Finally - a NS2 track from me!

I must confess I havent managed to do much with NS2 in the last couple of years (just some half finished things). I've been a bit seduced by the wonders of some hardware bits and pieces and just doing improvised jams with AUM on the ipad (plus the hardware bits and pieces), along with trying actually to do something with Ableton. Oh, and doing things still in NS1 :-)

But during this Coronavirus lockdown period I have tried to get round to actually doing music in NS2 - and this is one of the results. Any slight resembleance to 1970's Tangerine Dream is **completley **intended - and no apologies for the abundance of Mellotron sounds :)

Comments

  • Nice! Good use of happy dog video too :+1:

    From a video point of view I also like that you ended with walking into the clearing and the sunshine.

    The problem with improvised jams is that you get all the fun of creating, without that hard work of mixing and fixing ;)

    And that's why I blame jamming for not getting anything finished, it's got nothing to do with my lack of discipline....

  • Oh wow, I really love your sounds and modulations! And happy dogs are always a welcome sight. The video really shows how you've made that walk many times as friends. Works very well with the music.

    Thanks for sharing, I quite enjoyed that :)

  • That is lovely mate. Beautiful sounds, mix and arrangement. The bass is especially nice. What synth did you use for it?
    Love a good walk too 👍🏼

  • Thanks for the nice comments!

    Yes he (called Caspian by the way) is a very happy dog and loves his walks. Its my job to take him out first thing - something I enjoy whatever the weather.

    @Trigger_the_Monkey - that was a very late addition - the actual source videos always had me turning to film the trees in blossom - but it didnt work very well when I edited it together. So for the completed video I just stopped when I left the wood and added the "tree blossom turning to leaves" at the end. As for the "Jam vs DAW" - both have their place, and in many way I like the immediate nature of a jam - I dont obsess over increasingly minor details for ages. Of the other 4 videos in this series 3 are just jams (sometimes just an iPad with AUM).

    @LeeB Everything is Obsidian - the Mellotron strings and flute are Thumbjam samples simply imported into Obsidian multisamples (helpfully all the TJ Mellotron sounds are in WAV format and have the note name in the file name). The bass sequence that starts at 0:19 is the Analog osc type with a square wave form. I used "Fathom Bass" as well from 4:12. The other Obsidian present was "Plunk" with the "tinkly riser things" in last third. My meagre guitar skills were recorded into AUM (with NS playing a loop), then brought into Slate and each phrase chopped up to different pads. For AU3 I used Frekvens, Tap Delay and Zero Reverb (three of my "goto" apps for my AUM jams).

    One of my problems is a lack of a good monitoring setup - just about everything for this track was done using my cheap ear buds - with a quick check on the Alesis M1 Active monitors when the family was elsewhere in the house. I would love a proper space for doing my music, alas that just isnt possible - so the hardware stuff fits into 2 guitar pedal flight cases and a couple of laptop bags (one for the Ableton laptop & Push, the other for the iPad & controllers). So its good to hear that other people think the mix and arrangement are OK :)

    For the video - everything was filmed on my cheap Motorol G6Play (and I found out too late that turning off stabilization would make it better in this case) and edited on Microsoft Movie Maker (I havent found anything I get on with and actually works for me on Windows 10). I'm going to return to this idea of walking through woods in different seasons - but with proper stablization and for a much longer period of time.

  • edited May 2020

    @kitejan said:
    Thanks for the nice comments!

    Yes he (called Caspian by the way) is a very happy dog and loves his walks. Its my job to take him out first thing - something I enjoy whatever the weather.

    @Trigger_the_Monkey - that was a very late addition - the actual source videos always had me turning to film the trees in blossom - but it didnt work very well when I edited it together. So for the completed video I just stopped when I left the wood and added the "tree blossom turning to leaves" at the end. As for the "Jam vs DAW" - both have their place, and in many way I like the immediate nature of a jam - I dont obsess over increasingly minor details for ages. Of the other 4 videos in this series 3 are just jams (sometimes just an iPad with AUM).

    @LeeB Everything is Obsidian - the Mellotron strings and flute are Thumbjam samples simply imported into Obsidian multisamples (helpfully all the TJ Mellotron sounds are in WAV format and have the note name in the file name). The bass sequence that starts at 0:19 is the Analog osc type with a square wave form. I used "Fathom Bass" as well from 4:12. The other Obsidian present was "Plunk" with the "tinkly riser things" in last third. My meagre guitar skills were recorded into AUM (with NS playing a loop), then brought into Slate and each phrase chopped up to different pads. For AU3 I used Frekvens, Tap Delay and Zero Reverb (three of my "goto" apps for my AUM jams).

