A quick little tune most likely inspired by recently listening to the Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex soundtrack. Wanted to try something with that sort of feel and kick out a concise 3 minute long soundtracky kind of deal without a lot of tweeking and obsessing. Not that my humble little technoish piece is even in the same ballpark as Ms. Kanno’s wonderful soundtrack, but it was sort of an inspiration point. Pretty basic arrangement: 2 synths, a home-rolled synth bass patch, synth lead and one @#$*%! massive drum kit.

I also ended up experimenting with the free (so get it) JB Vol.3 – Multi-Band Toolbox ReFill released by Propellerheads for Reason. It would appear to be trying to fill what I currently feel is the biggest hole in the Reason arsenal: a multi-band compressor like the Multipressor that comes with Logic. It’s easily the most useful mastering tool (as far as I’m concerned) and can be used for other non-mastering related tasks as well (it played a huge role when I did forensics on some old live recordings). The compressor that comes in the Reason mastering suite is pretty heavy-handed for someone that likes compression on the output bus (hi!) and is used to the Multipressor. It definitely performs (I like the tweekable parallel compressor myself) but to use it as your main output/mastering combinator is a bit touchy – it’s easy to make it clip out. So for this I ended up running the drum kit thru a quad parallel compressor as an insert before it hit the board and then use a second one as a send to help out all the synth parts.

I psyched to use this in the future since I hate fighting with that one compressor on the way out. Using it inline you get a nice compressed sound and you can leave that output compressor off.

The flaw in this tune is that it turns out that my two main foundation synth voices (not the bass or lead) had a bunch of “stereo panning” on them that I didn’t notice until I got out the headphones for a final mix (and was too lazy to go back into “preset hell” and find new voices). So it makes some of the foundation sound a little off since it’s constantly bouncing back and forth rather than just sitting where I pan it. Oh well, to late to care.

[driving-and-blinded.mp3]

And the Reason published song:

[driving-and-blinded.rps]

It uses the aforementioned free ReFill (not sure if you need it since it’s made of core components) and the non-free but everyone has it Reason Drum Kits ReFill.

Cheers.