chunter music collection

Darkest Night of the Year

In a global culture that gradually moves itself toward 24-hour days that are, on a vast majority, spent indoors, the aspect that maintains our agricultural sense of the harvest is the collection of holidays celebrated around the world between October and January. It is no coincidence that Christmas is four days after Winter Solstice, and that we celebrate the beginnings of hope for a better life and a better world on the darkest night of the year.
An interpretation of Stille Nacht by Josef Moht and Franz Xaver Gruber.

I made this for SounDevotion’s holiday-themed round 34 last year. There’ll be another for this year too.

2009: 12/24
CATEGORY: Single Tracks
Write comment

Broken Machine

Download from battleofthebits.org

A garbled wall of happy ambience, made for the Battle of the Bits’ Ann Arbor 8 mix contest. The samples for this mix were very lush and large. The lesson I take from this round is that the lush samples can do a lot of work if you leave a lot of space in the mix for them, otherwise, they have to be filtered, thinned, and chopped down so that the big sounds don’t beat each other up. Just as a composer should work with a variety of sounds and styles, a good mix should have a good range of sounds- small. medium, and large.

Congratulations to µB who won the contest by creating a very fun song from the same pallette of sounds.

2009: 12/12
CATEGORY: Single Tracks
3 comments

Found, At the Edge of the Forest

Download courtesy of loopproject.com

This came in second in SounDevotion competition, round 44!

A snow flurry invites a walk, but a devil lurks in the woods.

A semi-orchestral progressive background music kind of piece.

This time around I accidentally rediscovered something I read somewhere a long time ago- slight delay can help individual parts (especially unison parts) stand out in a mix where playing the parts dead-on exact may make them disappear into each other, even when panned apart.

Enjoy!

2009: 12/01
CATEGORY: Single Tracks
Write comment

REMIX – capslock by Mick Rippon

Download from loopproject.com

SounDevotion round 43 was a remix round, the challenge being to remix any piece by classic and current module tracker Mick Rippon. His great works can be found at http://mickrippon.com

This is more like a cover with slight rearrangement than a remix, though I have deliberately tried to create this from memory- some samples were taken from the .mod file but none of the note data was used. The note data was referenced only once because I couldn’t get the notes in the panflute hook right.

Listen to the original to find out how much better Mick is at note embellishment than I am, and also to study the masterful use of four columns.

I remember copying this to a tape with a handful of other .mod and .sid files I found in an FTP site. This was part of my introduction to what a tracker can do, and part of how I learned that music can be passed along and preserved in ways that do not require a record contract. It is also part of my appreciation for those that can do a lot with a little; when this tune was originally created I was still using MIDI sequencers and was trying to escape a sound that was called “cheap” and “quirky” when I should’ve worked harder at giving that sound more personality.

Mick Rippon’s music, and music like it, are influential to this sound; the notion of creating the best music you can with the equipment and software you have at the moment.

2009: 11/02
CATEGORY: Single Tracks
Write comment

Compact Electronic Desktop Music

Download audio from Soundcloud here

Download the source Renoise file here

This is for the Indamixx + Renoise + Create Digital Music contest, detailed here: http://bit.ly/4oB6Cm

Released under Creative Commons license by-sa ver 3 in accordance with the contest rules. Please ask me if you wish to use the music and the license is not understood.

Enjoy!