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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / Cosmic Cairns's music / Cassiopeia Express

Cassiopeia Express

By Cosmic Cairns on September 11, 2018 8:05 pm

While recently cleaning out my closet I stumbled upon my old Digitech RP6 effects pedal I bought back in 1997 and used to use the hell out of back in the day.  I haven't used it for several years because I lost the plug for it and being that old it wasn't compatible with any plugs I had for other pedals.  I remember not being able to find a replacement plug when I tried once before as even Digitech no longer manufactures them, but I tried looking online again and this time found someone selling one so I ordered it.  It finally arrived a few days ago so I tested it out and it still mostly works.  So I started building this track with a pre-programmed beat and some guitar lines on the old pedal.  Then I added some bass and some vocoder.  I thought I wanted to add some more natural organic elements to balance out some of the synthesized sounds so I added some regular vocals, harmonica, and some whistles.  I also didn't notice until near the end of the recording process when I listened through headphones but somehow the drumbeat had a kind of nasty buzz on it.  I couldn't hear it at all through my monitors, but it was quite obvious through the headphones.  I didn't want to scrap it completely since it was the foundation the song was built on so I pulled out the good old popcorn tin again and doubled up the percussion with that, which seemed to at least make the buzz not so noticeable and maybe it's just sort of become an ambient sound in the mix now.  At least I'd like to think so.

Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial (BY-NC)

Nice work.

Nice trippy melodic whistles with the nostalgic feeling of the guitar and vocals!

I like it big_smile Good inclusion of the whistling and harmonica, everything meshes together in a nice dream, I didn't pick up on any out of place buzzing myself.

Devieus wrote:

Nice work.

  Thanks!



Tone Matrix wrote:

Nice trippy melodic whistles with the nostalgic feeling of the guitar and vocals!

  Awesome!  The whistles were one of the last things I added when I thought the track just needed a little something more, so glad to hear they worked ok.



Gab Manette wrote:

I like it big_smile Good inclusion of the whistling and harmonica, everything meshes together in a nice dream, I didn't pick up on any out of place buzzing myself.

  Thanks!  Luckily, I don't really hear the buzzing in the final mix.  It was pretty frustrating to discover it right at the end of the recording process, but is seems my ploy of disguising it with more percussion might have actually worked.  smile

You're like a crazy mad scientist with the old pedals and pop corn tin problem solving.  I feel the need to equip my studio with a pop corn tin.  Are they available as a DAW plugin? A great dreamy mixture!

NWSPR wrote:

You're like a crazy mad scientist with the old pedals and pop corn tin problem solving.  I feel the need to equip my studio with a pop corn tin.  Are they available as a DAW plugin? A great dreamy mixture!

I try to use different stuff I have laying around.  If it's capable of making sound I will attempt to use it in some capacity.  Someone gave me the popcorn tin for Christmas a couple years ago.  After all the popcorn was eaten I noticed it would make a good drum, especially since I don't own an actual drum kit and don't really have the space for one.  I did manage to get some drumsticks from a drummer friend of mine so I use those to pound away on it.  It certainly works pretty well in a pinch.  That probably would be a good idea for a plug-in, but otherwise I recommend scoring yourself a physical one at Christmas time.  smile

Quite the journey. Novel and creative!

Jim Wood wrote:

Quite the journey. Novel and creative!

  Thanks for going on the journey with me!

A pleasant, emjoyable journey indeed. Yay for popcorn tin and found percussion, I hope santa brings me popcorn for xmas.

miraclemiles wrote:

A pleasant, emjoyable journey indeed. Yay for popcorn tin and found percussion, I hope santa brings me popcorn for xmas.

  Thanks!  Yeah, budget and space sometimes necessitate making do with whatever you can.  Popcorn tins for the win!  smile

A sweet, trippy ride. Extra kudos for the popcorn tin as problem solver.

Plantrain wrote:

A sweet, trippy ride. Extra kudos for the popcorn tin as problem solver.

  Sometimes you've gotta improvise on the fly.  I'm kind of amazed it worked as well as it did.

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