I’ve got to hand it to the Logic’s built-in content which really helped get my ideas together. I could just drag a few loops in to sketch out my ideas and then go back and program exactly what I wanted, using the loops as a replaceable guide. I’d hoped to get one of my guitar buddies to do the little solo bit toward the end but schedule conflicts prevented that from happening. I used Logic’s built-in Ultrabeat drum synth (for basically all the electronic drums and FX), EXS24 sampler (for timpani and choir), FM1 synth (for the little pitch modulated sines at the beginning and end) along with Absynth (for some of the cool break FX) and a couple Apple Loops (the guitar solo and tabla.)

I got a call to use one of the Capybara tunes as a demo for QSC at Infocomm 2009. The demo was for their Q-Sys Integrated system platform and judging by the picture, it’s pretty freaking fancy!

For the demo, I had to do a bit of a remix because they wanted to demonstrate the 2d panner portion of the system. It’s a way to take any input and route it to any output. To do that, I had to create a 7.1 surround mix with each of the elements (drums, bass, organ, guitar and vocals) on their own tracks. Then, they could take any element from the 7.1 mix and move it around to various speakers they had in the room. Pretty cool!

Here’s a regular stereo mix of the 7.1.

[See post to listen to audio]

Here’s a kind of nutty one. I got an email out of the blue asking if I could make a sound for the South Dakota State Lottery. South Dakota is one of the states I consider myself to be “from” (the other being California…strange, I know but I have flexible standards.) Anyhoo, on further investigation, I find out that I’ll be making a sound that plays when someone scans a winning lottery ticket. Crazy! So, I came up with a bunch of different ideas, sent them off to the Robert Sharp Agency and they ended up picking this one:

[See post to listen to audio]

This one didn’t get picked but it was my favorite of the bunch:

[See post to listen to audio]

Alesis DM10 Pro

This was an interesting project. The guys at Alesis asked me if I could create a bunch of practice patterns for a electronic drum set they had coming out called the DM10 Pro. These are kind of like built-in “Jamey Aebersold” play along tunes where the drummer can mute the drum part and play against the other accompaniment parts. The accompaniment parts consisted of a bass line which played back by the DM10’s internal sounds and an “accompaniment” track. This accompanimnet track basically anything I could record as audio. So I could record someone singing, playing guitar, piano, my dog barking…anything! The only problem was, recording audio takes space in the memory and there wasn’t a lot of space to create a bunch of audio for the 20-odd patterns I made.

Because we were working within a restrictive memory budget for the audio portion of the patterns, I had to take a very syncopated approach while composing. I mean, a sustained pad or piano chord wasn’t going to work unless that was the only thing I wanted in the entire pattern. Even then, if the pattern was at a slow tempo, just a single sustained chord might use the entire memory budgeted for that pattern and 2 or 3 others. The upside was, polyphony wasn’t a problem because you could layer a bunch of sounds to create a sample as you wanted; you just could make it very long.

Fortunately, drum parts tend to be more fun when they’re syncopated so I tried to write more with the bass and drums. Although, I suppose the drums would be the first thing a drummer mutes when they sit down to play the thing!

Alesis wanted to do a lot of rock patterns so I broke out the guitar and tried to get my playing in order. All I can say about my guitar playing is, thank God for digital audio editing. I also used my Fender Rhodes, Yamaha VL1 and Dave Smith Instruments Mopho on a few patterns.

At the Summer NAMM 2009 show here in Nashville, I finally got to meet Jim Norman from Alesis. I’ve been working on projects for him for the past few years but we’d never met. I also got to see the DM10 for the first time. Here’s a shot from Alesis’ Facebook page with Darrin James laying it down.

Darrin James and the DM10 Pro

Here are a few of the patterns. Note, I didn’t have the final sounds when I made these so you’re not hearing what’s in the DM10. The drum sounds are from Logic and the bass is from the Alesis SR-18.

My favorite pattern is this jazz pattern. I was able to actually get melody AND harmony into a single pattern. The very high tempo and vamping chords help. The horns came from the VL1, I believe the piano is one of the pianos from Logic and the guitar is me playing my Yamaha SBG-2000.

[See post to listen to audio]

I also really like this Acid Jazz pattern. The drums are from Logic and bass from the SR-18. The Rhodes is my Dyna-my-Rhodes and the guitar is me playing my SBG-2000.

[See post to listen to audio]

My main man, John DePatie (a guy who can REALLY play guitar) helped me out with this Stevie Ray Vaughn-influenced pattern. Drums again are from Logic and bass from the SR-18. I believe John was playing his Strat for this one.

[See post to listen to audio]

Finally, here’s the overall demo which was very interesting to put together. Basically, I just edited together excerpts from a few of the patterns. However, there was some really tricky math involved because we always had to start on a downbeat. In order to make that happen, I had to create a lot of odd-metered bars and tempo changes:
[See post to listen to audio]