The sample pack we created for Hospital Records has just been released, so if you make music and you’re looking for a bit of inspiration head over to the Hospital Shop to buy the complete pack, or you can buy individual Apple Loops, Reason Refills and Ableton Live packs from the Loopmasters store.

Here’s a demo track to show what the samples sort of sound like…

Blu Mar Ten – Drum and Bass Vol.7 by loopmasters

This is what they say about it:

“This huge inspirational collection of single sounds, loops and fx includes uplifting pads, subsonic basses, submerged atmospheres, tribal breaks, imperial bells, pulsating pads, chilled strings, half time breaks, future breaks, growling hoover basses, complex percussion, and a huge array of instrument samples and Fx.

One Shots & Sampler Patches format includes all single (non-looping) sounds and sampler patches for Kontakt, Halion, NNXT, EXS24 soft samplers.

Buy the pack from the Hospital Records Shop.

Here are three simple things we think about when we make tunes.

You may or may not find them useful to think about when you make tunes.

1) Call & Response

We almost always think about sounds as if they’re in conversation with each other, so when one sound ‘calls’ another ‘responds’ to it. This can happen tonally, rhythmically or texturally. A melody started on one instrument can be resolved or commented upon by another, or maybe the same melody repeated with additional layers to give the feel of many answering one, (also known as an antiphon).

This is a useful habit to get into as a call & response routine is a very human thing to do whereas mindless repetition is not and will appear thoughtless or robotic. If something appears to be more human then humans respond much better to it.

2) Leitmotifs

Rather than play the same sound over and over, we often repeat the character of a sound in different ways throughout a tune, again either tonally, rhythmically or texturally. For example, a melody played on a piano may be repeated on another instrument later in the tune. Or, rather than repeating the same melody throughout the tune, we may vary it in different ways or even reverse the notes. At other points we may echo the pattern of the bassline with kick drums or percussion. Doing this allows you to establish the theme of a track without boring the listener.

From time to time we make deliberately overt use of sounds or melodies that we have used before in other tracks, so the leitmotifs stretch over several pieces of work. On very rare occasions we will deliberately use a well known sample that is designed to be recognised for its source rather than its inherent characteristic. This would be an example of a cultural leitmotif rather than the internal ones described above. The geekier among you may also know cultural leitmotifs by their other name, ‘memes’.

3) Narrative Flow

Narrative can work on both macro and micro levels. At a macro level most of our tunes work in the same way, with a set-up, conflict / passion and resolution. At a micro level we always think about what a section of music is saying about the section that directly follows it. Rather than just cutting and pasting sections over and over they almost always change to introduce the next set of events with a view to also serving the macro narrative.

This gives you a narrative that develops over time with a tune often ending up in a slightly different place from where it started. The advantage of this is that the listener will always hear something new the longer they listen to the tune. This disadvantage of this is that most people need to understand a tune in the first 30 seconds or so and rarely believe that it will develop much beyond that.

We feel a tune is successful when, after listening to it all the way through, you feel slightly drained and exhausted and the place you’ve reached seems to be a very long way from where you started.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been working on a tune with InsideInfo, (aka Paul), at his studio in East London. Given that he leans much more towards the dancefloor than we do a few people have been surprised that we should hook up to make music, but it’s been working pretty well so far.

You can hear a clip of the tune and see Paul give a quick tour of his set-up below.

If you want to be notified when this tune gets released then stick your email in the box below and join our newsletter.

Oh and Paul has a new tune out today so go and buy it on vinyl or mp3.

SoundCloud asked us if we’d like to pick a track from our last album and talk through it, commenting on some of the components and methods that went into its creation.

Who better for the task than Michael Blu Mar Ten, the driving force behind all things technical in our studio.

You can see his comments in the player below, or view the track on SoundCloud if you’d like to read them more clearly or make comments of your own.

If you’d like to ask him more questions about the track you can email him here.

Blu Mar Ten – Close (VIP): Production Close-up by Blu Mar Ten

About Michael:

Michael Tognarelli is one third of London production trio Blu Mar Ten.
Born in Manchester, UK, Michael spent his youth working in records shops alongside Marcus Intalex and Sappo, and formed an encyclopedic knowledge of dance music at a frighteningly early age. After laying his hands on some gear to write music of his own, Michael moved to London in 2003 and linked up with Leo & Chris, the other two members of Blu Mar Ten. Absorbed into the outfit Michael rapidly became the driving force behind Blu Mar Ten’s production ethic and is responsible for consistently pushing the boundaries of the trio’s engineering. You can hear Michael’s work on the Blu Mar Ten album, Natural History, available now on CD, MP3 and limited edition vinyl

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Tonight we bought Melodyne Direct Note Access. You’ve probably never come across this software, but we’ve been impatiently waiting for it ever since it was first talked about more than two years ago.

The original version of Melodyne was pretty incredible. The program would take a line of monophonic audio, (a sound that only plays one note at a time, like a vocal or a trumpet), split the sound into its component notes and then allow you to change the pitch of each part as you like. You can use it to correct wrong notes, or completely re-write the melody, if you choose. Pretty amazing.

However, this new version of Melodyne, ‘Direct Note Access’ (DNA), not only allows you to change a monophonic melody line, but it will also analyse polyphonic audio, bursting the sound out into individual, manipulable parts. To give you a basic example, when you load a piano chord into the program it will separate out all the notes from the chord in front of you and allow you to change the pitch and position of each one. Take a look at this video to see for yourself…

Now as incredible as this is, I wouldn’t ordinarily write about something as geeky as new software as it’s only really of interest to us. However the ramifications for copyright and intellectual property that Melodyne DNA suggests have been gnawing away at me since I first saw it demoed, and now using it for the first time and seeing how powerful it is has sparked off these thoughts again.

A huge portion of dance music is, and always has been, based around sampling, the act of taking a portion, or ‘sample’, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording in one’s own work.
Without going into the legal ins-and-outs of sampling, Melodyne presents a brand new twist on the claims creators have against people who sample their works.

Let’s carry on with the piano chord example.

Let’s say I sample a series of piano chords from Coldplay. There are many ways we could manipulate this sample. We could pitch it up or down. We could chop it up and only use parts of it. We could reverse it. We could do all sorts of things to it, but fundamentally it’s very, very hard to alter the genetics of the sample. The notes are still the notes that the band played, the relationships between the notes are still the same and remain immutable no matter what alterations we make to them. The changes we would make to the sample are, relatively speaking, cosmetic

The confusion that Melodyne DNA throws over this situation is that you can now alter a sample fundamentally, rather than just cosmetically. If we use DNA to deconstruct every element of the Coldplay chords and rearrange them into a completely new set of notes, then alter their sequential relationships, at what point does it stop being anything to do with the band?

If we end up with notes they never played, making up chords they never played, in an order they never played, what claim do they have over the sound? Is it the texture of the sound? Is timbre a copyrightable thing? Probably not, or the 20th Century would have been full of piano players suing each other for having similar sounding recordings.

Melodyne DNA represents an absolute paradigm shift regarding intellectual property in music, as well as offering sample-based producers ways of taking advantage of the timbre of a sound without having to also steal someone else’s sense of melody or harmony.

Big subject, big ramifications. If you have any thoughts then add them in the comments section below.

Anyway, aside from that…excellent software and highly recommended. You can buy it here. Our sample library just got a new lease of life.

i’m interested in this ‘sketch’ idea…how do you put together the sketches in terms of instrumentation? do you have a stock of samples/patches to draw on which you then refine? how far you take it during the sketching phase. how do you exact quality control to make sure nothing gets missed and none of the weaker ideas get picked? i’d love to hear one of the original sketches so i could get an idea of how much you work it up before you shelve it.

…So I thought I’d pick a recent track and show a few snapshots of the stages it goes through before ending up as releasable.

NB – All audio in this post is 64k mp3, aside from the Soundcloud player at the end

If I Could Tell You – Released April 2009

We started working on this in November 2006 and, as you can hear, the sketch consists of a load of musical elements with placeholder drums and bass.

2nd Nov 2006

The next step was to try and figure out more interesting drums and bass, so we started playing with much more chopped up arrangements. You’ll hear that the ideas for the bass were more or less carried through into the final version.

7th Aug 2008

Over the next couple of months we started to look at the instrumentation again and see what could be added, what could be thrown out, and what needed to be rearranged.

18th Aug 2008

14th Sep 2008

We then spent the next month arranging the track into a full piece while still rejigging the instrumentation and writing new bass progressions.

20 Nov 2008

29th Nov 2008

29th Dec 2008

We thought we’d got to a point where the track was more or less ready to go, but there was something nagging us about the drums. They were holding the tune back so at the very last minute we threw them all out and replaced them with the drums that give the whole tune a lot more space and that worked in sympathy with the instrumentation much more effectively, and that’s what you hear in the final version that was released a couple of years after it first began.

