What follows will be my attempt at explaining what makes each track individual to me:

Apparitions - A good song to listen to on Halloween. I patched my Hydrogen drums through an amazing program called FreqTweak to create a very surreal beat on this song that almost sounds like crickets on an alien planet. The groaning is a monk sound borrowed from FreeSound by djgriffin, a very excellent sound set from him. I have used it numerous times throughout my music as you will find here. The piano was recorded via mic, and it was originally going to be much quieter than the rest of the music until a friend told me I that they liked it much better with the volume up.

The BaBa Song - This is one of my more recent works and is composed from a couple of recordings of my girlfriends child, Chris, saying "Ba Ba". It may not be so funny to you, but I find it hilarious just because this kid is obsessed with the word and it comes out almost all the time, added to the sound of her other boy, Blaze, screaming. First I loaded the sounds into a drumset in Hydrogen and included them with the beat. Then I loaded the sounds into Specimen and played around with the beat to create a nice bass line like sound with them. Finally I created a mellow atmosphere over top of it all with ZynAddSubFX.

Blue Silence - What can I say about Blue Silence? It is everything about soul to me. Recorded with my brother-in-law Brett Scholl on the guitar, it is one song that I am completely sick of playing. I even sat him down at Hydrogen to create a drum track for it. The most I can say is that this is his song. The official recording is 13 minutes long and it is nothing but jam, I cut it back to about 6 minutes, just before our fingers got tired and screwy. There is no official plan to this song, it just goes. With only one mic we had to plan an original layout for recording this song, where I recorded his guitar with the mic first all the while playing to the stored memory on my Clavinova to record with the mic in a second track. We bought a mixing board shortly after recording this song, but never really recorded with it much. We never could match the ingenuity of Blue Silence.

Chillin - An experimental piece all about the beat. Just a few simple tracks but all about having fun with the beat. The piano was recorded in the same way, just a single microphone to the speaker. The drums are from Hydrogen again, but routed through another neat program called JaMin. The entire time the drums were recording I played with turning the Highs, Mids, and Lows off and on, moving their ranges about, and just generally having fun with it. Turn your bass up for special treats in this song.

Evening Dreams - This song is another experiment in progress while having fun with the monk sounds provided through FreeSound by djgriffin. This was before I had MIDI hooked up to my Clavinova. I had 5 virtual keyboards lined up on my screen each wired to Specimen to trigger different monk sounds in different keys. I basically added the piano track to give this song more than just an ambient feeling.

Johnny2 - The only reason I named this Johnny2 was because Johnny1 was taken by the original failed recordings of this. A composition piece existing of a drumtrack, various recordings of guitar feedback from Brett's amp, and a bunch of sounds from FreeSound thrown in.

Mach Zero - This was an attempt at interacting between the recorded piano and a software synthesizer, AMSynth. Some points I failed, others I suceeded, but all together it makes a nice little song. That coupled with a headache inducing bass wah to keep the beat going, I am rather proud of this song and often use it to test the full range of bass on a new stereo.

MiniBeats - This song starts out with the whirs and clicks of an old film reel projector starting up, a very nice FreeSound provided by cfork. From there it is an exploration of every single slider and dial in Hydrogen. A few AMSynth tracks added over top for good measure to take the mind off the monotony of the beat, which in reality is nothing but monotonous. All in all I had fun making this one, and I hope you have fun listening to it.

Perfectly Normal - This one is anything but perfectly normal, that's why I named it what I did. Derived from a patch file in ZynAddSubFX under the noises category named oioioioi. I think it's a very proper name for the sound. The drum track is also a crazy one I created in Hydrogen a while back that I thought would just fit with this noise. I added some other noises in with Zyn for the chord noise, and to make it sound more like a song and less like annoying noise, but yes the purpose was to be annoying.

