-( maverick )-( blacktron music productions )-()--

title      : 'underwater dolphins (deep blue mix)'
style      : uplifting ambiental breakbeat? (in other words: no idea)
duration   : 4 minutes 'n 20 seconds
channels   : 30
time spend : approx 7 hours
finished   : january 29, 1998
special    : for the Praetonic Music Compo, by Kraiden
special 2  : nearly 100% 16bit/44hz


story :

If you load up the track you'll notice that it only has 13 samples, of which
7 (yes 7) are loops, 2 are whale sounds, 3 are used for rhythm and 1 is a
string.

The whale sounds were ripped from Madhatter/Chill. Thanx alot madhatter for
making these INCREDIBLE whale fx !! they're damn awesome!! sorry for ripping
them tho.. they just fitted in so damn well you know ;)

The 3 loose 909 rhythm samples are ripped from Assign/Tdr. Thanx also.
I always use those rhythm samples coz they're simply the best I've yet
encountered.

The string was constructed by me on my Yamaha Cs1x, then totally edited,
looped and used :)

For the 6 melody loops I applied a technique which I hadn't used yet before
I made this song. Basicly it went like this:

First I switched on my cs1x and looked for some good spacy sounds.
As soon as I found several, I edited them, changed them slightly, changed
the reverb, echo, chorus and all those other settings. Until I had a few
decent selfmade sounds.

Next step was sampling them. I sampled all the sounds I made in 4 different
octaves (coz it sounds better if you have a note on c-2 with a sound that IS
sampled as c-2, than when you have a sound sampled on c-5 played as c-2).

I sampled the instruments in Soundforge 4.0 .. Also edited them a little
after the sampling job.

Nexy up was fasttracker 2 itself. So I went in and made some nice melodies
(some of these I had already practiced live on my cs1x, so I basicly knew
the melodies a little in advance).
After alot of work I had all 32 channels full of melodies throughout the
whole song (which was only about 1:30 mins then). It was still beatless tho.

Since I like songs with nice rocking breakbeats, I _had_ to insert a beat ;)
So I had to find out a way of reducing the number of channels used by the
melodies. So I took the 6 main melodies (high bells 1, high bells 2,
high&medium bells, high strings, medium strings 1, medium strings 2)
seperatly and wave them as .WAV ..

After the saving I went back to Soundforge and edited the wav's a little.
Mainly added in a little reverb.

As I got back in ft2, I just had to finetune those melody-loops a little
(so that they went with the beatsteps) and insert them, which was easy.
I could even echo several of these melodies by using 3 channels instead of
1 (where the 2 new channels are echoed copies of the 1st one, with different
panning positions).

Finally I managed to use a maximum of 22 (or so) channels for the melodies
and fx.

Now it was time for the beat.

So I took a whole lot of loose beat-samples, tiks, basshits, etc and made
a beat on one channel. After this I echoed this one channel over 2 new
channels. Then I COPIED those 3 channels to another 3 new channels and
replaced those beat samples in the new channels with other beat samples
(ofcourse it took a long time selecting the right samples).
So now there were 2 beats which were constructed the same, but with different
samples. And they were both echoed.
To make it even more wicked I added a 3rd beat. I didn't pan this one
(coz it somehow sounded better UNpanned ;])

Now, I saved this whole beat as .WAV again and went back over to Soundforge,
loaded it up and added a whole lot of reverb (had to try out lotssss of
settings and fuck around quite a long time before I got this right).
Now damn that was a fucking fat beat !! :)

So I went back to ft2 again, put in the beat (after finetuning it) and added
the 3 rhythm 909 samples from Assign. The whole thing sounded pretty damn
cool imho. :)

Then it was time to make the song itself (build up, etc).
Took some time etc, but I think I managed ok.

After the song was done I listened it about 25 times or so and started
dreaming away with it. The 'dream' which I wrote down inside the .XM is
kinda what I was imaginating during that time.. ;)

I thought alot about the title then, and with some help of Masakado/bmp I
got the one I have right now..


Well, finally the song turned out pretty big as usual (6megs is starting
to become my average song size damn!! ;]). It's not my best song ever
(allthough I think that beat is one of the best ones I've done so far), but
it surely is pretty good in my opinion.

Anyway, that's up to you to decide :)

would rock if I got feedback on this:

vandebilt@skynet.be

don't hesitate, just write !!
Or if you want to exchange songs with me or want me to check out some of
your work, just go ahead and send it. I'd be glad ..

well that's it.. see ya next time..

maverick

ps: big greetinx to ORION (sorry I forgot you last time mate) for being a
cool scene friend and organizing so much for bmp and advance, and to KRAIDEN
for organizing this cool music compo.

mzzl.
