Category: a_new_day_in_the_workshop

Likely the most ambitious track on the album, the long spacey build of layered Cardinal synthesis crescendos into an irregular drum breakdown. This approach takes a lot of cues from the Trance music world, but tries to utilize a drum beat that is a little less four-to-the-floor. The drawn out melodic sweeps in the breakdown…

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proto_desertmn is more experimental, even for me, and yet it’s really not that experimental when you consider my influences. Growing up, when I thought of N64 Zelda music, I never thought of the dungeons. As an adult, I deeply appreciate the sound and instrument design that went in to them. While Koji Kondo did a…

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This was actually the first track produced on this album, with the intention of being able to release the project files. The album concept, a_new_day_in_the_workshop, hadn’t emerged yet though. After this, and the two other “proto” tracks were created and released on YouTube (originally without the “proto” name), several things happened around me which diffused…

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Synthesized crickets chirpPrinted to digital tapeRespunAround the atmosphere immediate — _software: supercollider_download: rune_c.wav_project-files: rune_c-SOURCE.zip_license: public-domain / cc0 …

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Supercollider has always seemed like the ultimate solution to my dream of making 100%-open-source music. All parts of the track are clearly laid out in text code. Nothing is obfuscated by destructive processing. If only I could stick with Supercollider and become an expert at the craft. In reality, Supercollider can suffer from the same…

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rune_a ran along the idea discovered in hymn – that music can be made of intriguing cycling sounds – and that, just maybe, this style will resonate with other people as much as it does with me. I can’t speak to whether other people do enjoy it, but there is a sense that it is…

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After discovering the particular aesthetic of resampled synths at the beginning of the album, but finding that creating new synths for each new track made each new composition a little too big a project, I decided to start a sample pack of my own, called MechSounds. MechSounds includes the synth presets and projects used to…

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Xenogears has had a profound impact on me. At time of writing, I have played through the game once, and watched Majuular’s 3-hour video essay on it about five times. hymn was created during on of my revisits to the Xenogears world, and expresses that techno-spirituality that the game paints so skillfully. This was also…

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Unintentionally, subtoxic_sands brings back the bitcrushed aesthetic of Game Boy Advance soundtracks that I had already started exploring in Soundworlds PRL. Vast pixel-art deserts, obscured by primitive particle effects, never needed to be realistic to evoke the same feeling of mystery and adventure as the pyramids did for 19th Century Egyptologists. _software: plugdata + cardinal…

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This track brings a workflow that I am particularly proud of – each instrument being synthesized from scratch for the purpose of the track. This workflow ends up being fairly time-consuming on the sound design side, which leaves less energy for the composition itself. Though, having bespoke instrument design does help to give a track…

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Experimenting with different DAWs, and starting to learn more into open-source tools, snowfield_of_angelmechs utilizes a workflow of recording improvised playing (in this case through Surge XT), and then chopping up, pitch shifting, and re-arranging the recordings. This is a technique that I find quite engaging, but does always make it hard to keep a clear…

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a_new_day_in_the_workshop was the first release in a newly-cemented direction for my personal music releases: a fully open-source stack. The goal was (and is) to make music using virtual instruments and DAWs that allow the project files to be shared and fully explorable – from composition, to automation, to sound design. Ideally, for anything the listener…

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