In this article I talk about what a remixer needs from you, and how to go about packaging up your sounds for delivery. I use FL Studio, but I’ve done this in a platform agnostic way. So whether you’re preparing stems for a specific remixer, or making a pack that you’ll upload to the Pirate Bay so you can pretend somebody “leaked it”, this will explain how it’s done.

Read the article here.

For the record, I don’t recommend self building – it’s one of those seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time sort of things. The house took two years to progress from a Sketchup drawing to finished architectural plans (thanks Andre Thompson), about three months of material prep, and seven months in the building, running a mere four months over schedule. It still isn’t 100% complete, but we’ve moved in anyway, and it will provide lots of DIY fun for years to come, I’m sure.

It was a challenging process that wrecked my general faith in humanity (all suppliers are bastards), but the end product is … well, it’s even better than I expected, to be honest. And for all it’s incompleteness, check out the space I’m going to be working in from now on.

This doesn't suck at all.

It’s like a freakin’ space ship. This loft studio faces east, the main window providing an unobstructed view of the Letsitele Valley, and the mountain range beyond. It has an equally splendid view looking north over the Tzaneen dam in the distance. The room is warm and light, and generously proportioned for a project space – about 7 metres by 5. I’m itching to make music in it – just got to get it all set up first. Since this photo was taken, those holes in the wall have been filled up with power outlets and LAN ports (yes, there’s CAT-5 in the walls), and the beginnings of furniture.

So there’s a lot of catching up to do, but this is going to be a great year. I currently have two album projects I’m grinding on – one cinematic, one electronic, plus a musical in the works. Over the next few weeks I’m going be posting new material I’ve worked on for Slide, Lauren Moore, Tumi Lane, Thato Nhlapo, and more, plus some tracks from my own repertoire. I’ve also got new technique articles and FL Studio tutorials to post.

Oh, and I have to build a staircase so you can reach the studio more easily …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sHoBzYU5vI

Working in the production side of the industry, you don’t typically expect to be acknowledged publicly by artists – after all, you’re being paid for providing a service, and the focus is supposed to be the product.

So I think that the fact that Phelo took the time to acknowledge me by name in a interview about himself speaks volumes about what a classy guy he is. Thanks Phelo!

If you’re receiving this via email, and the above embedding doesn’t work, you can watch the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sHoBzYU5vI#t=4m40s

You’d be completely wrong, though, which is why I’m not going to mention those other Balas here (no disrespect guys, you know I love you).

Phelo Bala has a lot going for him. He was born into a uniquely musical family, a gift he has inherited and nurtured. He’s young and full of energy – at the time I write this he is only 20. Some will misjudge him based on this, thinking that his youth translates to inexperience.They’re wrong, too.

Only 20, yes, but he’s been singing in front of audiences for more than half a decade. Although this is his first solo outing, his previous projects mean he already has significant stage time under his belt, not just in local venues around the country, but internationally too. When you go to see him, then, you’re not going to be looking at someone cutting their teeth – Phelo is a class act. His youth does make him easy on the eyes, a fact that neither his label nor his fans will have missed.

Nor, for that matter, are you going to be watching someone lip syncing along on an empty stage to an over-produced backtrack – Phelo does everything live, with real musicians. I am old enough to remember a time when such things were taken for granted; they are now an exceptional rarity.

But along with strong chops, a great, controlled voice and a face for TV, Phelo has also been blessed with talent. He isn’t merely an accomplished performer, he’s a writer too – his debut album, due out later this month, is the product of his own pen. It’s enough to make you sick with jealousy.

He is uniquely poised, then, to take the market by storm, and I have every expectation that he will do just that. You will forgive me, other Balas, for my prediction that if I google you in a few years, I’ll find you being referred to as relatives of Phelo Bala.

Phelo B – Look Like A Fool by mdavisto

Anyway, let me bring it back for a moment to the technical side of things. I was approached a few weeks back to take a run at Look Like A Fool, the first single off Phelo’s new album. The song had already been recorded, with extremely strong vocals and good flow, but Phelo’s producer (dude, this article is about Phelo, shhhhh) felt it needed to go in a different direction.

I have a tendency to go very electronic, but I could hear straight away that this would not be the right approach for this song – it needed to stay as organic as possible. I took the parts into the newly released FL Studio 10 to see what I could get up to. I ended up discarding  the drums and most of the existing synths (although I kept most of the actual chord progressions), but the guitar parts worked for me, although not in their original form.

Slicex in action

I used FL’s SliceX plugin to do two main things. Firstly, what was most appealing to me about the guitars were the harmonics – so I basically just focussed on those and built a new rhythm around them. In the picture you can see that although the sample is sequentially sliced, the arrangement is anything but.

