Random text, video and music from electronic musician and piracy supporter Alexander Støver. This blog is used for uploading new music, videos, pictures of naked fembots and general geekage. All good things more or less related to Binärpilot and electro robot rock 3000. You can't stop da funk.
Alexander on September 29, 2009
Penguin (Rachael's Theme)
I started working on this a couple of weeks ago for a 30 second compilation. After a few days it refused to conform to the allotted time, and who am I to argue with my children? This song is dedicated to my favorite penguin in the whole wide world, Rachael Ivy Young. As such it is aptly titled, Penguin.
Labels: music
Alexander on May 26, 2009
Nordland Contest: Guess the lyrics
The release is coming up and I want to hold a little mini-contest. Amazing prizes! Money and fame! Gratuitous nudity! The first person to make out exactly what I'm singing in the clip below will get to listen to Nordland in it's entirety before anybody else. All you have to do is write a comment with what you think the lyrics are. The winner (if anyone) will also receive a signed copy of the CD when it's pressed. Good luck, robots!
Update: In fear of making it too easy I might have made it too hard. Impossible contests are no fun, so I changed the clip to help you guys out. Update 2: You're still having a hard time? Here's the correct words so far and blanks for the ones nobody has guessed:
all the ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ track fucking ___
___ ___ the beat ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
all the ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ track fucking ___
___ ___ the beat ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
Alexander on May 16, 2009
Remix: Human League - Don't You Want Me
Earlier today I stumbled across a forum post that challenged people to try and remake an old pop hit. I wanted to give it a shot and Rachael decided I should try to do Human League's "Don't You Want Me Baby". Now I'm tired, my head hurts, and in retrospect I should have gone with a song I've actually heard before. Singing without knowing the track was very, very hard. But all in all, good times! Human League - Don't You Want Me (Binärpilot Penguin Mix)
Alexander on April 8, 2009
Battlestar II
To defend the remainder of humanity against the threat of Planet Taker-class spaceships, the G.E.C. decided to build a space station. Set to orbit the earth at a safe distance, it would be equipped with state of the art weaponry and nuclear capability. Based on earlier plans of an interstellar defense station, the project was dubbed Battlestar II.
Alexander on March 6, 2009
Sample Offset and Timestretching
Agradula asked what technique I used to manipulate a vocal sample in a track I'm working on. Sample offset, as most trackers know, is great when you want to break a drumloop or create old school acid leads without resorting to multisamples. It's also handy if you want to timestretch a sample without using an external program like Sound Forge (a trick I learned in FT2). In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to do this. Pretty cheesy huh? Luckily cheese is the new cool.
Setup
First I believe we need a sample (no really). Download this one of a girl saying "All your base are belong to us". Now open Madtracker, click the sample dialogue (1) and load the sample (2+3).
Playback
Click on the first channel/track in the pattern editor (1), make sure Edit is toggled (2) (if not click it or press space once) and press Q on the keyboard to start a sample playback from the beginning of the pattern. Adjust the LPB to a higher value (3) (making the pattern play faster for precision, you'll see why soon enough), I'd choose 8 for now. Then press play (4) to check that everything is in it's right place.
Get Hexed
Before we continue I advise you change the Madtracker display to use hexadecimals instead of plain numbers. Why? Because, as an old Fasttracker, I do and changing will make it easier to follow this guide. Open the config (1+2), select the display pane (3) and check Hexadecimal (4).
Breakin'
Now for the fun part. Each channel/track is divided like this: Note (1), volume (2) (00-80), panning (3) (00-FF), effect number (4) (XX) and effect parameter (5) (XXXX).
The effect number for set offset is 9, so use your arrow keys to move the marker into the second column of the 4th section and press "9" (remember to make sure Edit is toggled). This is a short sample and from experience I'm guessing that "Base" is on 40 (ie. All 00, Your 20, Base 40). To check my theory let's move into the third column of the 5th section, press "4" and play the module to hear where the sample starts.

Now select that line by clicking it (it should highlight like in the picture above) and copy it by pressing ALT+F4. Paste it to row 08, 0C and 10 by moving the marker into those positions with the down-arrow and using ALT+F5. Then go back to the first line, press delete, move back up and then "Q" to insert a regular playback of the sample. It should look something like this (picture). Press play.

All done
And there you have it, the basics of breakin' a vocal sample using sample offset. As everything else, the end result depends on how much time you're willing to spend. Hopefully this tutorial will give you enough information to start experimenting on your own but to give you some ideas I made a little more just playing around with the numbers (picture).
Timestretching?
In closing I'm going to show you how to do timestretching, if you haven't figured it out already. It's the same principle as breakin' only now we have to to issue the offset command a whole lot more. Insert a new pattern below the current one (1), press SHIFT+F3 to empty the channel of commands, press and hold Q to fill the entire channel with sample start (2) and increase the LPB to 16 (3).
Now for the tedious task of programming the offset. Basically, you want to issue the offset one value higher for each sample start (picture). And don't worry if programming it now seems horribly slow, you'll probably discover a way of doing it faster (Hint: copying blocks is a nice thing). After you're done press play to check whether you have to add additional lines to the pattern or not (I'm betting that 40 lines isn't going to be enough).

Labels: madtracker, tutorial










