I am very happy to announce that the first release of 2012 is now ready to download from Bandcamp.

The record is made up of four tracks plus a bonus remix by Noodrem of  The Germs.

• The Germs
• The Future of Mankind
• My Body
• Jigsaw (2)
• The Germs – Noodrem Remix

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Download

The release can be downloaded in one of the following ways:

1. You can download it on a ‘Pay as You Like’ basis from Bandcamp. It starts at 20p per track or £1.00 for the full release..

2. You can get the album for free by tweeting about it using the button below or by using the advertisement at the right hand side of the blog. It adds a tweet to your timeline and then takes you to the download.

Making of: “The Germs”

I have been working under the moniker T2D for a very long time and although I loved the output I was always working between different aliases when creating music. T2D was generally my Minimal and Tech House guise with MrTheBigMan as a more bouncy, break-beat orientated style.

After the 2011 being about the T2D album and also the year in which Multiples really took shape, I decided to close MTBM.NET as it was then and just from that point focus on MrTheBigMan as a brand and offer music and samples under this brand instead of the 4 brands I had at the time.

As you can imagine this took alot of pressure off considering the demanding schedule of releases that this gave me and because of it, I was able to really get back to taking time over tracks rather than busting out 20 tracks a year.

The Germs is the culmination of that work and is my most satisfying release to date for exactly those reasons. It is a four track e.p. with a special bonus remix of The Germs by Noodrem. Below is a track by track breakdown (in order of when they were completed rather than record order) as to the motivation and the synth’s and programs used to create the tracks:

The Future of Mankind

I came up with the idea for this track when I was watching a production video from Future Music Magazine on Umek, a Slovenian electronic music producer and it was mostly about using delay to introduce different sections of the track, bouncing it down as you go and then chopping it up for lead ins and out.

So, I got a fairly straightforward sound (I believe is was a high pitched Bell or Tom) and then programmed a fairly straight midi file and then put Logics Delay Designer on top of it and then tried all of the presets and made some of my own, bouncing the audio as I went along. I then cut it all up and built the lead in’s with that. You can hear it in the first breakdown of the track.

The main synth line in the second breakdown came from the Prism synth in Reaktor (available in 5.6). I really like this synth as it gives bell like tones I haven’t heard in a long time. It was essentially played as a sequenced line across two octaves.

The main vocal samples can from a Crate Diggers sample pack and you can find more information on those guys further down this post.

The Germs

This was my first foray into using Reaktor for every aspect of the sound and track. The Massive Drum sequencer was the symth of choice here and I loaded samplemaps of all of the samples on E|Drums 2.0 into it and then mined over 300 loops for use in the track. Even the bassline came from a drum sounds through the synth.

The thing I love about Massive is that no matter what sound or timbre you throw at it, it spits out the most usable sounds and loops imaginable and you can really here that in the finished recording.

I got the vocal samples again from the Crate Diggers pack and the loops together with this gave it a theme of a track for a horror movie or old scifi movie.

The pads heard throughout were created with exactly that in mind in order to create that tension throughout the track as it builds up throughout.

This was also the first track I really felt I had got the build up to the final drop right, after lots of experimentation. I love how it filters and reverbs out before smacking you in the face when the beats and sounds come back in. This is the reason I make music.

My Body

This was built at 6am on a Saturday morning when I came downstairs with an idea to get the Bass Guitar out and noodle on it. I recorded several passes over the beat on the track (I had this already written but was taking my time in thinking of rhythm parts) and then comped the best parts together (I don’t claim to be any kind of ‘player’).

That gave me the basis for the track and I continued that day until the main melody line for the last break and intro was made.

Again, I used the Prism synth on this for the reasons I mentioned earlier.

The sample came in very easily as it fitted perfectly with the track but also the theme of the record as well.

Jigsaw (2)

As you will have seen throughout the site I have been working on this track for the last few months and really took shape one sunny afternoon in Spain on a laptop with Reason 4. I won’t go into the details here but the links for the creation can be found below:

The Making of Jigsaw (2)

Incidentally, this will be made available in the forthcoming release entitled ‘Jigsaw’ and it will be included with the third and fourth incarnation.

So, this was a labour of love which saw many different mixes across two countries to get it finished and I am very satisfied with the result.

Crate Diggers

As said previously in this post I used a samplepack from Crate Diggers to provide me with the vocal samples for this record. They came from ‘The Golden Age of Wireless’ pack and the details of it can be found below:

430+ extended phrases, statements, exclamations and questions captured directly from the golden era of radio broadcasting in this original, royalty-free spoken word treasure trove bristling vinyl-infused character.

Spanning female swoons to sci-fi statements and everything inbetween, this ultra-useable selection of dusty dialogues will suit house, chillout and hip hop producers searching for truly vintage vocal inspiration.

433 clips are offered in total, broken down into 12 sub-folders of Exclamations, Female Words, Love, Male Words, Musical References, On The Radio, On The Telephone, Questions, Science Fiction, Statements, Sultry Women and Tasks.

You can download it here.

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