SpaceRocks - One of my favorite ambient tracks to date. A good Hydrogen beat, nothing special, just a good beat. A nice mellow vocal noise from AMSynth, again nothing special. Then another stranger noise from AMSynth, a patch I programmed myself, creates a chaotic noise. The buzzing sound is my favorite part though. Using the microphone, I just buzzed for a couple seconds for a recording, then looped it using Rezound all the while playing with the size of the loop. An excellent sound altogether.

The Machine - Another song that would not be possible without the help of FreeSound. I have to go back through my files and find what sounds exactly I used in here, but there's a lot of them. The idea came from watching the movie "Silent Hill" where they are exploring the depths of whatever, I don't even remember the movie too well because I was just sitting there imagining how I'd morph my own song out of that. Basically slowed down some mechanical sounds and added some reverb and used them in Hydrogen on a very slow beat to create The Machine. A few screams and some electrical sounds added via Specimen made for an eery noise. The piano was recorded in the same way, just a single microphone directly in front of the Clavinova's speakers.

Persistance - I left Hydrogen behind when creating this one and did all the effects via ZynAddSubFX. I'm exploring the depths of the effects and noise and sounds and everything I can get out of this amazing program and will never finish. The restart at the beginning is actually a mistake because I began recording a test to make sure everything was working and forgot to rewind to the beginning before I began the final recording, but I liked the result and kept it.

I promised a long time ago that the descriptions on these next few songs were coming soon and promptly forgot to do so. It's been a while since I've recorded these next six, but I still come back every once in a while to listen to them and revel in my insanity. Finally I've decided to enthuse my listeners and fans (all 2 of you) and finish my descriptions.

Until Death - This song is an experiment of a voice I designed in Zyn, a violin dropped in pitch to resemble a cello plus a heavy modulation on it makes a wonderful beat, however during recording I was so wrapped up in the instrument that I forgot about the beat and stopped in the middle to get back on beat. In retrospect I may reedit this song and cut it around that point, or may redesign the synth and rerecord it altogether.

Little People - A creative take on a bit of "poetry" that was stuck in my head for a while. I recorded the main instrument and the lyrics at the same time, which is why they barely overlap, but it makes a good effect throughout the song, so I kept it. It's a little hard to understand so what follows is the poem in it's original form:

Kill the little people and the little people run
Love the little people and the little people come
Coming up on little town and little people stare
Little people, little people running everywhere
Listening to the sounds of all the little people run
I wish I weren't so big, I wish I never would have come
Don't take this in the wrong way, but I know I'll take their lives
I will never see them, but I'll always hear their cries
All the little people are just running everywhere,
They never really seem to ever make it anywhere.
Little people bring me little cakes and pies,
Trying to hide their faces and their little people eyes.
I will never eat them 'cause I know I did them wrong
It was me that took their leader, it was me there all along.

There is no true meaning behind the poem, just a bit of madness, but you can find your own meanings behind it. No, Little People does not refer to midgets, I love midgets.

Retitled - This is another bit of madness using a sample from Freesound as a main instrument. I may have gotten a little carried away. For a nice background effect I used the same sound continuously while playing with the speed slider for a while. That got really annoying, so it's volume was diminished signinficantly in the final mix, but left at just enough so that you, the listener, may experience the madness.

Morning After - This another load of fun I had with various synthesizer sounds, not very many experiments, but I managed to create an atmospheric sound that was both harsh and mellow at the same time. I imagine this is what a hangover would sound like, hence the title.

Halls of Valhalla - There's not much I can say about this song except that every once in a while I like to add a heavy echo to an instrument and just get carried away in it. This is usually the result, so I decided to record it at least once.

NexGen - When I was much younger I used to try to imagine what the future of music would sound like. Perhaps someday we would sit down and listen to one long continuous note or just a plethora of noise. This is my imagination at work trying to get ahead of my time again and this is the result.

The following songs were produced on my laptop while in the Army using Ubuntu Studio. The laptop isn't much better than the junker listed at the top of this page, but my knowledge of the software has gotten much better. I'm going to include the following songs on my next album, Flight of the Airlynx. I labeled it thus and used the phoenix as a symbol of my rebirth. I didn't have any of my music gear and had to reinvent my methods just to continue making music. You just can't hold me down. More songs will be added soon.

