Don't Fear the Reaper

Since Saturday I've been getting to grips with my new Reaper workstation. I wondered at first whether it was all that good, since it didn't seem to have many of the features I want. But of course it does have them – and many others besides – I just didn't know where to look. I've no doubt now that, for the money, it's an astonishingly powerful program. So most of my time has been taken up with getting back to somewhere near where I was when I stopped recording six years ago. It's like I've bought a strange new car and I'm having to learn where all the pedals and controls have been hidden.

Anyway, I'm slowly getting up to speed, and I've started work on a couple of tracks. The first (excitingly called “Exercise 1”, with a cheeky nod to the Joy Division song of the same name) is a short piece of nonsense thrown together to practice a few basic techniques. It sounds like 1988 is breaking out all over because the only instruments I had at the time were free VST imitations of old analogue synths and drum machines. Well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. There's no live performance on it (or the other track); since I don't have an audio interface yet I'm only working with MIDI and sampled sounds. Still, you can do a surprising amount with those. 

For what it's worth, you can hear Exercise 1 here.

The second track (excitingly called “Exercise 2”) is more substantial. It's based on two different chord progressions bolted together. The first seeks to form a new chord by altering one semi-tone of the existing triad. So it starts in G major then drops the G to Gb to form B minor, raises the D to Eb to form B major, and so on through five transitions until it arrives back at G major. It repeats four times but then moves into a different cycle. This time, starting with G minor (the final chord of the previous sequence), it drops the root note by a single tone to form a major chord (so from G minor the G drops to F forming Bb major) and then drops the root note by a semi-tone to form another minor chord (Bb drops to A to form D minor). In this way you can transpose through all 24 major and minor chords without repetition before you arrive back at your starting point. It still needs a lot of work, but I like the way it's shaping up, and you can hear it here. Oh, and for no good reason at all it's in 5/4.

Enjoy!