Marching Right Along...

Nice RT60 session this morning, wherein we took a song I’ve been working on all weekend and replaced all my soft-synth parts with “real” synths, which is always a pleasant experience. No offense to the softsynth makers out there, but there is really no comparison between a pad done in Massive or Twin2 and a pad done on an OB-8 recorded to tape, with analog effects. None whatsoever.

This current track (the second) only has a backbone to it, and already it has OB-8 pads, a kick drum made with a Jupiter 6 and a Moog The Rogue, DR-110 for the other drums, and a 303 bass (but not what you’d think.) We set ourselves what seemed at the time to be a rather lofty goal of not using a single sample on this album, where a sample is defined as a clip, loop, or sound recorded by someone else. There will be no softsynths and very few plug-ins.

In any event, the RT60 writing process is moving on schedule. We’re neck deep in the middle of the second song, pondering the third, and a “sound” is starting to take shape. This is always the cool part of a new band, because you’re never sure what you’re gonna get until you have it. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe that sound, as I’m not terribly familiar with this genre. I’ll leave that up to people that know better to say who we’re ripping off or whatever, because I’ve just never heard most of it.

While we’re writing and recording (kind of the same thing in this type of music) we’re also pondering how we’re going to pull it off live, and much of the writing is done with that in mind. I’ll talk more about that when the time comes, but suffice to say that RT60 shows most definitely will not consist of two guys hunched over laptops in front of projections. Speaking to that, I’m interested in talking with a visual artist in PDX or the surrounding environs that might be interested in being part of this project, and who has some skills in that regard.

Anyhow, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming. As is becoming the tradition on days like this, I’ve put pictures of everything we used this morning in the RT60 set on my Flickr page. The last three are today’s additions.