Psycliq Musical Productions

First, a quick note: Have you downloaded the Telegraph EP yet? It’s a limited edition! Not many copies left and only a couple weeks to grab them!

After I basically finalized the the mix for “House of the Rising Sun” to a point I’m pretty happy with, I continued to poke at it a little bit more because I can’t leave well enough alone.

At first it started with me just cutting out some of the tracks and adding a few filters to other tracks to create a very sparse organ-driven version of the song. The regular mix is a kind of slow, loud shuffle with lots of layers happening to it, and I was looking to trim things down and open them up a lot. Of course this wasn’t good enough and I ended up routing the melody synthesizers through the organ sounds. Even so, it was nice and simple and a good exercise in remixing from existing track stems.

Then things got a little nutty. I pulled open the regular mix and swapped out the drums entirely for a much more driving march beat, something I’ve been calling a techno-stomp. I also mixed in most of the synth sounds throughout the song instead of fading them in and out. It completely changed the feel of the song, and so I swapped out the effects on the bass and guitars and a few of the other synths. I even added a flanger to the organ, just because. However, this wasn’t nearly cacophonous enough, so I added a secondary drum track, some synth bass, and some mellotron strings to fill things out.

My poor little computer was having trouble keeping up with the results, especially when I bounced out all the individual tracks, but I like how it sounds. I think it has on the order of 17 active tracks, most of theme stereo with plugins running on top. For reference, most Psycliq songs have about 5 or 6 stereo tracks, tops.

What started out as a little production exercise is going to turn into a digital single. Sometime in the next few weeks, you’ll be able to pick up “House of the Rising Sun” from all over the place with at least these three mixes, maybe more if I go even crazier.  And then it’s on to some new, original music!

I’ve been slowly but dilligently working away on finishing up “House of the Rising Sun” here in the studio, and I’m glad to say that it’s nearly complete. I’m trying out all kinds of new production techniques and getting a handle on new pieces of software and hardware while putting this together.

The results are currently something of a monster. With all of the tracks activated (including the MIDI tracks that have since been printed to audio), I had to zoom out as small as I could just to get them to fit on the screen. Now this is nowhere near what a Celldweller song looks like, but for me, it’s pretty crazy. There’s definitely a lot going on in here, and I wanted to try and bottle some chaos with my take on this song.

I’m also trying my hand at doing a bit more EQ and mastering on this track than I ever have before. It’s tricky business, and I’m sure there are a lot of things I’m doing wrong. But in the end, It’s all a learning experience, and I intend to take everything that I’m doing here and apply it to future recordings.

Overall, I am really liking how this is coming together. “House of the Rising Sun” should be available in about a few weeks’ time, once I’ve got all of the final mixing taken care of and can get it packaged up. It’ll be available as a digital single from the Bandcamp site, so keep an eye out!

I had cause to squeal like a little girl last night, and that cause was Moogerfoogers.

For those of you that don’t know, the Moog Music company (makers of fine analogue synthesizers) also makes a range of effects pedals these days called Moogerfoogers. And I dare you to say “moogerfooger” ten times fast. They’re all-analogue and are practically modular synth components, and they cost somewhere between $200 and $900 each. A bit rich for my budget. However, Avid, the folks who make ProTools, have managed to put together some really great software emulations of the real thing. It’s not the same, that’s for sure, but they do a really good job of reproducing the effects they create digitally. The pack of four sells for $500 these days, which is also a bit much for me to drop on four audio plugins, even in the midst of trying to update my studio.

Last night, however, I found hope. Back when I first bought my Mbox2, I sprung for the “Factory Bundle”, which came with a bunch of extra bits of demo software like Melodyne, Abelton, Reason, and most importantly the Moogerfooger Analogue Delay. I have used this delay effect on every major Psycliq recording to date, and I just absolutely love its sound and definitely wanted to keep it working during the upgrade. Thus, I went poking around the internet to make sure it would still work when I upgrade to ProTools 9, and I saw that I would have to get a patch from Avid to keep things happy. Not too surprising, I had to do the same thing when I upgraded from 7 to 8. But then I found something interesting.

In the Avid store, I stumbled across the Mbox and Mbox 2 Factory/Producer Factory 8.0 Upgrade for $15. It was a bundle that included all four Moogerfooger plugins as well as a few other nice ones, including the Cosmonaut Voice effect that I was fond of from the original Factory pack. For only 15 bucks, I was expecting this to simply upgrade the license to the plugins I already owned. Imagine my surprise then when I found out that it does in fact come with everything on the box, in full, no strings attached.

I quickly fired up ProTools and pulled open Mettle to make sure the delay plugin still worked, at least. Having confirmed that, I dug through the menu and found the other three Moogerfoogers happily staring at me. I toss the lowpass filter onto one of the tracks and hit play.

This is the part where I squealed with glee.

So for $15, I’ve got a suite of world-class effects, and I can’t wait to see what I can do with them now. Stay tuned to hear.