Thursday, July 28, 2011

Bragware Report: Imprecations, by Ceo1 & Abandoned Orchard, by Nikolai Bonamente

Probably the most rewarding feedback I receive from Reason Patch A Day is when readers send me emails to share what they've created with the patches posted here. Recently, French artist Ceo1 sent me an email to share a new track that he created using only patches that had been posted during the blog's first few months, back in 2008.

Ceo1 explains:


I like from time to time to write songs under rules (like with only one refill bank, only with a piano, etc.). Often, having rules enables me to focus more on the feel of the piece, rather than wandering through my 10,000 refills (note : I don't actually have 10,000 refills, but you catch my drift).

So, I did it like this with your instruments: I tried them all and felt what could inspire me and started from there to develop a theme. I hit a wall with the 2008 instruments, because even though I find them very neat sounding and inspiring to me, they were a bit similar. Don't get me wrong, I love them, but I felt they were in the same category of dark pads or something like that (besides the Paper Towel Tube, of course).

In the end I like what I've done with it, but I'm pretty sure that I can do something maybe better with your other sounds, which I have to try, and that's a whole lot more!


Ceo - Imprecations by Ceo1

As Ceo1 explained to me, the patches used in Imprecations were: Ancient Tongue, John Carpenter, Dreary Chorus, Ice Age, Paper Towel Tube, the Yamaha RX 11 samples, Ominous Cloud, Under Emergency Power, and Vocode - Creese




You may remember the name of long time reader Nikolai Bonamente, formerly 1.44MB, who has shared a number of songs here on Reason Patch A Day, stretching back to his two tracks that were a part of the original PAD Challenge in August of 2010.

I've had the pleasure of exchanging more than a few emails with Nikolai over the last year and have been following him on Soundcloud as well. I've been impressed with his ability to crank out the tunes. He seems to turn them out faster than I can listen to them, but I thought I'd highlight one of his more recent tunes, a song called Abandoned Orchard that he posted a couple of months ago.

Abandoned Orchard uses the Rectification patch and might be my favorite track Nikolai has produced. He describes it by saying:


With Abandoned orchard I started off with the bass - playing with it's distortion was very pleasing to my ear - I'd had a few bars lying around for while and then along came the strings which seemed like a really good fit.


You can hear Abandoned Orchard here:

Abandoned orchard by Nikolai Bonamente




Thank you both, Ceo1 and Nikolai Bonamente, for sharing your tracks with me and the readers here on Reason Patch A Day. If anyone has any constructive comments or criticism to offer, please leave them on either Ceo1 or Nikoali's Soundcloud pages, or feel free to leave them a note here in the comments.

If you have a track of your own that you'd like to highlight on the blog, please send me an email with a link to your track and a description, so I can post it here. I'm always eager to hear what's being done with the patches shared here, so I'd love to hear from you.

3 comments:

Nikolai said...

Glad you like the track Rob - the string PAD was the key that really made the whole thing come together. It's a great PAD bourne out by the fact that most of the favorable comments I've had refer directly to them.

I'm like a kid in a candy store when I'm playing with reason, that coupled with my musical ADD means I have a shed-load of fragments and unfinished tracks lying around. PAD has been and continues to be a great source of sonic glue to stitch them together and actually finish some tracks (as much as a track is ever really 'finished'). For me that was one of the great things about the PAD challenge - it forced me to finally finish something and made me much more aware of where I needed to improve. The ability to look under the hood of the other contributors tracks really helped me move forward with the quality of my tracks. If you come up with another challenge of some description I hope it's a similarly fruitful experience.

I've been fairly productive this year I've been trying to put something new up on Soundcloud every 2-4 weeks to share the love and get some feedback. Honestly though I tip my hat in your direction - the number of PADs and ideas you come up with is truely heroic!

Jonny Easton said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Nikolai said...

The correct number of refills is n+1 (n = the number you have at any one moment in time).

In truth we all have infinite refills as all you have to do is click the 'initialize device' tab and start tweaking for yourself. Commercial refills can really help your learning process as you can look under the hood and see how they tweak the controls to achieve their sounds.

I've collected refills from all over - from bought to freebies both legit and torrented. Search around the intertubes there's a larger supply than you'll ever need sloshing around.