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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / laguna's music / Transients are thoughts (with Colorful Grey)

Transients are thoughts (with Colorful Grey)

By laguna on March 13, 2016 11:17 pm

This week I'm honoured to be able to collaborate a fellow WB veteran: Colorful Grey.

Each of us is writing a different foreword, so I guess I must describe the process from my point of view:

It all started on Monday when I received an Ableton project with some beautiful 8 bars of lute music in three tracks. Christian AKA Colorful Gray told me it was a rough idea but maybe I could find some way to put it in good use. I could here some vague pop structure in it (in the way those acoustic mandollin passages on the early Led Zeppelin records are poppy), so my task was to convert those three 20-something-seconds-long tracks into a 4 minute arrangement, so to speak.

As our styles could be sometimes very different I was afraid, as a musician, that Christian would find that I was "ruining" the idea. I am heavily loop/rhythm based and he's a melodic composer quite concerned about harmony and expressive playing. I felt that, in order to make those fragments work, I should quantize and "warp" the hell out of them so the fit into a tight grid, and then I could layer some synths, bass, and lastly the breaks and beats.

Those timid 3 lute tracks slowly grew into a monstrous 18 track project (yes, real producers could laugh about my "lot of tracks" terror". I tried really really hard to reach level 0 without any mastering so the sound wouldn't be overcompressed.

For all the production geeks out there: drums were brought back to life from my darkest Win95's HammerHead / Boss DR-550 era, and they're basically almost 20 years old. They took me about half an hour to place and almost 5 hours to EQ and compress so they sounded nearly cohesive.

Enough technical details, what it's important about such a project is the following:

We exchanged mails, Whatsapp messages and files while fighting a 6 (or is it 7) hour time gap between the States and Spain, life, work and day to day task. I found it really difficult because some decisions and suggestions could be made in a matter of minutes but took us a couple of days. Since I am not a performer, most of "what I've got to show" requires several hours in front of the computer just to be able to show your idea. In order to keep the schedule (I only would be able to work the track until friday morning) I worked roughtly from 22:00 to 4:00, so Christian could hear the advances every morning.

My overall feeling, and this could surprise someone maybe, is that I would have loved to build this one not using loops, but a room with 2 fellow musicians sharing ideas back and forth. I'm really sure we could have played and created rich harmonies having different takes (and the chance to discuss them). I'm quite happy with the result, though sometimes making the track advance is not a matter of "what we'd love to have" but rather "what we've got" in that exact moment. Collaboration teaches organization and a certain "etiquette" we've all have to follow.

Thanks again to Christian for his patience and to tolerate me ruining his playing with my usual boom bap cheap tricks : 1,2,3, no bass and just melody, 5,6,7, just the main bass tone and a kick drum, rinse, repeat wink

P.S.: Please stay tuned for some artwork we'll upload soon. It's way passed the deadline and I'm still rewriting this foreword. Peace

Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)

Ah I love this track :-) Glad you made it home in time... fist bump bro!

I agree. You two are onto something here that would probably be even better with in person collaboration.  I especially like when Grey decides to do vocals.  smile

I'm downloading this, gentlemen.

colorful grey wrote:

Ah I love this track :-) Glad you made it home in time... fist bump bro!

Thanks, mate! There you go... some pictures. We should make and artwork, though

Edmund Snyder wrote:

I agree. You two are onto something here that would probably be even better with in person collaboration.  I especially like when Grey decides to do vocals.  smile

I'm downloading this, gentlemen.

Completely agree, Edmund smile

Thanks for listening, downloading and being there

Your two styles combine wonderfully natural together. What a beautiful piece of music it turned out to be ! Well-balanced, great atmosphere, ... amazing work, guys! Congrats!!

Wow fuck, this track is insane!

I love the guitar intro man and the vocals, you're a maestro!

Wow.

Percussion is a perfect fit; who's doing the vocals?

Jim Wood wrote:

Percussion is a perfect fit; who's doing the vocals?

me, me!

as I said in colorful grey's page: this is an encounter of the weekly beats giants! amazing stuff. I have to say that I really love the filtered snare sound in the beginning of the song. sounds like a very loose head with a very tight snare. and also, great warping!

by the way, for this week's submissions colorful grey (involuntarily) collaborated with me as well - meaning I sampled one of his tracks. it is very hard not to fall in love with the sound of the lute, isn't it?

dj someguy wrote:

Your two styles combine wonderfully natural together. What a beautiful piece of music it turned out to be ! Well-balanced, great atmosphere, ... amazing work, guys! Congrats!!

Thanks man. It was hard work. Wish one day we could make this face to face smile

Naikymusic wrote:

Wow fuck, this track is insane!

I love the guitar intro man and the vocals, you're a maestro!

Well, it's actually a lute, and the vocal props should be going to Colorful Grey. He's the man!

He's the skilled played, so I guess I hope to be the skilled chopper and warper smile

Gracias man!

Abludo wrote:

Wow.

Thanks man! Wow indeed to my man Colorful Grey

Wow, great job guys, very nice blend of your different styles, my personal opinion there is no style of music that couldn't benefit from some boom-bap!  Would like to hear more from the two of you, great vocals colourful grey

Already appreciated this on Grey's page. Really cool collaboration. Slight feeling of jealousy of not being part of this great piece. This is positive!!!!
It sounds like you are actually playing together.

Wow
Your collaboration shold be be continued!
It is very successful, and full of feeling.
Great Work!

yikes just yikes more more more

Considering all the difficulties involved for this track this sounds awesome and really chill.  I hear both of your styles in this track too.  Really cool smile

I love the way this track hangs together!!  Beautiful progression

Jason Nijjer wrote:

Wow, great job guys, very nice blend of your different styles, my personal opinion there is no style of music that couldn't benefit from some boom-bap!  Would like to hear more from the two of you, great vocals colourful grey

Would love to collaborate again, though it requires planning and a lot of time!

Thanks for listening and your encouragind words smile

Kleie wrote:

Already appreciated this on Grey's page. Really cool collaboration. Slight feeling of jealousy of not being part of this great piece. This is positive!!!!
It sounds like you are actually playing together.

Well, thank you smile I think Colorful Grey's music fills the spectrum really well so I could place my boom-bap gimmicks wink Collaboration is hard, but also nice and, as you said, really positive.

m2K7 wrote:

Wow
Your collaboration shold be be continued!
It is very successful, and full of feeling.
Great Work!

Let's hope we could manage another one together. It was quite time-consuming but totally worth.

Thanks for listening and commenting, m2K7 smile

thricefoldedcloak wrote:

yikes just yikes more more more

We should definetely make it happen sometime in the near future

Tone Matrix wrote:

Considering all the difficulties involved for this track this sounds awesome and really chill.  I hear both of your styles in this track too.  Really cool smile

Thank you, Tone Matrix. It would be an honour to collaborate with you also. I've been loving your tracks since WB'14!

cTrix wrote:

I love the way this track hangs together!!  Beautiful progression

Thank you, cTrix. I guess most of the melodic merit belongs to Colorful Grey. My main department are Beats and Cuts smile

As I said over on Christian's post for this one, this is an excellent collaboration. Outstanding work, guys!

Yes! Really nice track. Good job on the mix too.

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