Dailies B-11: Alright OK (3:15)

It's ok, i'm alright. A boppy little number that started out life as a krautrock jam and got lost in trademark Kurrel soft harmonies. Apologies for the patchy pitching on the lead vocal. :) Also apologies for the dead link.

Dailies B-10: Arrow (1:42)

This is me, musically playing it straight.. This is me, musically playing it straight. As an arrow. Hence the title.

Also an arrow points to things. This song also points to things. So it is straight, and it points to things. Straight to things which are to be pointed to straightly and pointedly.

Also arrows pierce things but i don't think this song is going to pierce much as it is quite soft.

So listen to this while i contemplate writing some more music for Voco, aight?

Dailies B-08: Lippapup (1:42)

Random. This is what a month of writing only a tiny bit of music does to my brain; it's back into twelve-tone land. (Link fixed.) I like the drum solo in this. I should do more of them. :)

Dailies B-05: Torpor (1:31)

It was time for a quick Daily featuring a classic cut-up parody of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. I'm going to bed. This job is really tiring me out; figures i'd write something ambient.

Dailies 0x0A.12: Copy and paste (3:18)

This is a song about program features. It is somewhat wistful. It's also more than a bit repetetive; i'm too tired to track any good ideas today. It builds off a quadraSID riff that augments into a fatter and fuller sound courtesy of a few extra SQ8Ls and Wavestations doubling the original riff. An Oatmeal provides the main melodic interest, starting off with a simple riff that widens into five-part harmony.

This tune would have been headache-inducing to write in Buzz. It was in fact written on the latest Buze alpha (0.4.6). Buze has a really nice feature that allows you to copy and paste entire machines, allowing things like note doubling in a few keystrokes. It also lets you track multiple channels of harmony very easily - every time you enter a note it sounds all the notes on the same tick in that pattern. Such a godsend for doing complicated melodies. So this song is about the usefulness of those two features in particular.

Also this is the first time i've put the tune into set-and-forget mastering instead of bothering to master it precisely. We'll see how it sounds on the Mackies tomorrow i think.

Dailies 0x0A.11: Out of shape (2:58)

After the excitement of yesterday's star-studded daily, my favoured approach tonight is something boppy and light.

The riffs in this song don't fit all that squarely into powers of four, which gives it a rather different feel. There's not a lot of ideas in this one but hopefully it gets some toes tapping and heads nodding among you. Instruments were Zebra 2, Korg MonoPoly and Drumatic 3.

Dailies 0x0A.10: And now sleep.. (4:17)

A nice calm song somewhat taking after Eno/Budd's The Pearl, except they never had Stephen Fry narration. (Mr Fry's monologue courtesy of voco.uk.com, whose other Fry samples i plan to hammer in due course.)

I heard this monologue and thought it might be nice if it led into some nice relaxing sounds of their own. I don't know how well i nailed the relaxing sounds, but oh well. The dub-styling of the monologue was good fun. :)

(This daily is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 as per the usage agreement of these samples.)

Dailies 0x0A.09: Thirty-two rhymes in triplet time (2:08)

Triplet time. Some people call it Marilyn Manson time. Some call it the glam beat. Me, i've just rapped in it. Took the better part of several hours, loads of takes, a quick mixing session and here it is. It's not a serious song, more a case of doing something three-quarter-arsed to see how well i could do it and inspire me to do it better next time. :)

Sixty-four lines in triplet time, that's thirty-two different rhymes to find
as an exercise in surmising whether a triplet rhythm is actually better
or worse for verse than good old four on the floor, so let's be sure that
the groove that we're using is phat, delivering lyrics intact
bouncing up and down like a kangaroo on a trampoline and if you
aren't at least nodding your head on tapping your foot as you listen i may have to put
my foot down and demand you get into this groove here! what'll it take to get you to move here?
sorry for that cheesy rhyme; that'll be the last time

Eight down, twenty-four to go - quality control? nah, i don't think so
'cause it's better to play like this, to let fly with whatever i come up with
that's no matter how crazy or strange or confusing, amusing, perplexed or deranged
the result is in the end and it's worth it to play instead of feeling shameful it isn't perfect
to experiment with the parameters, to enjoy and create is what matters
building the skills to take me where i wanna go, fuck around to find out what i wanna know
and my playground is sound
i've said it before and i'll say it again - experimentation is not my enemy, it's my friend

i count sixteen done, sixteen left - uh, are you stick of me yet?
stupid Australian-accent git, rapping robotically, dribbling shit
apparently unaware of the fact that obviously skips should never rap
what the hell could a skip ever say? "I really miss Hey Hey it's Saturday.."
and i'm losing my will to write here, lacking musical play and delight here
but i have no choice in it because freestyling would be worse than this
Rhyme 23 is Shout out to Eris, goddess of Discord who's always there for us
RIP Pope Bob and all the rest, thanks for the wisdom, you've been the best

did I mention - and this is no lie - i get my best rap tips from Stephen Fry,
The Ode Less Travelled, the book he wrote about writing poetry - this is no joke!
i bought it in London on Oxford Street and sat at Marble Arch waiting to meet
my good friend Sandroo getting some tips on rhyme and of course rhythm too
consonance, assonance, slant rhyme, iambic pentameter and i'm
pleased to say, it's improved my flow, thank you Mr Fry
now we're out of beats it's time to wrap it up with one more rhyme
so thanks for the download, my name is Kurrel the Raven - hello!

Dailies 0x0A.08: Lullaby (2:15)

I'd like to get to bed before 4am so this is just a very slow and fairly simple tune. I hope it inspires nice dreams for all.