4th April 2009

Blu Mar Ten – If I Could Tell You by Blu Mar Ten

He talked about wanting to figure out the ‘direction’ of the tune and I found this interesting because I realised that the way we normally write our tracks is very different from that.

Working in modern sequencers often forces you to think about music in very compartmentalised ways – everything moving from left to right, everything contained in little boxes, everything beginning and ending at very rigid moments – and this can often lead to highly formulaic ways of writing tracks.

Generally, we leave our arrangements as late as we possibly can. They’re always the very last thing we do.
What we have instead is a collection of sounds looping around & around, over which we let new sounds drift in and out, (often out-of-time), until we have a whole palette of ideas which we think are substantial enough to support a whole track.

Working in this way and not really having a ‘start’ or ‘end’ point allows us to treat the music as a ‘field’ rather than a ‘path’, a space where things are able to relate to each other in terms of depth, rather than over time.

I remember once reading a glib description of the way memory works. As an adult we perceive events as having happened in sequential relation to each other; C follows B follows A and so on. We see events as a path leading backwards into our childhood, with memories as signposts in sequence along the path. However, the further back you go you eventually reach a point where an infantile lack of self-consciousness means that a linear perception of events fades and instead of a path we perceive our memories as a field with the signposts scattered in a haphazard fashion all over it, having no sequential relationship to each other, (one reason why it’s so hard to definitively pin down your earliest memory, or to put in order events that occurred between the ages of 4 and 5).

I think it’s this same diminished self-consciousness that you’re granted when working in an infinitely repeating loop. Like repeating a word over and over again until it loses its semantic tethering and just becomes a sound in its own right, you’re free to listen to and enjoy the sound of the word without being constrained by what it signifies. If you listen to a loop for long enough the edges start to fade away and you’re able to ‘drift’ sounds into it and work on their sonic qualities in relation to other elements rather than their ‘meaning’ in terms of an overall structure; not as things that have ‘direction’ but as things which occupy a place in space. This means that, when the time comes to arrange the track, the elements are less likely to have been formulated in such a rigid fashion and will, (hopefully), lend themselves to a more interesting progression.

As usual, Brian Eno has some interesting things to say on this topic.

I have this word that I think about a lot which is ‘unlocked’ music. Ambient – my kind of ambient music – is the most unlocked music possible. A lot of things drift separately from each other and you listen to the result. In fact, African music is basically like that, because you have two time signatures going on always, a three-beat and a four-beat, and they don’t always lock. They are cycles of different length that don’t overlay in precise numerical ways – or if they do they overlay in such long cycles that you are not conscious of that, necessarily. So, I’m always arguing for the unlocked. Some technology really encourages lock, so you have a problem with it being locked vertically. And if it’s keyboard-based you have a problem with it being locked horizontally as well. The instruments play either this pitch or that pitch, they tend not to move fluidly between them. You may have a mod wheel, but it’s not an expressive element.

When I make loops on a sequencer, I always try to play them all the way through, so I play the whole part, then I listen to it, and quite often I find a long section that I like. Loop that, cut it up so that the loop doesn’t recur regularly. The idea of always editing in straight vertical cuts is the most single annoying thing about most of that music. Because a whole part of my feeling has been to make music that is ‘unlocked’. And all that stuff like Thursday Afternoon, Discreet Music and so on, is very deliberately that: music where the elements float separately from one another.
One of the things I love about soul music is that it’s relatively unlocked, so there are things that are very tight, like the rhythm section, but it’s not tied: tight, but not tied. People can shift around, and they create inflexions by not falling together when you expect them to and so on. So this unlocked thing has been a big issue for me for a long time. And then suddenly this kind of music appears that is not only locked, but absolutely fucking bolted down together…

A few years ago, in an interview with drumandbass.ch I was asked about what makes our sound ours, and I answered:

We’re generally fans of real life and we’ve come to realise that our music reflects that. Life is often messy, disorganised, a bit broken and imperfect but often somehow beautiful, and our music works in the same sort of way. If you try and sanitise & control everything, you eventually end up with music that doesn’t bear much relation to real life and gradually people will lose interest in it.

Much of our music uses samples or recordings of ‘real’ instruments, (as distinct from synthesizers). Aside from our personal, aesthetic preferences, we’ve always enjoyed the fact that the ‘real life-ness’ of these sounds inevitably implies a narrative of some sort, an organic sound laden down with aural baggage and emotional association; things which a listener will find very difficult not to be drawn in by and feel themselves relating to.

