On the monome forums, there is a user by the name of PirxthePilot, otherwise known as Modulogeek (check out his music, it’s some of my favorite stuff out of the monome community).
He started a thread proposing the idea of remixing christmas songs for a monome christmas compilation. A bunch of people have jumped on board and begun claiming songs. On the 15th of this month everyone will reveal their final tracks.
Tonight I decided to work on my song a bit. I claimed “The Christmas Song” by Nat King Cole. The song has no beat and also has a very open rhythm to it. My main idea for the remix was to vocode the voice of Nat King Cole and support it with some synth pads. I plan on using my gameboy mixed with some larger, more lush analog modular lines. I don’t even know if it will ultimately have any beat to it.
Of course tonight I didn’t add any of that. This evening I basically just turned Nat into a robot. It took quite awhile to dial in the vocoder sound. I used Ableton Lives vocoder and I’m not entirely impressed with it. I think I might have to ultimately record myself saying the lyrics instead of Nat himself because he’s mixed with the music and that’s ruining the vocoder.
After I finished Robo-tizing Nat I added the rest of the song in. I created two tracks with heavy EQ’ing/Reverb/Delay to fill in all the silence. Next, I added another track of the song with all the highs and mids cut leaving only the bass tones. Then I added a bunch of sample rate reduction to make it all sound kind of digital and aliased. The track below is the results of my experiments.
This song is certainly nowhere near what the final track will sound like. It’s actually quite hard to get through the whole thing. It’s vocoder christmas music. It doesn’t get better the closer you are to the end.
this is really cool. i grabbed an old radio show to throw in my remix of gauraldi’s skating.
great job! it’s pretty good already as it is methinks. can’t wait for the finished product!
Really digging this. I like the lo-fi artifacting on the music. Has that cold old school sampler feel.
Thanks Juan, I’m happy people are liking it. I was enjoying it for most of the night I was creating it but a couple of days after my taste went sour on it. I do like the sample reduction aliasing effect, in general. I still think this could be a cool song. I think I need to perhaps use a different vocoder as well as record myself saying all the words.