Prelude to Greatness

The world of music production has shown me something about the concept of greatness. Greatness comes from the performance of the artists and experts involved with the production of music. You can sense a great production in the making when you have good performers getting their pieces just right.

The Robot Band Spaceforce are not great in this sense. I know that because the work behind their performance is not just right. Their level of ambition is also too high for me to complete within a reasonable amount of time. To prove this point I will have to make some less ambitious Robot song which I can claim reaches Robot greatness.

Iteration 2

A lot of various edits from the previous version. Now the video also contain a very cryptic little story.

Note: The production value is still extremely low, the whole piece of work has not been given a large number of hours. The low production values makes it some kind of fun on a wierd level.

This works, in some ways

So this is the result of putting sound on Blogger. To get sound up you got to make a movie, add the sound to the movie and upload it through some beta enabled version of Blogger which connect with google video somehow.

So this is iteration 1 of a Spaceforce song. Just finished tracking everything and set some levels, spent hours removing compression from some samplers. As first iterations go not a whole lot of the thing is done with much effort yet.

Since you need to have a picture along I couldnt help but make a low budget video to go with the robot performance. All in about a day and a half of work to write, record and mix, then about 2 hours for the fantastic video. Maybe interesting things will happen when I start mixing this thing.

Noticed that uploading the thing sent it through a pretty bad audio processing which probably reduces the size of the sound data by a few %, at the cost of nasty swischy-swoschy compression defects.

Drumming up value

So Tricklock is busy drumming away at an experimental space ballad as performed by Spaceforce. It runs at 90 bpm and tries to convey a bit of what goes on inside robots as they travel through space towards unknown alien civilisations. Having decided that Tricklock is not going to complain at his sound I can use him as a kind of infrastructure on which the rest of the song is built.

There are some problems which reduce productivity towards a useful result and they are hidden beneath the ability to change the arrangement around when need arise. I end up doing a lot of something I will call "backwards sequencing" which means that I realize the result will be better if I go back and shuffle the rythmic infrastructure to satisfy the needs of the other band members, mainly Schmooth who is the keyboard player.

This makes me think that I will need to work on Schmooth next so I can determine which parts of Schmooth and Tricklock needs to be in agreement on how the song infrastructure really operates before any large amount of work is sunk into details that require rearrangement of the core structure. I am expecting Schmooth to have 4 roles to fill with varying impact on core structure. Having a steady drummer who can tell the keyboard player how things should work will hopefully make this upcoming job a lot easier than creating the drummer was. If that is true then Tricklock already prove some type of value.

A Flawless Piece

Now I spent the weekend finishing and testing Tricklock.

This means that I will from now on accept any remaining defects within the construction of Tricklock as a part of his "personality" rather than try to fix it. I think this is a relevant insight to all kinds of production. Included within the piece of Tricklock came various prototype implementations of the other band members.

I could claim that the other band members are implemented to a functional cheap implementation. From here I have the option to use the "maintain multiple options" and actually make a production based on the prototypes which would sound reasonably decent. I have on the other hand identified the need to formalize the data set behind the other band members into modules which I can load easily to reproduce them.

To create these modules I will need to invest much time in infrastructure, and since I always aim to balance all effort against user value I will also add some time to refining the content of the modules for an even better result.

I wonder if I can uplaod sound files to this blog for the documentation of this process...

Tricklock - The Drummer Robot

Tricklock is a very ambitious drummer robot. He is built on 32 triggers, with an average of three samples per trigger which in turn are velocity sensitive leading to roughly 90 or so samples in total. The 90 samples are then sent to 8 separate stereo channels for mixing purposes.

Kick, Toms, Overheads, HiHat, Snare, Perc, Shaker and WierdSFX

The main drum channels except for the WierdSFX and Shaker channel are sent to a Drum Submix for an overall level control so the whole package can be automated on its own. The Drum sub is also sent to a drumroom reverb for some ambience. We can expect that Tricklock will be doing all kinds of wierd processing on this setup eventually, but his bones are now in place.

The samples range across a mix of more or less natural samples, the idea is that Tricklock will be able to electronically play most of the genres I might consider for the Spaceforce band later on, from light ambient kinds of things, pop, rock and electronic.

