Ajay graciously sent me the stems of the track. I knew I probably wasn’t going to use a ton of the material aside from the vocal track, but it was nice to get a peek inside the arrangement and actually soloing out some of the parts gave me some ideas for countermelodies. After playing around with it for a while, I kind of settled on doing something at half tempo of the original track. Their track was upbeat and driving, so I took it to a new place with half tempo and filling the spaces with glitchy marble samples, cello parts, bouncy arpeggiated FM synths, and a throbbing Dubstep bassline. It’s definitely a headphone song. I seem to do my best work at around 2am.

I hope that they release it in a format that’s purchasable, but in the meantime I can give you a listen only here.

Here’s the original track: Data Romance – Beating Records

Here’s my version of the track: Data Romance – Beating Records (Meta Remix)

You can visit Data Romance here: Data Romance

Buy their first EP “Paint” here: iTunes link

Pick up their ”Ghosted” single here: Link

Follow them at Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo

The second piece of it is turning the sketch into something performable. I used to like to just sit back and watch all of my automation and parts fly by on the sequencer, but these days it’s so much more fun to get in it and work with it on the fly. After much, much buying and selling and playing around with different control surfaces, I’ve settled on primarily a 128 grid system that I’ve customized to control both the arrangement and live effects, with the addition of small, flexible controllers that focus on mixing, percussion, and note entry. Using a customized Ableton Live template, I have a setup that gives me a static set of intuitive controls while allowing me to fly compositions and parts in and out at will, and for the most part, disconnect from the computer screen and just focus on manipulating the music through the control surfaces.

This is a sketch that I came up with in the winter of ’09 while at a beach house with the family. I have played through this song a bunch of times with a sort of loose idea of dynamic direction and arrangement that allows me to experiment and self-correct as I play the song, but for the most part, this is a one take.

We made due though, and after introducing myself the Edison and Owner/Operator, I was able to tie directly into their sets. I wished they had started an hour earlier so I could have gotten to see Egadz set. Anyway, here’s the resulting video(s)

I hadn’t known the Bachrans super well while attending church with them, but I’d served alongside them a number of times, and ran into Daniel more than once at the Mac Store. When I found out that Kelly was an American Idol hopeful that went on to Hollywood week, I jumped at the chance to shoot a quick video with them. I had seen that they were recording some cover songs in their house, so I offered to come and shoot something with my own gear in their home setting. This was the result. While I need to work on a better way to stabilize my camera during shooting, I was pretty happy with the way it turned out, and my reward ultimately, was the experience of shooting and producing it. I need to remind myself of that more.

Now since then, Ableton has teamed up with Cycling ’74, makers of Max, and developed a Max4Live, that allows you to run Max patches right inside Live. This has been the tie in that everyone has been waiting for, and now has once again piqued my interest. I think this time i’d like to build one though. Here’s one of the original videos that sold me on it: