Song Per Week #01 - Venus

Name: Venus
Type: Original
Genre: Electro House / Chiptune
Production Time: ~2 years, in short bursts and with small changes every month or so

I kicked off the year with this rather old song of mine from the unfinished projects folder. I believe I sat down one afternoon intending to write some dark, atmospheric minimal house, but instead of eeriness I came up with this bright melodic sequence. Regardless, the name of the track remained 'ambient minimal stuff' the whole time. The name Venus was a last minute title inspired by Y.V. and surfing through the atmosphere of another planet

Inspirations

I can put my finger on two things, namely Feed Me and his awesome electro house tracks and amazing synth solos, and then I think Dubmood - Transregional Des Pyrenees was the main influence for the chip goodness and breakdown.

Tools

• Renoise
• Charlatan (v1.2 for the beeps and boops, making heavy use of ring modulation, however the ringmod has been changed since, so newer versions of the synth can't make those exact sounds)
• Prodigious Synthesizer (for the delicious analogue-sounding chords)
• Ohmygod! (for the delicious analogue-sounding filter on some chords which start at 1:13)
• The bass is an excited Charlatan instance with Rez layered over in some parts e.g. the outro
• TAL-Reverb-2 as always :)

A Song per Week

Hi! I set up this blog late 2014, but didn't have anything interesting to post until now. My old blog, neglected as it was, disappeared into the ether along with Posterous. That's a real shame because I think Posterous was possibly the best hosted blogging platform out there, but it's all in the past now.

This year I'm going to try and step up my production with a 'song per week' challenge. It's inspired by the game a week project that MsMinotaur undertook last year, and which has been recommended to many by Rami Ismail (totally check out those developers if you haven't heard of them). The idea is that by creating lots of small projects, you gain experience in all aspects of development regularly, you get to learn from your mistakes quickly at less cost, and so the quality of your work improves. The person who makes many games becomes a better developer than the person who spends all their time making one game.

The reason I'm choosing music instead of video games is, well, I enjoy events like Ludum Dare but I'm not ready to face that amount of pressure on a regular basis, nor do I have the time with being at university. Anything less than LD quality would be disappointing for me - I'd rather stick to medium and long term projects. With music however, I know from experience that I can follow ideas from start to finish in a reasonable time and be happy with the result when I put my mind to it.

I'll say now that I'm going easy on myself. I want to make sure I put out something worthwhile (a full song) every week, not necessarily from scratch. That includes collaborations, covers/remixes, and old unreleased projects. I also see this as a way to break out of my usual habit of leaving songs unfinished for months or even years. Plus it's a way to stretch myself with new techniques (I just got my first MIDI keyboard) and with new styles and genres.

So in summary, I'm going to release music every week, not for all the same reasons as my idols making games, but for similar ones at least.

Wishing anyone reading a happy 2015 (and also anyone not reading)

Gecko