

And for your viewing pleasure… a few visual enhancements.

Dave, Gustaf, and Jim. Fourteen years!

Oh yeah… woke up one morning and discovered my shelf had fallen off the wall and onto my little music production workstation. Amazing, not a single thing was broken.

Up late once again. Big day tomorrow, or… er, later today. More to come.

Another ambient bass excursion here. Really just a sonic texture and nothing more. I was messing around, intending to program up some spacious patches on my GT-Pro (this one, not this one!)… and this sort of fell out—by way of the Looperlative, of course.

In other matters… I’m off to New York for the next week.

Michael Manring

Jeff Schmidt

Jean Baudin

I haven’t really spent much time getting aquatinted with Thor, so I just wanted to pop the hood and see what was there. Within a few minutes, I dialed up a tasty little lo-fi analog patch. That lead to a quick little melodic pattern… one of those things that literally just fell out under my fingers without any concentrated effort— I love those. I quickly captured the raw idea in the sequencer… and started building from there.

I fleshed out the basic structure in DP, creating some drum loops from scratch, and augmenting them with a few heavily de/reconstructed rex loops. I fumbled around a bit with my bass cello trying to find a bass line, then added some washed-out accordion as texture. On top of all that I layered in some more bass cello (arco, of course!). I polished off the whole thing with some noise effects and discreet samples… and that was it! With a process that usually takes me weeks, if not months, it was very surprising and rewarding to actually “finish” a construction so efficiently (and be reasonably happy with it, I might add). Definitely not my usual experience.

After a couple day’s listenings, I made just a few minor compositional tweaks and exported a rough mix.... You can download it here: 05_02_08_mix4.mp3