My new lobit/lofi/alternative/pop/rock album made with Renoise was released today on Sub65 Media.
It’s free to stream and download
https://archive.org/details/s65148
Here’s a music video for one of the songs
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I feel those are good songs. I would like to know the lyrics, if there are any.
How did you encode them? lame? ffmpeg? sox?
Thank you for listening and your feedback. I encoded with oggdropXPd RareWares - Ogg Vorbis oggdropXPd
Here are the lyrics:
Fire Engine Steamboat
Yes I was awake I got to see horses on the riverboat / Making their way down the blue crystal current / Those of us on the riverside we saw with our alert open eyes / The steamboat fire engine approaching close behind / And then we looked back closely at the horse boat / And then we noticed more smoke than usual / The sudden realization fell on us warm and strong / The riverboat horses are destined to be saved / Without a doubt there was families of horses / Traveling together on the burning riverboat / God bless the firefighters of the fire engine steamboat / Rescuing the horses before the crack of dawn / And what we’ve seen will stand the test of time / Those stories will pass on to the horse loving generations / We’ll never forget the bold bravery of the firefighters from the fire engine steamboat / Those horses will see their green and peaceful destination / Call it a win for the horse population
Aweigh
Raised and clear of the bottom of the bay floor / And the navy sailor starts to sing her song / Admiral is on the phone with the president of the motherland / Telling him the fleet is ready for the journey ahead / But the president says it’s not a journey / It’s just a routine voyage at sea / Be sure to drill them and sharpen their skills / Have them ready for the anything for the unforseen / Have them ready for the protection of the nation / Meanwhile the shipmates are chattering with each other / Making big plans for the ports they pull up to / And the husbands and wives in the land they’ll be leaving / Are well connected with the satellite email / And the anchor rises at a moderate speed / And the captain wishes the crew health and godspeed / The navy sailor starts to sing her song / And the rest of the crew start to sing along / The cruiser ship is on its way / For life at sea day after day / And the crew will learn and share with each other / In the most intimate ways
Hope And Lana
Hope and Lana walking down the boulevard with the boots they picked out together / Now it’s lunchtime and time to go to the outside table of their favorite restaurant / And they take out their phones to share their recent pictures / And who’s that cute guy bringing us our salads / Tickled pink Hope don’t you think so / So much we have in common / And our shades are Ray-Bans to block the sun / Who are the queens of the Friday afternoon / Alex I’ll take two wonderful singers for a thousand / Ooooo Hope and Lana keeping it true for you / Ooooo Hope and Lana for your heart / It’s time to stop the talk and make the plans / We’ll take this show around the planet with Chris Isaak
Brother Sam
It’s remarkable how much I didn’t know that I needed you / Brother Sam teaching the kingdom with the word of the Lord / With the heart of a teacher and mind of a kingdom man / The topic papers you prepared for our lessons / A reading each week / The lesson you teach / Are making progress for the kingdom / Brother Sam our journey is now on pause / I trust it’ll resume in the day of resurrection / In our glorified bodies we will meet again / Under the perfect government of the Lord / One added to the kingdom / Brother Sam I’ll see you again / The day awaits we’ll see the Lord’s face together in the kingdom
Conversation Town
Happy man fitted what feels right / Down to the wire / Higher than the words require / Of this talk we’re having as we walk up and down conversation town / Every house building and store has a flag blowing in the wind / And the pets of the town people have collars that match those flags / So yeah we’re here in conversation town today / Reporting all the good news and quoting all the nice things to say / Underneath the sewers are green and slimy / And the odor of the words behind me / Are headed home to roost with the words they choose / Ain’t no human-like turtles fighting off the worst of the sewers / And the rats are regular rats just crawling around underneath the town / The plumbers and city sanitation workers of this town / Are the only ones who will see both sides of things
Legendary Lunar Style