For me, the interesting thing about these sounds is how messily imperfect they are. The world of synthesizers and drum machines, sample-accurate audio workstations, lovingly sound-treated rooms and spectral analysers is all well and good, but ultimately so incredibly linear and inhuman that, after a while, I find it almost impossible to relate to.

Brian Eno has talked about this on several occasions:

I like [the piano] because of the complexity of its sound. If you hold the sustain pedal down, strike a note and just listen… that’s one of my favourite musical experiences. I often sit at the piano for an hour or two, and just go “bung!” and listen to the note dying. Each piano does it in a different way. You find all these exotic harmonies drifting in and drifting out again, and one that will appear and disappear many times. There’ll be fast-moving ones and slow-moving ones. That’s spell-binding, for me.
The interesting thing about the piano is that it’s a kind of compromised instrument, because of Equal Temperament. You know, no piano you’ve ever heard is in tune. Pianos are not tuned to be perfectly in tune. You can’t do it.

It occurred to me that the real problem with synthesizers is that what you are hearing in the end is the movement of a few atoms amplified, really it’s just a few atoms. When you’re hearing a grand piano you’re hearing the movement of billions of molecules, everything is active: the wood, the strings, the metal, the temperature in the room, all these elements change the way that thing sounds. For this reason those instruments remain interesting, because they are never the same twice. If you play this piano today, it isn’t the same piano that you play tomorrow.
So I think that actually the “novelty” of electronics has slightly worn off, and people are starting to look to those instruments again. The same movement happened in painting, there was a period when everybody wanted their colours to be totally flat and with very hard edges. Towards the middle of the Seventies people started to get messy again, you started to see brush strokes, evidences of the human hand and of the materials.
I think the same thing is happening in music, and once again it’s exciting to realize that this thing has a history, it’s not just something that was invented in a factory in Japan last year.
There’s a whole history and a tradition which becomes part of the performance: you can’t listen to a piano without listening to the whole history of piano music as well.

What Eno is talking about here is a loss of control; a surrender to, appreciation of, and a revelling in imperfection.

The sort of music we are involved in is so often crippled by obsessions with ideas of perfection, technique and control. Undoubtedly, there is a powerful aesthetic charm to crafting a sound which gives the impression it has never been touched by the human hand, (LFO’s 1991 album ‘Frequencies’ is a superb example of this ), however there is a limit to how far an audience will suspend their humanity and indulge your robot rock-out.

Life is full of passions, and control is the antithesis of passion.
We are at our most excited, and exciting, when matters lack clarity and are confused, fuzzy and chaotic.

In Les Liaisons Dangereuses the Marquise de Merteuil criticises the Vicomte de Valmont for writing love letters that are too perfect, too logical to be the words of a true lover, whose thoughts will be disjointed and for whom the fine phrase will always elude.

de Botton observes:

Language trips up on love, desire lacks articulacy.

A desire for too much control is a suspicious thing. True feeling, the arena in which we reveal our real selves, is out of our control.

de Botton again:

…the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant.

As I sat reading in a coffee shop on the Finchley Road I was making notes to myself, trying to think through the ebb and flow of human relationships

It occurred to me me how many of the same themes relate to the making of music.

The world of music technology I described earlier is one of machines designed to maximise control, emphasise accuracy, reduce weakness. So much effort is spent in the pursuit of the ideal sound but I’m never wholly convinced that this pursuit is driven by the desire to most perfectly articulate an expression of the self together with all its frailties, or whether it is, in fact, designed to escape it.
When people fall in love it’s common for them to idealise their lover, hoping to find in them none of the weaknesses we see in ourselves.

Talking about the feeling of inferiority which comes from comparing the perfection perceived in the idealised lover with oneself, de Botton observes:

Out of this perceived inferiority, there often emerges the need to lie or be absurdly reserved: to take on a personality that is not directly our own, a seducing self that can locate and respond to the demands of the superior being we’re having dinner with. Does love condemn us not to be ourselves? Perhaps not for ever, but at least initially, for it leads us to ask What would appeal to her? rather than what appeals to me?

