some of my music - 'Breath Bird'

brandon

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
Music making is one of my hobbies, though I'm more of a sound engineer than a composer - always enjoyed making weird/beautiful/silly/surprising sounds with computers, but wasn't really happy with anything I made until the last few years.. It's pretty simple stuff, not objective art or anything fancy, but this album 'Breath Bird' from 2019 is far and away my favourite... the album I put the most of "me" into.. It's instrumental, not about anything, but more just music to evoke a mood - In this case the mood of a fresh breeze blowing in from over the sea, playful birds going about their business in the jungle.

I attached a few tracks here, or the whole thing is streamable from bandcamp if you want to hear more: breath bird, by eryngi

I used to be into spectacle, big bombastic sound, fast and loud and weird, but as I get older I gravitate more towards simpler and gentler things.. Not sure if I'll ever make more electronic music - haven't done any in over a year now. I feel like that time has passed. And making music with a computer, it's all very locked-in, everything's aligned to a grid and running in perfect time. It doesn't *have* to be, but you have to go to a lot of effort to step outside that feeling (something I tried to do a lot with Breath Bird, with partial success I think, though it's still very obviously computery... it's a combination of programmed notes, somewhat inept live performance on keyboard, and pseudo-algorithmically generated parts)... I learnt classical guitar as a kid and would quite like to take that up again.. Anyway, thanks for reading/listening :)
 

Attachments

  • 2 breath bird.mp3
    8.1 MB
  • 5 ebba.mp3
    5.4 MB
  • 7 towards agathasea.mp3
    6.9 MB
  • 3 azearth.mp3
    7.1 MB
Cool, I like ebba the most.
May I ask did you mix and master it yourself? I have some raw piece which I made in FL (minimal style) , but have no idea about mixing, so I am curious about it.
 
Cool, I like ebba the most.
May I ask did you mix and master it yourself? I have some raw piece which I made in FL (minimal style) , but have no idea about mixing, so I am curious about it.

Thanks PerfectCircle! Yep, I mixed and mastered it, though it's not really technically 'mastered' like what they do with professional, commercial recordings.. I used to work as a sound engineer and have had a lot of practice at getting things to sound good (to my ears at least) and consistent-ish when played on all different speakers :)

The way I think of sound mixing is, well, it's down to personal taste in the end, or what works for any given song...I often really like weird, rough, uneven or muddy recordings. They can be quite characterful and human..

But a more 'polished' sound is lovely too. When everything's well balanced it can all come together and be greater than the sum of its parts. To that end, in mixing, the most important general thing I've learned is, turn the volume down! The longer you're working on a song, the louder you tend to turn it as your ears become fatigued, and I think it becomes much harder to hear the mix as a whole - you end up focusing on each specific part/instrument/frequency range individually.. But if you turn it right down so you can barely hear it, it's like zooming out to where you can hear how all the different parts work together, as a whole. It sounds so simple and sort of obvious but counter-intuitive.. but try it.. mixing at super low volume, works wonders!

(Sorry if that's way too general, I can get more specific if you have any specific questions about this stuff.. it's hard to know where to start if someone asks, what is sound mixing? :) It's basically just getting different sounds to fit together in a way that sounds good to you, and hopefully sounds alright on various different speakers/headphones/etc)
 
It sounds good enough ;)
Thanks, I will certainly check some guides on mixing and mastering when I catch more time. All I know is that bass and snare should not be panned and that removing some part of frequency registers should do the trick. :)
 
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