Blu Mar Ten » sketch

Blu Mar Ten – Untitled Old Tune 2006

Blu Mar Ten — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 01:57:46 +0000

Here’s a little track from 2006 that we never finished.
Stray heard it when he was loitering around the studio and insisted on having a copy to play out.
We might work it up into a full track. Then again we may well not.

Anyway, below is a clip from dnbtv a couple of weeks ago.

Blu Mar Ten – Untitled Old Tune (Stray live on dnbtv 15/9/2010) by Blu Mar Ten

Work in progress – 5th feb 2010

Blu Mar Ten — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:39:54 +0000

A Saturday Night’s Work

Blu Mar Ten — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:51:44 +0000

Evolution of a Track

Blu Mar Ten — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:30:46 +0000

Someone emailed us a few days ago and asked…

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

Work in progress – June 21st 2009

Blu Mar Ten — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 04:00:37 +0000

Another Saturday night…

Work in progress – June 13th 2009

Blu Mar Ten — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:57:09 +0000

Running out of time to finish the album. Trying to get all tracks up to at least 90% done.
This evening was spent on this…

Work in Progress

Blu Mar Ten — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:48:53 +0000

Loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops….

Jump Up Jump Up Jump Jump Jump

Blu Mar Ten — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:42:00 +0000

Stumbled across this sketch on the hard drive from a couple of years ago. Just a bit of fun.
No – the album will not sound anything like this

The Start of a Tune

Blu Mar Ten — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 04:00:08 +0000

So this evening we started something new. This is the first sketch with a handful of sounds.
Let’s see if it turns into anything over the next few months…