Sometimes making music can be really hard…

Depending on the track it might take you no more than a couple of hours to produce something that sounds decent, or it might take weeks and weeks (sometimes months, years!) of going through countless permutations of the same song, deleting complete arrangements and starting over again and again before you come up with a satisfactory result.

The track we are currently working on unfortunately falls in the latter category…Under the working title “Gentle” the song first came to life in Anders’ home studio, where Anders produced a couple of initial drafts:

Version 1
First draft was based on a simple bouncy drum groove:

Gentle – Version A by subdelay

Version 2
Second version was more ambient with huge strings making up the bulk of the arrangement:

Gentle – Version B by subdelay

Version 3
Third version Anders returned to a more rhythmical groove:

Gentle – Version C by subdelay

…and this was the point where Anders felt he’d…had enough and decided to pass the track on to me. I personally really liked the first two versions and wanted to combine them somehow, but sadly a lot of the original elements where lost due to computer trouble, so I went to work with whatever was left and began adding some new elements.

Version 4
My first draft was a breakbeat driven affair which worked fairly well in the verse but sounded terrible once it got to the chorus:

Gentle – Version D by subdelay

Version 5
My second draft, the current version which…I am still not quite sure how I feel about! :/ It does have a “Sub Delay”-sound to it I guess (to the point of being “samey”??):

Gentle – Version E by subdelay

…Meh. Back to work!

View on SoundCloud

View on SoundCloud

View on SoundCloud

View on SoundCloud

View on SoundCloud

Remember when Anders and I used to do something called “Sub Delay Sessions” where we would take turns DJing, streaming tracks live over the internet? …No? Well, we did. And we’re doing it again.

Without further ado then, feast your eyes (and ears) on my pink-shirted self below, as I work through the 6th installment of Sub Delay Sessions recorded earlier today. I’m particular proud of the part where I manage to stop the track that is mixed in, or the other part where the camera changes and you can’t hear any sound for a while!

Sub Delay Sessions 6 on Ustream.tv

As always, we went through a couple of versions before settling on the final cover for the Low Ground album. Thought it might be fun to share them so you can see what the album could have looked like!

Version 1 – Airplane

The first version we experimented with was a picture taken by a colleague who is an avid amateur photographer in her spare time. The picture had a dark mood to it that I liked, but in the end we couldn’t find a version of the picture in high enough resolution to be printed, and also we weren’t entirely sure it suited the concept of the album so eventually we starting looking elsewhere.

Version 2 – People in the night

Anders mentioned that when listening to the album he got the mental image of a city with blurred silhouettes of people. Don’t ask. I didn’t. Instead I went on a hunt across Flickr and came up with the picture above, which I believe is taken somewhere in Germany? (I am sorry, I seem to have lost the username of the photographer…If any knows, write a comment!)

However, we didn’t feel completely comfortable using something that wasn’t more….”ours”, and so another couple of days passed as I began rummaging through my old photo archives.

Version 3 – Final

We finally settled on using a photograph taken by me on a trip to Kyoto in Japan, showing a view of the city, famously surrounded by mountains, right after sunset. The photo was taken from “Kiyomizudera”, a more than 1000-year old buddhist temple which itself is set on top of a mountain.

The temple is well known for having a large stage protruding out from the mountainside. It was traditionally believed that if you could survive the 13 meter jump from here, you would be granted a wish. The practice is now (obviously) prohibited, but in the Edo period more than 230 jumps where registered, of which about 85% actually survived the fall!

Anyway, we thought the atmosphere of the picture suited the music well, and were happy with the fact that it was something entirely of our own making, thus it ended up being the one we stuck with. Listen to the album here and judge for yourself whether we made the right choice!

Messing around in Traktor while trying out ustream:

Sub Delay – DJ Live (Test Run) on Ustream.tv

Taking advantage of a rare opportunity to actually be in the same room, Anders and I cooked up this little dub-like track during my visit to Copenhagen last year.

Copenhagen Jam Session by subdelay

Everything was basically improvised live on two computers running in sync (set up in Anders’ living room). Although we started out having lots and lots of parts playing together all at once, after a bit of weeding out we came up with this rather sparsely instrumentated version.

Since this was done on two separate computers, we ended up each taking home “half” of the track (like one of those spy movies where two people hold a master key in order to prevent the accidental launching of a ballistic missile), but recently I finally got a chance to merge everything back together (missiles away!).

Whether this will ever be developed into a full length track is yet uncertain…comments are welcome!