Digital Single: A Robot In Every Home

The final free single from the Radioatomic project looks at the bright future promised by the advent of atomic energy that didn't quite live up to expectations. Sure, there were advances in many industries, but where are our personal jet packs, flying cars, and robot butlers? This was my inspiration for A Robot In Every Home.

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A Robot In Every Home [single edit] is drastically pruned down from the eight minute album version to serve up the essence of the track. It retains most of the intro, consisting of French horns, found sound, and a snippet of processed audio from a fun little film called 'Leave It To Roll-oh.' I was thinking of old RKO Radio Pictures black & white b-films, complete with a menacing mechanical man. Next come some synthesizer parts, the bulk of which were created with the Novation K-Station this time around. HS-60 is also present, and Gmedia M-Tron choir. The Korg Monotribe was used on the bridge, but that particular part was cut from this version.

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Like Radium Smile before it, this song started with the lyrics. Then came the melody as heard on the intro: something to set the tone for the Radioatomic album's 'big finale'. I spent some time last year sampling an electronic game called Parker Brothers' Merlin (see this post) and this seemed a perfect place to use the sounds. As well as the usual DR-550 tom-toms and synthesized percussion, there's the odd found sound in the mix, including a hand-clap with tight reverb recorded in the corner of a concrete foundation, and a pebble being dropped (into a drain pipe, if memory serves).

A Robot In Every Home [electro edit] rather than include the album version on the single I created this alternate mix, which omits the French horns and some of the samples. It has the same shortened bridge as the single edit.

There's currently no video for this track, but it's forthcoming. (updated 12/11/14). This release is twinned with the full Radioatomic album. Stay tuned to the next post for details!

Digital Single: Radium Smile

My intention was to release the Radioatomic album tonight, to coincide with my birthday. But the booklet and liner notes aren't quite finished. Thankfully, the seventh single from the album was ready to go, so here it is: Radium Smile.


Radium Smile is inspired by the plight of the 'Radium Girls', who unwittingly poisoned themselves working for the Radium Dial Company in the early 1900's. Though the lyrics are tongue-in-cheek, I like to think this pays tribute to them in some small way. Musically, it's one of the poppiest from the new album (insasmuch as I write that sort of thing!). Unusually, the lyrics were written first. Once I had an idea of how I was going to sing it, I programmed a bass arpeggio on the K-Station. That synth provides most of the sounds and melodies. The Roland HS-60 makes a brief appearance on the chorus, and string chords from the Crumar Performer give what is a fairly bare-bones track a bit of meat. All percussion is either created from scratch or sourced from found sounds, with the exception of tom-toms from the Boss DR-550. Most of the sounds had already been added by the time the Korg MS-20 Mini arrived, but I managed to sneak it in on a bit of percussion before the mix-down. AnalogX SayIt provides the computer voice.

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I hope to release the album before the end of the month. Stay tuned!

Digital Single: Isotopes For All

The second in my series of free singles is Isotopes For All Parts 1&2. These two tracks date from earlier in the recording sessions than Electro Magnetic, and are a little more indicative of what to expect from the rest of the album.

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Isotopes For All - Part 1 was inspired in part by the works of Atomic Shadow. (If you haven't already, I urge you to give him a listen. He has a new album out called City of Chrome and Glass, which is very good). Further inspiration, including the monologue heard in the track, came from a 1953 educational(?) film called A Is For Atom. The naive and alarming nature of the film, juxtaposed as it is with the cute Disney-esque animation, prompted me to re-purpose it in a way that highlights the more disturbing elements of 1950's atomic-age thinking.

Snippets of the soundtrack were copied to cassette tape and the pitch modified manually with my Marantz PMD201 tape recorder. To my mind this further enhanced both the disturbing and comical nature of the monologue. Forming the basis of the music is some quirky synthesized percussion, rendered using the TAL U-No-LX softsynth. Weaving in and out of the track is a bassline constructed on the Korg Monotribe, and an arpeggio from the K-Station. In between the narrated sections, the Roland HS-60 adds some interesting sounds and the K-Station provides a second bassline.

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Isotopes For All - Part 2 evolved out of a desire to see how the music would sound with a more conventional beat. It was initially a three-minute recording (this became the 'single edit') of Monotribe bassline and K-Station arpeggio with parameters such as filter-cutoff manipulated in real-time, to which the instrumental parts and drums were added. An early version used the Monotribe's analogue drum sounds, but I found they muddied the mix. An 808 kit from the Boss DR-550 left room in the mix for some phased strings courtesy of the Crumar Performer run through a Small Stone phaser.

