I have just finished (another) piece of melodic IDM/ electronica, but this time dating back to the original sessions from ‘Exploration and Ascent’ and recently rediscovered on my hard drive.
It’s not anything ground-breaking, but I thought it was worth sharing. I’m somehow managing to maintain (for the moment) the recent trend of one new track on Soundcloud a month (although possibly this one is cheating slightly) and also a recent trend for single-word track titles… The title is new but hopefully links with the ‘mountain’ ethos of the original (everything seemed to be connected while I was working on the album- both musical and non-musical inspiration). While clearly this track didn’t make it to the original release, I can definitely hear some of the ‘Exploration and Ascent’ sound in there.
As this was originally done in Cubase 9 (I’m now on Cubase 14!) finishing it was not unchallenging, as a number of the VSTs I’d used originally no longer work. Emu Emulator X which was used for the drums was particularly badly missed (not just for this track, it used to be my go-to plugin for drums), but fortunately I’d mixed the drums down to audio in 2013 so I could still work with them even if I couldn’t ‘play’ them. Quite a lot of other plugins also no longer worked, but the back-compatibility of Cubase as a whole is pretty good so I could still load the track and work with it, and fortunately all the major sounds were also still there.
I also had to change the end of the track as the sound was too much (IMO) and definitely one reason why this track never was finished originally – as I generally find tracks evolve based on the sounds from day one, and the specific sounds used become fundamental to the track itself, I find replacing sounds at a late stage quite difficult, so getting something that I felt was OK was the hardest part of reworking this.
Next step is to return to new music… I can’t promise something in April though 🙂
Tags: electronica, idm, rework