OCS Alma Mater - This is the techno version of the OCS Alma Mater, if you don't know it, don't worry about it, it doesn't apply to you.

Bravo - This is my first experiment with vocoding and a tribute to Bravo Co Class 001-09 3/11 INF. Listen carefully because it contains vocoded phrases that you might have heard quite frequently had you attended this class. All vocoding was done using the patched LADSPA vocoder that can be found on the Linux Audio Users Mailing List, I prerecorded out a series of phrases then set them on different channels in Specimen and used Seq24 to arrange them. There's also an unwelcome appearance by ZynAddSubFX right in the middle of the song to the near end of the song, just as a note on how annoying and frequent that particular cadence was.

Nowhere To Go

Project

Valkyrie Tears

Uruz

Hourglass

Open Your Eyes

Sol

Sigil - The whispers you hear are from a poem I wrote not too long ago about a battle between mortal and immortal. The poem is as follows:

I fall back into the same hole,
The one that first ate my soul.
Kicked back into the abyss,
Despair brought on by bliss.
Edging forward to the line,
Bring it on another time.
I'm here with all my wit,
Don't think I'm gonna quit.
Cut loose unto the winds,
Streamlined on heavenly fins.
This time I've come to fight,
First one up wins the right,
To breathe the golden air of gods,
Not struck down by thunder rods.
Valhalla lift me up here I come,
Valkyries shall not stop my drum,
Battle march on the final path,
The chosen ones shall feel my wrath,
Waging war against the invincible,
Doesn't mean they aren't destructible.
Perhaps I have a little more to lose,
Perhaps I should have let them choose,
My destiny that keeps crashing to shore.
Few would choose to fight this war,
But bring it on I'll lose it all,
Just so they can hear my battle call,
I'm not ready to throw the towel,
I'm going to call their foul.
Now I know it was meant to be,
The fight is what will set me free.

My Love - This is a song based on another poem, written for my darling wife, the poem is as follows

A smidgen of a penny and a quarter of a pinch
Everything is hidden in around about an inch
Nothings ever as it seems, it all has been a lie
It doesn't matter what you do, we all are going to die

How can we enjoy good health without enduring pain?
A sunny day is not as great without the pouring rain
To learn to love like lovers do we must first learn to hate
To have the things we want in life we'll always have to wait.

Time will never bring me down but just might wash me out
But I shall stand right up again and face it without doubt
The tears I've cried still wet my feet, they never will forget
But stronger days upon me now, my soul will never quit

The wounds which once have haunted me have now grown over hard
Forget it now for now its time to turn a brand new card
The pain is past and now its time to revel in the glory
The old one's done and now its time to tell a brand new story

No Laughing Matter - No I haven't lost my rocker or fell of my marbles, this is just to put a little smile in your day. Yes it is just a bunch of looped recordings of me laughing my ass off, but in a musical way. What else do you want from me? Enjoy!

Frost

Lead The Way - This song borrows a lot of clips from Freesound. I owe credit to alienbomb for his battlefield sounds, inferno for the explosion at the end, Syna_Max for his sound "war", Mastertronic for "foamo 12", and Benboncan for "Helicopter L to R" and "Chinook High."

Resist The Pull

Tidal Symphony - Finally I am breaking away from the addiction to ZynAddSubFX and trying out some qsynth/soundfont stuff. I put a full day into this song and I think it is one of my best yet.

Date Last Compressed

Progress

What follows here is the related art for my albums.

Flight of the Airlynx album cover (800 x 800)

Phoenix Burst desktop image (1280 x 800)

Phoenix Fractal desktop image (1024 x 768)

Phoenix in Flames desktop image (1280 x 800)

If you have any questions about my music you may email me at airlynx99 [at] yahoo [dot] com. Most of the work here is copyright in some manner or another by Christopher Van Dan, but don't worry about that, download and enjoy. I'm not trying to make money at this (but if you have any feel free to send some my way).

visitors