PORTFOLIO
Some tracks have been shortened,
see the SoundCloud widget below for the full versions.
Beats, Loops, and Commissions
This track was made for a software company to liven up their social media content. Hard hitting rock was specified to be the genre and a joke about how easy it is to make a Royal Blood song also influenced this composition.
The track listed here was initially made for a rap artist who asked for a beat which also used classical instruments. Note that the track begins with the drum beat, as the introduction is just playing the sample in full to demonstrate how it was used. Unfortunately the artist was not able to finish their project so we now have this available as a demo.
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Faux Covers
When using music for online content, you can run into copyright issues. There are ways around this, one might be simply using copyright free music, and another would be seeking permission from the rights holder to use their song. The latter solution comes with many obstacles though: Finding out who owns the rights, getting in touch with them, and then coming to an agreement on how you may use the song. This "faux cover" gets around the issue. This doesn't violate copyright, we just study the song and the artist, then use their techniques to create a legally original track, that's just stylistically very unoriginal! This is what's known in the industry as a "Joe Bonamassa".
Song Reboot
This was a track first produced by Luke with his own setup at home and then rebooted by 3 musicians remotely over the lockdown period ("reboot" is just our buzzword, as remix tends to imply EDM). Luke had commented that the original felt a bit repetitive and asked for the song to be re-styled to be a mix of 2010s modern and nu metal. We sampled parts of the synths to be used in the new verses, while using the whole vocal track and building an entirely new drum track. To add more variety we changed the chord progressions, made sure the drum track contained plenty of fills and then also sampled the new guitar tracks alongside the old synth parts.
Guitar credit: Demir Akarsu
Drum credit: Daniel Csokmei
Live Session
This is a multitrack recording captured in one take with no metronome, similarly to how many records were created before click tracks became the standard method. This means that we got to capture an "everyone in the room together" feel which many music fans claim to prefer and critique modern tracks for being "too clean". But also, because our studio is a mostly DI and digital setup, we can avoid the common problems of live recording such as bleed and limitations on what you can edit and mix in post, which is why most people use click tracks instead. Essentially we are getting the best of both worlds.
Traditional Production... sort of.
This track started out the same way Ruby Dawn's did, but in this case the artist opted for the all-DI project to be used as a room demo which we would then overdub with more fine tuned takes.
Stage Openers
Deadneck's prompt for their stage opener was to have a track that was "droning, emotional, complimentary but not too similar, with an obvious ending" and allowed the band to play over it if they wanted to. From this we took the guitar riff which appears on the 1:08 mark here and adjusted it's key to match the first half of the song, giving us a drone which will be a familiar melody to the band. The next part to tackle was an obvious ending, so we applied time based effects on the riser sound to act as a cue. Although this demo uses the full spectrum, the band were also sent a copy with the bass cut to prevent the track clashing with the bassist.
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Torrid's prompt was essentially "spacey" and something inspired by Tool, but otherwise we were given a blank canvas to work with. This track will open up for their song Don't Bother so we started off setting our track up in the same key and swung 8th rhythm. From there a percussion section was created from a variety of instruments, it's not accurate to what Tool might use but hopefully delivers a similar atmosphere. Naturally synths then fill in the "spacey" part, played in a crescendo. Lastly, using text-to-speech we sampled the dictionary definition of each word in the bands name, and then asked the band how they would describe themselves with single words or short phrases, which became their definition.