Mattias Westlund

Most of us who use computers for music production are caught in an unending spiral of upgrades and migrations and searching high and low for new toys. But in this high-tech maze of almost endless possibilities it’s easy to forget that limitations can be a source of inspiration.

My main system is a 2010 quad-core with 8GB RAM. Despite being three years old (and an AMD), this machine is still so powerful that it handles everything I throw at it without even breaking a sweat. The largest and most taxing projects I have push it close to 60% CPU usage, but that’s about it.

Which is great of course, but I find it hard adapting to this luxurious abundance of processing power. Throughout my life as a computer user I’ve always battled the hard limitations of my systems. CPU, RAM, graphics cards, hard disk space. It seems there was always something that required just a little more than my machine could handle, forcing me to spend crazy amounts of time streamlining and optimizing every little tweakable detail of my OS. Living on the edge, so to speak.

These days I can do pretty much whatever I want without having to worry about my computer suddenly shitting its pants and falling over, and this on an OS (Windows 7) that I haven’t changed a single thing on except cosmetics and usability since I installed it a year and a half ago. The only bottleneck in my system is my Geforce 9600GT which is starting to show it’s age, something that is obviously only apparent in newer games.

Oddly enough this hasn’t made me any more productive. On the contrary I find myself getting increasingly caught up in little details like, say, finding the perfect effects chain for a 2 second transitional sound effect in a song, or choosing which synths or samples to layer for that string pad that sits behind everything else. When what I really should be doing is finish that damn song already and worry about the mixing and production bits afterwards.

Simply put, having this much power at my fingertips encourages me to tinker rather than make music.

Then a few days ago, on a whim, I decided to use my laptop for laying down the basics for a song idea that’s been spinning in my head for a while. My laptop, unlike my stationary machine, is definitely at the bottom end of the spectrum. It’s a budget ASUS from 2008 with a 1.5GHz Celeron processor and 3GB RAM, running Windows XP. Not a terrible computer overall, it’s snappy enough for everyday tasks, but for DAW work it’s pretty pathetic.

I’ve had this lappy for a year and a half or so (my girlfriend gave it to me as she wasn’t using it) and yes, I have used it for some modest music making tasks all along. But I’ve always been frustrated by the fact that it can’t handle the stuff I’m used to so it’s been mostly a musical scratch pad, something for capturing rough ideas when I’m away from my main machine.

This, however, was the first time I sat down with my laptop with the clear intention of using it for more serious work. And after the initial hurdle of letting go of most of my favorite plugins and sample sets and picking some more CPU and RAM-frugal alternatives… it was a ton of fun!

Suddenly I found that this limited setup had a lot more speaking for it than I could have imagined. Not only did it allow me to dust off some oldies that won’t even run on Win 7 x64, like my trusty old Yamaha S-YXG50 and a plethora of early/mid 2000′s freeware VST’s and DX’s that I hadn’t seen or even thought about since I started working with plugins.

It also forced me to focus on the important stuff. When you can’t just add things without suffering a noticeable performance hit, you start thinking a lot harder on the value of the parts in your arrangement. You tend to forego all the extraneous fluff for the sake of making the other parts sound the best they can. And that, my friends, was a valuable lesson to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going make my lappy my main music production platform. But I will certainly not disregard it again as a serious tool for music making, despite its seemingly measly specs. It also made me realize that there’s value to be found in the forgotten, outdated plugins of yesteryear and keeping an XP machine around that will run them is probably not a bad idea.

This whole thing also inspired me to embark on a more extreme retro-computing venture, but that is another story.

It’s easy to be seduced by the power of modern computers and if you don’t possess a stronger sense of determination than mine they will sidetrack you and make you forget why you’re using them in the first place.

To create.

No updates from me for a while, as you may or may not have noticed. I wish I could say this indicates some new orchestral goodness to come. I really wish I could. But the truth is I got more than a little disheartened by the outcome of my request for donations back in December, and on top of that the the trouble I had to go through to make a site claiming to be “on my side” to pay me money they owed me.

FTR: I’m not in this for the money. Far from it. I just thought that offering free and open music would be worth more to people. Apparently I was wrong.

Sorry about the grumpy tone of all this, I’m extremely grateful for the donations I did receieve, but honestly there is no reason for me to release anything new when the sole reason people are using my music is that it’s free.

