Electro Music Project and YouTube Video

Simple Electro Track Project

We have put a version of this on our open Facebook page, but with their EdgeRanking stuff not actually putting all news items in news feeds,  it isn't very useful.  Who needs an electronic "mail" system that is worse than the post office, and only delivers 20% of items sent? Facebook thinks that is a good idea?

Much of what we do is on the heavier guitar side, but synthesiser based music has always been on our own playlist, and a significant part of our technical career.

This quick project started off partly as the new ValhallaVintageVerb sounds wonderful on synthesisers.  It was also that I was listening to some stuff on SoundCloud, and thought it was way too simple, and could do better in an hour.

Even doing a simple electro track uses some virtual gear. 6 software synths in this case plus a Monotron. The whole thing took under an hour. All the synths used, except the Monotron are free.

ValhallaVintageVerb is a commercial product, as is Reaper and the track was mastered with Ozone5, and that is also a commercial product.

Could call it "electro BGM", but EGAD does just as well, as it is very much just E, G, A D and C at 120BPM. This track is not to be taken seriously and is very musically unsophisticated.

We haven't put this on SoundCloud yet, but see how it stands up over the coming weeks. It isn't a bad thing to ride an exercise bike too...it is 5 minutes, and just looping it is ok, as it just goes on.....

It uses only four 4/4 grid entered drum patterns driving the LinnDrum Samples. The bass line was played on a mini moog like synth, and note starts quantized.... the other parts were just played on our PC-180 midi keyboard.

It uses two ValhallaVintageVerb  presets.  A drum plate for the drums and a nice room for the synths. Makes a HUGE difference to the track here.

We needed to make a YouTube video with it.  Something different this time that isn't a soundtrack to our illustrations.  5 minutes is a LOT of animation, and I didn't want to cut the track down, as the length is part of its magic. As the music is dance/trance/electro/whatever we decided on an abstract visualization. These things are in all the PC and Mac music players, but we need something more than that. Being program generated, it thus saved us weeks or months of animation work.

The result is here:

It looks like it could be clay animation, or a purple, wet slime mould moving in sync with the music. It is rather hypnotic AND creepy.  Will not go into the details of how I did it just yet.


We can be contacted at Art & Technology  and some of music tracks are on the usual sites such as SoundCloud .