The other thing I did with SliceX was re-quantise the groove of the mute guitar parts. Not because the guitarist is out – they’re bang on time in fact – but because I wanted more ass-shaking swing in it.

FL Studio 10 has introduced two new plugins for vocal manipulation called Pitcher and Newtone. I view their addition with some scepticism, because Pitcher is an automatic retuner that works exactly like the infamous Autotune plugin – turn the knobs all the way over and you have an instant generic T-Pain vocal. To my ears, it’s like nails on a chalkboard.

Pitcher also, however has a neat feature that lets you dictate its output via MIDI: play notes on your keyboard, and your vocal comes out in that melody. I had a lot of fun experimenting with this for the chorus harmonies, although I ended up going with Newtone instead.

Newtone does a similar job, but not in realtime. It lets you get right into the melody and edit what’s there, but in a much more controlled way than Pitcher does. It’s a lot like Melodyne, although its monophonic only (at this stage). So in the end, I cloned the chorus line and used Newtone to create harmony parts (“… so happy … so angry”). It’s all Phelo, and it’s all the same recording, but it ends up sounding like there’s a harmonising choir of him.

This was a great project to work on – I had a lot of fun doing it.

Hailing from Indianapolis, USA, Moore is in fact a very special kind of nerd, in that she’s made her debut release a concept album based on the cult science fiction show Firefly, from everyone’s favourite cult show creator, Joss Whedon. If you haven’t seen the show, well, what is wrong with you? Go buy the box set, now.

Under the band name ‘Verse, Moore’s project is a collection of songs that, without being obvious, tell stories from the paradigm of the show, often speaking with the voices of the characters. The styles vary wildly from song to song, all experimentally electronic, with strong pop flavours, but all held together with Moore’s smooth, expressive vocals.

Whether you’re a Browncoat (a fan of the show), a new recruit (yet to watch) or an ignorant cretinous philistine with no friends and body odour (not a fan of the show), ‘Verse’s debut album is quite extraordinary listening. Her talents lie not only with beautiful delivery, but with lush vocal layering and haunting harmonies.

However, on this remix project, I took the very laidback “They Fall Out Of The Sky” and put it squarely in the club. Moore’s spacey lyric allows this. Bizarrely, that involved slowing the vocal down a little, even though the track is faster and trancier (in a sort of Dutch way).

Production nerds among you will be interested to note that this was made using the FL Studio 9.7 beta (the precursor to FL 10), and utilises the upcoming Newtone and Pitcher plugins. I used Newtone for adjusting the vocal timing (the original is swingier), and Pitcher for shaming my family and my honour by doing Autotune effects.

My take on the upcoming FL Studio version is that the expanded mixer does the same job it ever did, but is easier to view and use now. Clips user? You’ll love it. Blocks user? You’ll whine on the forums. Then you’ll grow up and learn to use clips.

Enjoy.

They Fall Right Out Of The Sky (Mdavisto’s Mix) by mdavisto

PS: Browncoats will recognise Kaylee’s perspective in this track.

That’s an incredibly hectic pace of writing, and doesn’t allow much room for deep thought – but that’s the point. Under such hectic time pressure, you really can’t afford to vanish into your navel, or waste months of your life trying to perfect things. With FAWM, no matter how raw it is, get it done and move on.

An interesting aspect of FAWM is that unlike similar projects like RPM, the focus is on the songwriting itself, not the recording or the performance. You don’t even have to submit a recorded demo if you don’t want to (although it obviously helps) – the lyrics are enough.

The aim here is really less about competition and more about helping you kickstart or restart your stagnant writing skills. That’s a really attractive idea for me. I’ve done so much work for other people in the last couple of years, I really haven’t had the time, discipline or inclination to write anything for myself. My hard drive has these folders, sorted by year, that contain little fragments of started things that I’ve never revisited.

So I signed up for FAWM 2011 – and so should you. My failing as a songwriter is that I tend to get lost in the groove, and then over-think the lyrics to the point where I decide they’re too shit to do anything with. I’m hoping that the pace of FAWM will help me snap out of this behaviour: get it done, today. Who cares if it sucks?

You see, not everything you write has to be a masterpiece. We all have great songs in us, and a lot of rubbish ones too. By writing more, and by being involved in that process, we make space for the good songs to appear.

So, I’ll be creating a FAWM page on this site, and you’re welcome to track my progress. If you’re at all interested in songwriting, I challenge you to come and join me and the (as of this writing) 4,000+ others from around the world who are taking part this year.

Good at lyrics but suck at music? Write great tunes but can’t find the words? No problem – FAWM has a vibrant forum with lots of people looking to collaborate.