See what I’m getting at?

A few years ago I published a three-part guide on orchestral instrument positioning over on the Wesnoth forums. There was a lot of people there who were struggling to get started with making music for the game and when I realized many of them were having the same problems and asking essentially the same questions, I got the idea of writing up a beginner’s guide. You know, a sticky thread with a bunch of tips that might come in handy. If nothing else, I could just link to that thread instead of typing the same responses over and over when people asked.

As usual when I get in my head to start some project, it immediately inflates beyond all sensible proportions (the project, not my head). I have never been able to make a long story short so soon I found myself sitting there with dozens upon dozens of jotted-down, semi-related, and very verbose paragraphs. I meant to connect everything into a sensible whole, I really did, but it all dragged out for so long that finally I decided to just organize the material I had into some semblance of order and publish it.

As you can understand I was never really happy with that guide, as it wasn’t what I had set out to write in the first place. It was a haphazard jumble of tips and thoughts and I’m not sure whether it was ever helpful to anyone. Also, even though all of it was well-meaning, some pieces of information were in retrospect a little misleading. I’m still learning and what I considered good advice two or three years ago might sound really dumb to me today.

Here I go again, making a long story even longer. Anyway. I’ve been trying to rewrite and update this guide for probably a year now and I sort of apprehensively present to you the first part: Orchestral Positioning: Panning. Apprehensively because I know that yet again some of my advice will make no sense to me a couple of years from now when I have even more experience, and I feel bad about offering what might turn out to be bad advice. But that’s a fact of life. If I’m going to wait until my knowledge is all-encompassing, I will go to my grave without having uttered a single word of advice to anyone.

And yes it’s still verbose, it still doesn’t have any really great structure, but this is at least a lot better then the original version.

Now back to working on the following parts…

Today is winter solstice, and what better way to celebrate this actual new year’s eve than with some music?

The Longest Night is a cute little tune that might come in handy for your holiday music playlists and youtube Christmas cards. CC-BY license, as always.

Happy solstice!

I rarely flat out ask for donations because it makes me feel greedy. But as Xmas is the season of giving I would just like to remind you that I’m giving music away here all year, with very liberal terms of use, so this might be a good time for you to give something back.

You can donate any amount via PayPal, or maybe get me something from my (very modest) eBay wishlist? [seems this feature is broken, thanks eBay!]

And unlike virtually all the big-name artists around, the money you send my way will not go towards lining the pockets of record label execs and redundant middle men. It will go directly to me, allowing me to cover all the various expenses of being a musician and making sure that I can keep providing you with free music for your game projects, youtube videos (yes I’m looking at you, Minecraft players!) and whatnot.

If you can’t donate, you can help out in other ways.

- Spread the word about me and my work in any way you can. Maybe you have friends and followers who are into this kind of music? Post it on Twitter, Facebook and all the social media waterholes.

- If you’re on Facebook, feel free to like my artist page and tell your friends about it.

- You good with some video editing software? I’m looking to release a bunch of my tracks on my youtube channel, but I don’t have time to do something interesting with this myself.

- Drop me a line and just say thanks or keep up the good work. I know this might seem trivial but believe it or not, it helps A LOT.

Happy holidays!

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only musician who has accumulated vast amounts of abandoned musical ideas over the years. You know, the I’ll let this rest for a while and this is good, I need to make something of this stuff.

I normally keep a list of all the little bits I consider good (or at least useable) so that I can go back to them and either finish them or use them in other compositions. It’s great to have a database of snippets for when you’re stuck on a tune or need to kickstart a new one.

But as time and technology progress, and you realize that some of these snippets were made years ago in a host that won’t even run on your current OS, using samples that have been moved, renamed or even deleted, then maybe it’s time to just let them go. But one man’s trash is another one’s treasure so who am I to say no one could find them useful?

Unfinished Business is a small collection of tracks made between mid 2007 and early 2009, most of them very short and rough. And by rough I don’t mean “needs a little more work” — I mean cobbled-together ideas that never really got anywhere. Feel free to use them for anything you want (as always: CC-BY license), my only reservation is this: parts of them might appear in my new compositions!

Some updates to the Samples page. First of all, I have uploaded everything to Google Drive, let me know how that works out for you. Secondly, I have added three experimental SSO packs: sustain variations for 1st and 2nd violins, plus two different tremolo violin patches. All of them should be considered alpha quality — they’re anything but perfect but you might find them useful. Be aware that they might need some work as they’re unlooped and (IIRC) not normalized.