Considering my ambition to follow the idea of a Flawless first Piece for Spaceforce I will probably keep on tweaking some details of Tricklock for a day or two before I feel satisfied with his final setup. So now Tricklock and I will start playing around with random grooves.

Defining a motive

I am very much driven by the need to have a motive. This reflects strongly on my hobby projects and when I do things aimlessly the result tend to be reduced to a conceptual effort without value.

To do something about this I need to create a reason for putting up with an effort. For hobby projects there is a good lot of slack on the side of communication. There is no need for anyone except myself to really understand the motive. To make a different type of thing I will try document this incomprehensible process here, you might not be able to follow it well. But I'll try make it readable.

I need a motive for making some sci-fi music, for a larger scale hobby project which is a bit under the radar and hopefully will deserve proper mention later on. What are my options?

1 - Make something that I want to have for my own pleasure.

2 - Make something I think others will like.

3 - Make something for the fun of it.

Ok, so I pick the fun, thats #3 in the list.

So what is fun?

Fun is learning something by using skills which I can develop during the creative process. This is the reason for picking option 3.

If I were to go for #1 I know I will personally dislike the result until my highly picky ears are willing to accept the output on an emotional level. This will require something I expect to be close to an infinite number of iterations. SinceI am somewhat reluctant to invest the rest of my life in this hobby project I will abondon this option.

If I were to go for #2 I would expect to need to work so hard that I will never finish, if I aim at pleasing an external audience my probability of success is limited by my inability to measure my progress against a target audience so this one is out.

Going for #3 I'll start with identifying which skills I want to develop. Thats relatively easy. Production methodology, guitar playing, mixing, rigging, storytelling and some other random stuff not worthy of mention. I will conciously abandon the skills of designing up value, I'll move outside that concept by pretending that I dont care about it in this particular case. The work involved with design in this case would also not be within my means to execute.

Now I have the basic idea, so how to I create the motive from here?

Last piece I made defined pieces of a motive I will use and I'll call this an informal vision.

The informal vision

Setting: Sci-fi (Technology has made changes to the world and the idea is to use the context of the changes to present a message about something which may be more or less deeply hidden in a story or fantstic context. What the technology is will be part of the vision of the effort.)

Method: Roleplay (I'll pretend to be some entity within the context and define details of this entity partly during the development process starting up. This entity will be a band, which is a part of the technology in question.)

Background: A Story

The story in short:

A political party, The Network Party, created a new ideology based on mathematical proof of optimized average and total life value of all humans in the world. This was such a powerful ideology that the political party spread its rule to cover the world and save the planet earth from destruction by consumeralism and economic competition for resources. As the party gained strength it became obvious that mathematically proven principles are well managed by computers. This led to the ideology being implemented in code and thereby further optimized, the implementation was known as The Network of Organized Democracy, usually called The Network or "TN" as shortened by l33tspeeking people.

Humankind was now living an awesome life happily together and they decided to journey towards the stars. A few million years later humankind has spread across the vastness of space. To establish new colonies they sent robots which are connected to The Network. These robots spread propaganda for The Netowrk to alien worlds in preparation for the arrival of human tourists and adventurers.

The Network developed several series of propaganda robots, one of the successful brands travel through space in the form of musicians. They bring the glory of The Network through galaxies by playing songs which they modify iteratively towards fitting whichever alien species they encounter. They can also defend themselves if attacked, but they generally are peaceful. Humans can also purchase these robots directly from The Network by spending a decent lot of their consumption allowance on each robot.

Anyhow... the setting for the work in question is to create odd iterations of the robots propaganda music. This leaves me without any reason to worry about making anything which either attempts to sound real, natural or great. I can focus on the skills I think I can hone through the work.

The details is to roleplay the robots. And the robot band is known as:

Spaceforce

Vocals: All 4 robots participate in singing

Guitar: Roxxor

Drums: Tricklock

Keyboard: Schmooth

Bass: Doppz

The first job in the process of creating the next song in their setlist is to define the sounds of Tricklock. This time I'll aim at the Make it Flawless principle, meaning that I'll spend a lot of effort on getting the drum sounds of Tricklock. I think Tricklock will get his own post before I am done with him. Now to setting up a whole lot of samples in the drum machine... time to start working.