Tracked and produced entirely in the very very fine Buzz-clone in development Buzé. More about it here.

Dailies 0x0A.07: Ploop! (1:46)

The night-time sounds of my TV room: a fish filter motor, bubbles and a clock, kwooked about with. Short and sweet.

Dailies 0x0A.06: Caffeine (2:22)

After a wee gap (during which i've still been writing music, just not Dailies) here is some vocoder-related silliness. Text from Wikipedia.

I was pissed off at the caffeine i drank just now for making me irritable; i get a bit hard up for inspiration and impatient when i'm irritable, and that just makes me more irritable. I was getting nowhere with the music (interesting as the chord progression was), so i wanted to find some text about how the effects of caffeine shut off the parts of the brain responsible for creativity, but instead i decided on reading some text about how caffeine can fuck you up and kill you.

The voice is run through Eiosis's ELS Vocoder which took a bit of tweaking to make me sound like i was wigging out. And intelligible of course. ELS is pretty awesome but i get the feeling it's going to be much more fun to tweak it live than it is to set and forget it. More experiments to follow. :)

Edit: If you want to experience any of the things mentioned in this song and thus require a supply of caffeine, the Google ads seem hilariously eager to please. :)

Dailies 0x0A.05: Coffee biscuit acid (3:56)

I didn't get much sleep last night, so this acid-infused meeting of Cyberpsychose and Polygon Window is liable to a bit of rambling. It was inspired by two things: wanting to run some drums through the MS20's virtual filter to see how Aphex it sounded, and wanting to use the sample of a 2-year old screaming YOU PAY NOW, BITCH! (Thanks to Will Ferrell and co for that one.)

Originally it was going to be much more aggressive and acid-soaked but i couldn't come up with anything really super-aggro to follow up the sample. I decided to go for something a little bit more soaring instead and ended up referencing one of my favourite acid tracks of all time, Cyberlandscape by Cyberpsychose. The Kraftwerklich laser zaps work really well in the second half to give the rhythm section just that extra bit of tickle and thrust too. (For those who don't know how to do the old KW zap yet, the base oscillator is white noise and the zap comes from a low-pass filter with high resonance being closed very quickly.)

Explaining the title: a coffee biscuit is my friend Sophia's word for the soggy disc of used coffee granules you get left over from making espresso. One day a mutual friend of ours took the description "biscuit" literally and ate one. Silly girl.

Dailies 0x0A.04: Three by three (3:00)

Lots of threes in this one - it's in triplet time, there's three different chords played in it, it has three different sections (build, break and full steam ahead), it's exactly three minutes long, i started writing it around 3:00am after i got back from my friend's place.

This song is very loopsome but still listenable i hope. It's been an experiment with pacing a mix by introducing elements in a way that maintains interest. It's also very badly mixed/mastered; i'm sure it's way more bass heavy than it should be judging by how much these headphones are pumping but i can't test the mix out on the Mackies because it's 4:22am and my housemate won't fancy being woken up by triplet-time doof. :)

Dailies 0x0A.03: Starglider (3:29)

So today my Laserdance Megamix 4 CD arrived from Holland. Thus inspired i finally got down to experimenting with a form of music i've recently rediscovered, an offshoot of synthpop called spacesynth. It's exactly what it sounds like: heavily synthesised music that has an obsession with all things outer space, and a very kitsch sort of obsession at that. My take on it is named Starglider after a fictional species of robot bird that migrates from planet to planet from the Rainbird game of the same name.

So it was out with the Linndrum samples, the SQ8L (which didn't actually get used in this for any final instrumentation), the Pro-53 for some leads, good old Swiss-army-synth Zebra for miscellaneous duties and the Korg M1 for pads and leads. The bass is done with the GMedia Odyssey and the Korg PolySix. Something about the Polysix just has the goods when it comes to simple, synthy basses. And again, a fair bit of time spent mixing this to make it sound all sparkly.

I feel like i should have briefly renamed myself Kurrel van der Raven for this tune. Buzz so disliked this tune that the moment i tracked it out it refused to load it again. Something about an incorrect parameter count. Perhaps it's still sore at those Belgians sneakily taking over its old domain when Jeskola wasn't looking..

Dailies 0x0A.02: Braindumbs (1:30)

I'm not feeling too crash hot at the moment, hence why today's Daily is a bit low on interesting ideas, heavy on solos and short on running time. You see, being unwell seriously gives me the braindumbs. Two hours of trying things, chucking them out, trying other things, chucking those out.. ugh. My composer's intuition is really dead in the water today. Still, i think it's a lot sparklier than Dailies usually sound, though there's something that really irritates me about this song. I couldn't figure out precisely what it was during mixdown but i did manage to do some rather radical EQing on the drums which made it a lot less horrible and even gave me a rather nifty chonky 1980s snare. Go the chonky snare!

Dailies 0x0A.01: The vocoder song (2:23)

It's on once again; here starts Dailies 0x0A. 0x0A is of course 10 in hexadecimal, though technically since there was a run of dailies in February for the RPM challenge this is the eleventh run.. but let's say this is the tenth series of dailies to be numbered. Yes.

For all those who fancy a bit of podcasting, here's the XML link: http://www.kwookyworld.com/dailiesa.xml - save you having to come and read this drivel. :)

So. Where better to start with an old daily dug up and massaged slightly: The Vocoder Song. It's a fairly quick and dirty cover but you do get a good strong shot of my latest purchase: the Eiosis ELS Vocoder. Bugs and sample resolution problems aside, it's rilly quite spiffeh.