October 2008
Thursday, Oct 9
Stupid MIDI tricks department....or cheap thrills...anyway, I have a piece of groove music sketched around a real-time drum track I recorded. Initially I wanted to run the drum track through the Virus, in search of some interesting filtering or modulation. That didn't manifest as I'd hoped, but I kept it anyway, as the treatment of Elastic Time had imparted some slight artifacts that lent a raw-ish trip-hop element.
I decided to trigger the Structure soft sampler for sound replacement. I inserted Drumagog on a bus, and routed kick and snare tracks through it. Drumagog will translate incoming audio to MIDI triggers of a selectable note number, but it will only recognize the instruments and routings in your MIDI setup. It will not recognize instances of Structure. So I set Drumagog to output MIDI through (thru) a hardware synth and back into a ProTools MIDI track, which then triggered Structure.
So, I can use Structure as a sound source for drum replacement.
Friday, Oct 3
Did a gig for the Tennessee Lottery.
I think this is something that runs on the local evening news when they announce the winning numbers in the "Cash 3 Cash 4" games.
A Quicktime reference movie was provided to me, and I went to work. Space whooshes, explosions, and a banging techno track...all over-the-top stuff that I enjoy doing but pity the person whose TV blasts this crap into their home.
I worked on it during the day, the ad agency production director came over in the afternoon, liked everything, took a copy for others to approve, and they called me later and said "everybody loves it - mix it." Boy, it's great when it goes that easily.
I posted a small clip with the audio mix (no voiceover) here. Even though I compressed the audio, it might take a few seconds to load. If you have a subwoofer with small computer speakers, you might want to turn it down a bit; it's pretty bass-heavy.
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