    One of my problems is a lack of a good monitoring setup - just about everything for this track was done using my cheap ear buds - with a quick check on the Alesis M1 Active monitors when the family was elsewhere in the house. I would love a proper space for doing my music, alas that just isnt possible - so the hardware stuff fits into 2 guitar pedal flight cases and a couple of laptop bags (one for the Ableton laptop & Push, the other for the iPad & controllers). So its good to hear that other people think the mix and arrangement are OK :)

    For the video - everything was filmed on my cheap Motorol G6Play (and I found out too late that turning off stabilization would make it better in this case) and edited on Microsoft Movie Maker (I havent found anything I get on with and actually works for me on Windows 10). I'm going to return to this idea of walking through woods in different seasons - but with proper stablization and for a much longer period of time.

    That’s crazy! Fathom Bass and I think Plunk are two of my factory patches. All I can say is you’ve done them justice 👍🏼

  • Wow, 100% nailed it. I love it!

  • Wonderful! Those strings are beautiful!!

  • @kitejan lovely composition ,bass sound is epic! Great all the way! Had to forward this to my friend, he is big tangerine dreams fan for long time and he is a dog lover so he will love it I bet;) Big ups!

  • This is just lovely! I too have a friend who is a big TD fan and I immediately sent him this link to enjoy. :-)
    I really like the mellow sounds and soothing 'apparent' repetition (which is actually evolving all the time). The sense of the repetition of the forest walk (same and different every time) perfectly matches the musical intent, I think. I’m a big fan of this kind of minimalist slow-changing form in music (and other time-based art), where the mind becomes accustomed to the pattern and yet still enjoys the small variations. (cf Koyaanisqatsi, Harvey Keitel's street corner photos in the movie Smoke, David Hockney's Yorkshire paintings from 2011 A Bigger Picture, etc and on and on).
    I checked out your YouTube channel too - beautiful videos! will subscribe! I have recently returned from a trip to Denmark and took several slo-mo videos of the ocean waves to which I want to add soundtracks... :-D
    I assume you make all the music for these videos yourself; can you list what platform/apps you use for these soundtracks? I would love to read that in the YouTube description.
    I look forward to the next one! 
    I’m a new poster but a long-time user of Nanostudio 1 and now 2 :-)

  • @bobheads thanks for the comments, and the subscription. You are correct about all the soundtracks = they all are my music - i just dont advertise it!

    Good point about what I use for each video - I'm in the midst of a on-line sort out where I closed some YouTube channels (I had 3 - now only my "named" channel remains) and reducing some of the "dead wood" videos that I wasn't that happy with. Once I have finished that I will be more transparent about what I use on each one.

    I use mixture of NanoStudio 1, Nanostudio 2, iPad + AUM, Ableton 9, and some hardware toys (such as Novation Mono Station, Circuit, Volca Modular, Bastl Kastl, Bastl Microgranny, KaossPad, Patchblocks, CraftSynth, Zoom FX & Korg Monotron Delay) - but not at the same time! For apps I tend to use things in AUM like Animoog, Addictive, Nave, iSEM, iVCS3, Pattening, Enkl, Jussi, Tines, Pads, and the ever wonderful Thumbjam. For effects I use ZeroReverb, ZeroChorus, TapDelay, Duplicat, and Frekens as the main "goto" FX apps. I also used Fugue machine quite a lot to sequence some of the previous apps, for HW controllers connected to the iPad - either a M-Audio Axiom mapped to control AUM, or Korg Nano Kontrol & Keys. Upto a couple of months ago I was using an iPad Mini2 for all this (even live), now its a reasonably recent iPad (2019 I think) which handles the workload far better. To run NS1 I got a second hand iPad 1 (yes the original 10 year old one) - and found it could run quite a lot of useful apps as well (especially Animoog and iSem) so I tend to use that with the Hardware toys.

    My current 2 projects are the "Lockdown" music - the "Unreal Songs for Strange Times" (includes the music used on the videos), and "Ventus" (tracks inspired by the Sci-Fi book of the same name by Karl Shroeder). Both have a mixture of tracks from all ways of working - "Ventus" especially is pretty evenly split between NS1, NS2, Ableton, AUM / Hardware jams - but I'm trying to mix and "master" in Ableton to give a consistent feel across them all.

    Hope that gives some background to what I do - feel free to ask any more detailed questions!

    Jan

  • Thanks for all the info @kitejan ! I never thought of keeping an old iPad for Nanostudio 1 - great idea! I look forward to the next one and hope to post something of mine on this forum soon.

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