So, I finally found time to finish some of my 90%-ish finished tracks and collect them into an album of sorts! It’s aptly named The Future We Were Promised and consists of five tracks of techno/deep house/IDM style evolving music with a steady beat (and a few strong riffs and hooks which is unavoidable if you’re me) designed for when you need to focus on something (a distant friend called it “music to get shit done to”, which I also believe is a good way to describe it), or simply relax and dream about the future we’re sort of getting, but in a weird way.

I remember reading The Monkey’s Paw when growing up, a story of getting what you wish for but certainly not in the way you intended, and I think of it now as a sort of eerie premonition of where things could go with machine learning and the things we wish for as humans. But, I digress.

The album is found here, free to listen or you can buy it which earns me a coffee, which would be nice!

And on Spotify…

Backstory

I currently came across an amazing Reaktor instrument called Scapeshift that has been designed by none other than Tim Exile. Apart from creating some amazing music over the years, he also designed interesting stuff for Native Instruments back in the day, so I was naturally intrigued when he announced that he was releasing something new to the world. Early Adopter as always, I jumped on the opportunity to try it out.

What sets Scapeshift apart is the way it can be used, compared to a traditional sequencer or DAW:

• Given a starting point, you can endlessly explore variations on your patterns, building your songs through sequencing gradual or abrupt changes between related patterns – there’s even something called a Wander Mode that turns it into an ever changing radio of sorts, constantly morphing your patterns into new things!
• Not only can you sequence patterns to morph into each other, but also the actual sounds as it comes loaded with a number of virtual synths integrated – or you can forego the internal sounds and generate MIDI for your own VST’s or hardware synths.
• It’s funky!

Exploring Scapeshift and learning it resulted in a number of song ideas of which I deemed five decent enough to release in album form! This is not just Scapeshift however, but while it provided the creative foundation for the tracks, I opted to work quite extensively with them in my DAW, adding creative effects and at times doubling the instruments with other plug-ins.

To create full songs, I recorded MIDI tracks in parallel, with additional keyboards, drums and other FX to pull them more into “Introvert” territory, which ended up with the final results you can hear above.

Mastering Mastering

The second impetus for me was finally learning how to mix tracks properly, and create a mastering chain that will work for my type of material, not having to create one from scratch every time! I believe I have succeeded, although there’s always room for improvement for sure. I might delve deeper into the nooks and crannies of the mastering chain at some point, but some of the crucial elements are:

• The God Particle by Cradle
• Smooth Operator Pro by Baby Audio
• bx_console AMEK 9099 by Brainworx

They work really well together, and combined with a good mastering limiter decent results can be had.

Instrumental Instruments

Finally, the gear list! These are instruments used on this release:

• Behringer Wave
• Korg Wavestate
• ASM Hydrasynth
• E-mu Morpheus
• Native Instruments Massive
• Dawesome Myth

… and probably some others that I forgotten in the heat of the moment.

Hope you like it, and if you do, try to get some sh-t done.