For those who are just encountering LoneRaynger for the first time, he’s a frighteningly talented songwriter, singer, beatboxer and guitar player. Catch some of his work on Facebook, Soundcloud, or YouTube, or follow him on Twitter. At the time of writing, LoneRaynger is currently touring Canada – look out for him in the Vancouver area. He’s keeping a blog of his touring escapades, which shenanigans have included his tour van catching fire (it doesn’t get much more rock ‘n roll than that).

Working with LoneRaynger’s material presents the usual challenge – how do you produce it up to a level of glossiness while still maintaining the organic feel of what he does naturally with his mouth and his guitar? I ended up taking the material a bit further from its organic roots than I originally intended, but I tried as far as possible to keep it grounded in the original performance.

The obvious way to do this was through the rhythm. For the first verse, the beat is 100% LoneRaynger: that’s his beatboxing under there. Thereafter, I open the track up with bigger drums and more synths – but I used SliceX (a beat slicing plugin for FL Studio) to chop up his beatboxing and use elements of it throughout the track. That’s Ray’s mouth-snare you’re hearing driving the track along throughout, as well as his tsp tsp mouth-hihats and periodic mouth-sidesnare action.

In my ongoing effort to actually create synth sounds rather than modify existing ones, I made the bass sound using TAL-BassLine, a very excellent and free synth from Togu Audio Line, and fattened it up using TAL-Tube, also free. The kick and 808-ish hat are generated using Synthmaker, and the morphing pad is hand-filtered for better rhythmic control. Sundry FX were also made using FL’s 3OSC synth.

The end result is a lot more mellow than anything I’ve produced recently, and extremely satisfying.

Check it out. If you like the track, you can purchase it here.

LoneRaynger – Heavy Daze by mdavisto

Now, among my friends, I am “that guy”, the dude you ask when the compootar does that thing again. It gets tiring (and more than a little frustrating) repeating the same stuff over and over again, particularly since it mostly gets ignored the next time some jackass on Facebook purports to show you Who’s Viewing Your Profile, the Shocking Thing Someone Said, or OMG You Have To See This, all of which somehow involve clicking through to an external site.

Since I cannot – and, arguably, should not – prevent people from making mistakes they refuse to learn from, I’ve condensed my standard  recovery advice into a short article on how to take care of the problem of unwanted virus and malware infections.

Read it here.

Outside of SA, though, the phenomena may need a little explaining. Kwaito is a form of dance music indigenous to South Africa, and is a close cousin of House music. In fact, during the 1990s many Kwaito DJs would spin International tracks, but would slow them down a few semitones, resulting in a more laid-back groove.

There are bigger differences, though. International House tends to emphasise the on-beats – the 1,2,3,4 of the rhythm punctuated by the kick drum. But Kwaito lives in the spaces in between, focusing instead on the upbeats. It also has a distinct vocal styling not found in any other genre of dance.

Dikakapa was the second single off TKZee’s latest opus, “Coming Home,” released on the back end of 2009, and you can check out the original music video here. Incidentally, if you like kwaito, you can grab a copy of “Coming Home” here.

I wanted to make it more accessible to mainstream club play, but still maintain a strong flavour of its origins that would permeate the palette of electro sounds I’d chosen to work with. I achieved this (at least, I hope I did) largely with the underlying structure of the bassline, and with a heavily pitch-bent synth tone that I put together to compliment Magesh’s vocals, a sound that serves as a responding voice to his call.

Play the track before I intellectualise it to death. This one is banging.

TKZee – Dikakapa (Mdavisto’s Mix) by mdavisto

From the marketing blurb:

“Silence of the Music is a ground breaking musical drama set in 2030 South Africa and tells the tale of an elderly couple whose intercultural marriage was spurned [...] by their families, friends and broader community. The story of Maria, a music composer (played by the inimitable Michele Maxwell of Isidingo and Scandal fame) and Khalil, a cab driver (played by veteran actor Farouk Valley-Omar – 10 000 BC, Tree of Life) reflects on the multitude of challenges they’ve experienced, through their love for each other, and their common love of music.”

The song was written by Lynne Holmes-Ganief, and features vocals by noted oratorio soprano Antoinette Blyth, who directs Cape Town’s Philharmonia Choir. It also features additional violin performances by François Luc Arzul, first violist of South Africa’s National Symphony Orchestra.

The rest of it is, of course, produced through the magic of very large sample libraries and the investment of far too much time, a sprawling monolith of a project that eats more than 70 tracks in my mixer. On this piece I used East West’s Symphonic Orchestra, legato patches from VSL’s Opus 1, and the very excellent TAL Bassline VST, which is available for free here.

Silence of the Music is on at the Baxter Theatre from late September through October 2010.

Dance of Madness by mdavisto