The projection of perfection onto a lover negates the pleasure of difference by refusing to recognise imperfection, classifying it as undesirable. Rather than be spellbound by the exotic harmonies, drifting frequencies and overall out-of-tune-ness of the true character of the lover across the table, the idealised version of her induces a crippling sense of conformity.

de Botton illustrates this as he describes dinner with a clever and opinionated woman he has only just met, but rapidly fallen in love with:

The complexity of her views led to a certain schizophrenia in mine. What sides of myself should I release? How could I avoid alienating her without appearing impossibly bland?…
Because it involves the risk of alienating those who do not agree with what one is saying, originality proved wholly beyond me. I merely adjusted myself to whatever I judged Chloe might feel…My idea of what she wanted from a lover could be compared to a tight-fitting suit and my true self to a fat man, so that the evening was a process resembling a fat man trying to fit into a suit that is too small for him. There was a desperate attempt to repress the bulges that did not fit the cut of the fabric, to shrink my waist and hold my breath so that the material did not tear. It was not surprising if my posture was not as spontaneous as I would have liked. How can a fat man in suit too small for him feel spontaneous? He is so frightened the suit will split, he is forced to sit in complete stillness, holding his breath and praying he can get through the evening without disaster. Love had crippled me.

The lover crippled by the pursuit of the ideal doesn’t feel that they can, (like Eno at his piano), simply strike a note on their object of desire and enjoy the fast and slow moving interplay of the molecules of her reaction.

Eno, talking about instruments, could so easily be talking about people. Read the following passage with a lover in mind:

The nature of acoustic instruments is that they have these complex harmonics. Not only do these notes generate their whole harmonic series, but the harmonics interact. You get both the product and the difference of them.

So the ear already hears very complex sound from a simple instrument, But, further than this, because of the problem of Equal Temperament and Just Intonation, because you can’t tune a piano perfectly, you never have such a simple interval. There are much more complex numbers than these involved with a piano, and that means you get some much more exotic harmonies, which really are very transitory. It’s the most extraordinary instrument for that.

Finding out about harmonics is actually a good way of understanding a lot about music, I think. And finding out about the piano, and about the history of the piano, is like studying a history of music.

I would suggest that in both the fields of sound and human love, a more enriching experience can be gained by recognising, appreciating and encouraging the beauty of difference and imperfection rather than the pursuit of a ideal that is almost entirely self-invented and projected. I’m sure everyone reading this knows either a musician or a lover who is holding their breath, crippled by love and in the pursuit of unattainable utopia, (itself from the Greek ‘ou-topos’ meaning ‘no place’).

de Botton again:

More often than not, we achieve our goals by coincidence rather than design, dispiriting news for the seducer, who is imbued with the spirit of positivism and rationalism , believing that with enough careful and almost scientific research, laws for the fall into love may be discovered. Seducers proceed in the hope of finding love hooks to ensnare the beloved – a certain smile, or opinion or way of holding a fork…But it is an unfortunate fact that though love hooks exist for everyone; if we hit upon them in the course of seduction, it is more by chance than by calculation. After all, what had Chloe done to make me fall in love with her? My love for her had as much to do with the adorable way she had asked the waiter for some butter as it had with her sharing my views on the merits of Heidegger’s Being and Time

Eno, (talking about starting a piece of music):

I really begin by allowing myself to make a mess, and then seeing if I can get out of it. There’s nothing worse than a ‘blank canvas’. Picasso said there’s nothing worse than a brilliant beginning, and that’s true. If your first move is brilliant, you’re in trouble. You don’t really know how to follow it; you’re frightened of ruining it. So to make a mess is a good beginning.

de Botton:

Seduction is a form of acting, but just as an actor needs to have a concept of the audience’s expectations, so too the seducer must have an idea of what the beloved will want to hear – so that if there is a conclusive argument against lying in order to be loved, it is that the actor can have no idea of what his or her audience will actually be touched by. Most of the time, we charm people for reasons we don’t entirely understand and cannot fully control. There’s no better reason to try to be that most tricky of things on our dates: ourselves.

This is a complex subject and something I’ve thought about for years. The detail of my opinions on it are constantly in flux but I believe that an appreciation and enjoyment of fault and difference is a hallmark of the capacity to love with clear vision.
I’ll take my music and my lovers as they are; flawed, imperfect and beautifully human; for as Eno says, “no piano you’ve ever heard is in tune”.

Here’s a little warts-and-all-behind-the-scenes glance at things in their very rawest, driest, unprocessed state.

Please bear in mind that the music and vocals you hear below in no way reflects the quality of what will appear on the final tracks. Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up repayments on a mortgage or any other loan secured on it.