After receiving the demo, my friend Jimmy sent me an extended mix of the track he'd put together for fun. I liked it so much that I decided to make a longer version myself, and that's how it ended up two-and-a-half minutes longer. By this time the bass patch on the Monotribe (which has no patch memory) was long-since gone. I came close to replicating it, but it didn't have quite the edge of the original, so I used a mix of the original recording and the new.

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96.1Mhz, an experimental 'atmosphere' was included on the e.p. to break up the two different versions of Isotopes Part 2. It consists of a recording of radio interference augmented by sound effects from the Korg Monotribe.

Digital Single: Electro Magnetic

Leading up to the release of my new album, I'll be releasing a series of free two-track singles. The first of these is Electro Magnetic/Nibiru. It will be available for free on my Bandcamp page until the next single is released (at least two weeks).

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Electro Magnetic was inspired by the knowledge that electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) are buzzing around us almost constantly in our technological society. Far from being gloom-and-doom, however, Electro Magnetic is an upbeat electropop song with minimal vocals and a focus on synthesized percussion and electronic rhythms. I came up with the idea when I was walking in the woods, and recorded some hand-percussion into my digital recorder so I'd remember it. It was later re-created in the studio. The sounds were created on Novation K-Station and Roland HS-60. The Crumar Performer is also featured on the bridge, and the Boss DR-550 provided the tom-toms.

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Nibiru began as a bass sequence on the Korg Monotribe. I recorded an improvisation of various filter and LFO tweaks as a single take and constructed the rest of the track around it. Also featured are the Roland HS-60, an arpeggio from the K-Station, and some Speak & Spell percussion samples. The title was inspired by a phantom sun purportedly hiding behind our own.

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Also included is a single edit of Electro Magnetic, which omits the extended breakdown. It essentially follows the same structure as my original demo.

Cover Song: The Tick Tock Man

This year mark's the 30th Anniversary of Gary Numan's classic Warriors album. To celebrate, Numanme has put together the Warriors Tribute project, featuring fan covers of songs from the album. For my contribution I decided to cover a song called The Tick Tock Man. It's not my favourite from the album (that would be This Prison Moon), but it's a well-crafted and oft-overlooked tune I thought could do with some exposure.

For those of you not familiar with it, here's Gary Numan's 1983 original, courtesy of YouTube:


And here's my re-interpretation:


The bassline and a lot of the melodies were made with the Novation K-Station. Chords and pads are Roland HS60. There are some 'big 80s drums' courtesy of the Boss DR-550, some Speak & Spell percussion samples, and the rest of the percussion was synthesized from scratch. The Spring Thing Mks. II & III can be heard on the intro and outro, and the Crumar Performer provides some strings. I should also mention an Alesis SamplePad was used to record the tom-toms. I've not had a chance to write a post about that piece of equipment yet.

My good friend Jimmy Aaron sang the backing vocals, doing a good job of the parts originally sung by Tracey Ackerman. The rest of the vocals and the vocoder fell to me. This song isn't really in my key but I think I did a reasonable job.

Word is that the Warriors Tribute will be a professionally printed 2CD set limited to fifty copies. The contributing artists each get a copy and the remainder will go on ebay to cover the cost of manufacture. If you miss the opportunity to get hold of it, you can download my version of The Tick Tock Man from my SoundCloud page (for free, of course).

New Equipment: Boss DR-550 mkII Drum Machine

In advance of getting a drum pad MIDI controller, I purchased this MIDI-capable drum machine. The DR-550 is part of the 'Dr. Rhythm' line made by Roland under the Boss imprint. I own two earlier models, the DR-220A and 220B, so was already familiar with how these machines function. They're quite fun once you get used to their eccentricities. A lot of functions rely on holding down the shift button, for instance, when dedicated buttons would have been more intuitive.

The original DR-550 was manufactured in 1986. I haven't been able to confirm when the mkII came out. The drum kit in the mkII was expanded to 91 sounds from about half that. Among these sounds are some fantastic 'big 80's drums' that I'm sure were a big selling point in 1986. It also contains 10 sounds sampled from the famous Roland TR-808, which is perhaps more of a selling point in 2013.

I've found that the internal timing clock is slightly faster than that in my DAW (it's a similar story with the Alesis SR-16). After much trial and error I was able to sync it via MIDI, but it's still not 100%. I found that letting the sequence run and using the second bar instead of the first seems to work best.

To hear what the DR-550 sounds like, I recommend checking out this page at Cyborg Studio* where you can preview the kit from the unexpanded machine, and also purchase the sample pack if you desire. *Please note I'm in no way affiliated with Cyborg Studio, but I think their site is pretty cool.