I have also made available a staccato violas patch that was meant to go in the SSO 1.1 release. Unzip the sfz file and “Samples” folder directly into your SSO dir.

Stand by for more SSO odds and ends

Edit: it appears that Google Drive lists the contents of the zip files. You will need to go to File -> Download to get the archive. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I still vividly remember my joy when I got the Swedish edition of the Talisman board game as a Christmas gift back in the eighties. In fact I still have this dog-eared copy of the game, though it’s been retired since I bought a modernized version of the game a few years ago.

If you’ve never played this wonderful classic, I suggest you head over to talisman-game.com and treat yourself to a virtual version of the game. Hats off to Nomad Games for bringing Talisman to a wider audience!

And oh, the game features a bunch of my tracks

Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra’s second birthday is getting awfully close now. I just can’t believe it’s been that long since I released it. And before that I tinkered with the library on and off for almost a year and a half. The first public alpha release of samples from what would become SSO was in August 2009. That’s more than three years ago. And, I admit it, not much has happend since in terms of development.

So I guess it will come as no big surprise to anyone if I say that it’s very unlikely that SSO will ever be updated. At least not in its present form. I know there’s a lot of people who like SSO and I feel really bad about saying this, but it’s only fair making it official instead of keeping you all waiting. And I just don’t want to feel the pressure of being expected to update it anymore.

Why, you ask? Well, there are several reasons. The main one being that my time is limited. I have a job and a kid. These things have to take precedence no matter what, as I’m sure you understand. And when it comes to my free time I have to prioritize. While I love creating and working on samples of various kinds, I am first and foremost a musician and a composer. Making music is what I do, it’s my passion — it’s what defines me as a person. If I have to choose between playing/composing and creating sample libraries… then I’m afraid creating sample libraries will have to go, as much as it pains me.

Another reason is that SSO, from my perspective, is a project that’s getting long in the tooth. I started working on it because I was curious about the results one could get from faking orchestral sections by layering solo instruments, placing them in an artificial space and so on. As all SSO users will likely attest, it worked out surprisingly well. Still, the library has numerous flaws and it doesn’t make sense to me to keep working on it. Because it’s been more than three years. Because SSO began as an experiment rather than a carefully planned project.

I didn’t really know what I was doing and where I was going, and I didn’t stop to think about it a lot because it was fun and it was turning out much better than I hoped. It never crossed my mind that this weird concoction of free samples and hobbyist-level audio engineering might actually become fairly popular, and that people would expect me to provide updates for it. It still feels completely surreal to me that musicians all around the globe are using SSO as a serious composing tool. I’m humbled and flattered, but it’s still surreal.

Simply put, creating SSO taught me a lot of things. The most important one being that I am only a single person and attempting to create something as complex as an orchestral sample library in my free time is hubris of the highest degree. SSO certainly gave me a deeper understanding of what it takes to create orchestral libraries. Let me put it this way: I used to scoff at the pricing of VSL and other high-end libraries. I don’t do that anymore.

Nevertheless, SSO isn’t dead just because I say there will be no updates. You have the library. It is open and free and you can use, modify and share it to your heart’s content. And if you read the early bits of this post again, you will notice that it says “At least not in its present form”. No promises, no deadlines, no hints of anything specific to come. But rest assured that SSO is not the last release you’ll see from me.

In my previous post about VSS I mentioned that the same results can probably be had with other and more inexpensive tools — and looky here what turned up in the KVR Developer Challenge 2012:

Proximity – This plug-in is an easy to use distance “pan-pot” based on several psycho-acoustic models. The idea is to give mixing engineer a reliable tool which allows him to manipulate the “depth” of several sound sources in a straight forward and convincing manner.

Space360 – The Space 360 can be used to add spatial “context” to sampled and synthesized sources, to achieve perfectly accurate binaural panning of stereo tracks, to put multiple tracks into the same virtual “room,” or to just add that perfect amount of reverb to make the source sit perfectly in the mix.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to slam the VSS developer or anything and I have only had a very brief look at the above plugins. Just saying that maybe my hunch that you don’t need to pay a hundred bucks for this functionality was even closer to the mark than I thought.