Strut from the lunar lander that you came in / Stepping over moon rocks / Headed to fix the robot / And as far out as it seems girl / Your lunar sandals brought style to the moon / And your moon lander copilot is taking notes on your fabulous moonwalk / Now there’s one modern lady bringing a new style to the moon / And the folks in charge at NASA are changing the space suits to honor you / But what’s most important is you’re a trained astronaut / And no one can reduce you down to a lunar sex symbol / But shoot you got no boots / You’re rocking them lunar sandals / Go on with your mission girl / You got this with your style / Equipped with the perfect tools headed for that robot / NASA’s so lucky your expertise is saving them money / And the reason why you can rock out lunar sandals on the moon / Is because after the war they gave you titanium legs and feet / The girls and boys on earth they’ve found a role model in you / And the fashionistas of this planet continue to honor your legend / Your legendary lunar style
Dream With False Memory
I’m having a dream / The kind of dream with false memories / And I swear that I had these thoughts before / After I wake up and think about it / I realize those memories weren’t real / A false memory inside my wildest dream / I could have sworn there was history / I was tricked by these dream memories before / Sudden and instant recollection at once / Fire after fire moments and memories / Higher and higher they come in the dreams
Mental Compulsion Management (And The Struggle For Clarity)
And so I’ve learned that the effort I put in / Becomes the size of the opening of the gates of freedom / Mental compulsion management and the struggle for clarity / In your sacred space / I’ll keep my mind from muddying the waters of thought / Strength as I have to keep every thought in line / The landscape of the mind is key / The key to a meaningful relationship / And the joy that only comes from your light / May the inspiration for the effort only come from you
Timeless Beauty
So new tomorrow / So old yesterday / So old tomorrow / So new yesterday / Late have I loved you / Beauty so ancient and new / Lo you were within but I was outside / Seeking hopelessly restlessly for you / You called shouted broke through my deafness / You flared blazed banished my blindness / They held me back far from you / those things which would have no being were they not in you
Nice lyrics.
Why ogg instead of the other one? Does it sound good in this usage?
It is interesting that it is not only not Renoise-like, but not very DAW-like either.
Maybe it’s the effects from the encoding, but overall it sounds like something carefully crafted with a Tascam 4-track recorder, drum machine, synthesizers like Casiotone and Korg M1, guitar, bass, SM58, etc.
Do you feel like you are using Renoise as a drum machine role?
How else are you editing?
Are you perhaps recording a live performance with Renoise and then playing it back directly on C4?
Or are you using it with REAPER, Audacity (Tenacity), etc.?
I also found it interesting that you are using archive.org.
Why ogg instead of the other one? Does it sound good in this usage?
I like ogg vorbis because it’s patent free and also sounds better (to my liking) at the lower bitrates compared to mp3.
It is interesting that it is not only not Renoise-like, but not very DAW-like either.
Maybe it’s the effects from the encoding, but overall it sounds like something carefully crafted with a Tascam 4-track recorder, drum machine, synthesizers like Casiotone and Korg M1, guitar, bass, SM58, etc.
I used Renoise as the master DAW. The external instruments I used were my Fender Duo-Sonic HS, Akai MPC One (Akai MPC has internal Bass and Drum synths and a handful of emulated synths), and Neewer NW-800 condenser mic for vocals.
Do you feel like you are using Renoise as a drum machine role?
How else are you editing?
For the tracks that employ a simple breakbeat loop, this is within Renoise. Some of the tracks the drums were programmed with the Akai MPC One drum synth. Same with the bass and synths. Some were made within Renoise, and others made within MPC. For most of the tracks I created the entire outline draft of the song in Renoise, then render and send the draft WAV into my MPC One. Using the draft WAV as playback reference, I made any drum, bass, synth tracks using the MPC pad grid to perform the notes. Then render those tracks and send them into the Renoise project and C4 the MPC-made tracks with Autoseek turned on.
While it is possible use the Akai MPC One with its Vsti software within Renoise (and not have to make and send drum, bass and synth tracks into Renoise), I find I prefer keeping the two separate. I like to sit in front of the MPC One itself just jam out on the pads and create any drums, bass, and synth tracks needed to later trigger within Renoise.
I still have to get a midi piano keyboard to use with Renoise and/or the MPC. But for now the MPC pads do just fine, they have velocity and pressure sensitivities so it helps to make drums, bass, synth parts naturally expressive.
Are you perhaps recording a live performance with Renoise and then playing it back directly on C4?
Yes, for recording the guitars and vocals, I perform and record within the Renoise sampler, and then C4 them with Autoseek turned on. Any of the recorded guitars and vocals are the length of a handful of consecutive patterns at the very most. The lot of them are small… one or two patterns in length. So it’s no bother at all to do everything within Renoise without using it rewired with Reaper or some DAW better equipped for multitracking large wav files. And as far as any lengthier instrument tracks that are made by the MPC then C4’d inside Renoise, there’s only 3 or 4 of them at the most within a renoise project, so the project files themselves don’t take too long to load or save at all.
I also found it interesting that you are using archive.org.
I love Internet Archive.
I see. I am impressed with your rich work. Thank you.
The missing information stimulates the listener’s imagination and makes him or her supplement it themselves.
This is good stuff.
If you don’t mind, can you share the .xrns file with me/us?
I would like to see how it is structured.
Sure, I’ll share one https://files.catbox.moe/ikpc1y.xrns As one might clearly see, my work certainly isn’t rocket science. It’s simply using Renoise the way it describes itself on their website as a complete multitrack DAW with a tracker interface. As can be noticed in the example xrns, I’m not even concerned about any channels peaking into the red. There’s a Renoise maximizer dsp in the master channel that I activated when rendering the final master track, then used that master WAV in oggXPd to crush it down into the final 32kbps ogg file. This example also shows of an instrument that I forgot to mention, my Ipad with SoundPrism loaded up with its stock organ sound…same approach as recording the guitars and vocals, I recorded the chords in Renoise’s sampler then triggering them with C4. I think the only external VSTs that the xrns uses is the first version of izotope ozone imager free for one or two of the vocal tracks, and one called DeepBoard for one of the guitar tracks
There is a “#Line Input” on tracks 1, 9, and 15. So you used this to record to the pattern.
This is one of the reasons why it seemed less DAW-like and more MTR-like.
When working with a DAW, sometimes the details can be distracting, but with Renoise, I felt it was possible to hide them and make it easier to work with.
It would be just as simple to use as a Tascam 4-track recorder combined with a drum machine with sampler.
You are using MPC One as an intuitive instrument/editor and finally playing it on C4 with Renoise.
I thought it would be useful to have such an instrument or software (Renoise or MPC One here) that is somewhere between a guitar and a DAW.
Thanks for elaborating. I learned a lot. I liked your piece too.
Are there any sites, people, etc. that do comparative studies of ogg, opus, mp3, wav encoders, etc. in the context of this kind of “high quality lo-fi” in music?
Thank you for your kind words, and I appreciate your feedback. And yes, those input channels are used exactly how you imagine. Those are the channels where I #Line Input with my M-Audio Fast Track Pro interface.
As far as any sites that that go into a comparative study of encoders in the context of high quality lofi in music, I don’t know of any, but I haven’t been looking. I imagine there should be some.
The place I’m coming from is that I simply found an encoder that sounds neat to my ears when squashing down the style of music that I seem to typically make. As for lobit/lowbit/etc music ( Low bit | Wikiola: The music business resource Wiki | Fandom ) this modality for audio aesthetic encompasses any genre of music. There are genres (especially in the vein of the noise genre) that the artist may even opt for a comparatively inferior encoder just because the kind of audio artifacts that turn up after the encoding process directly contribute to the timbre and texture they are going for in their piece.
I can understand how the lobit thing can come off as an unsubstantial gimmick to some people. Nevertheless, I happen to love it. I first became interested when I ran into the netlabel 20kbps.net when surfing the web. Here are some links that help give insight to 20kbps and why the label exists
Thank you. It is exciting and interesting. I will explore it.
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