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frosted-mini-wheats

Halloween In Denver

July 4, 2008 by Aaron
aaron trumm, free music, free music download, frosted mini wheats, halloween in denver, third option


I kept thinking about this song this weekend:

[sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://www.nquit.com/sounds/ThirdOption/FrostedMiniWheats/14ThirdOptionHalloweenInDenver.mp3″] Halloween In Denver by Third Option

It’s from the first Third Option album, Frosted Mini Wheats. I thought of doing that album, and thus created that act, when I had been beatboxing for an hour straight on the drive home from hockey practice when I was playing for UNM. I noticed the beatbox tunes would change slowly over time. I thought I’d invented something and I told my buddy Dustin how I was gonna make an album where each song just morphed into the next, and he said “oh you mean a trance record?” Dammit. I had invented nothing!

But this Halloween In Denver song, it’s funny that such a marginal thing that I never really shared with anyone is the one that’s called Halloween In Denver. That title is a reference to me being diagnosed with CF when I was 8. It was at a hospital in Denver and it was Halloween. They gave me one of those plastic jack-o-lantern buckets and I was going from room to room getting little Snickers from people with it. That stupid night and that stupid diagnosis has defined my life ever since, really a lot more than any “disease” or “condition”. But I didn’t write a slam poem that I did in front of thousands of people, or even a rap song or anything. It’s just this short tune jammed in the middle of 60 minutes of album, and what’s more it’s not a highly charged big epic thing either, it’s just a pretty melody that I like. But what makes me think about it sometimes is that that melody doesn’t seem like me to me. It seems like something that comes from outside of me, or maybe it comes from my essence, whereas a lot of stuff comes from the ego and personality that I built on top of that essence, shrouding the essence. Ironically, I probably built a lot of that up in response to the diagnosis, so there’s this irony around having a song that comes from the essence, who’s title refers to the diagnosis.

It’s like a subtle, sleek victory. Poision in the night that the enemy general never even notices, let alone resists.

I win!! 🙂

And now you win too, because Third Option (us) is giving away free stuff! GO GET FREE STUFF! 🙂

Frosted Mini Wheats

June 27, 2008 by Aaron
frosted mini wheats, third option


[sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://www.nquit.com/sounds/ThirdOption/FrostedMiniWheats/13ThirdOptionFrostedMiniWheats.mp3″] Frosted Mini Wheats by Third Option

It’s a bit anticlimatic, I think, that this track is the title track. But still (at first I capitalized that, that’s funny) this one’s kinda fun and bouncy to me and I laugh because of the serious sounding essay text I’m reading where I’m talking about the Frosted Mini Wheats analogy to life. It’s silly but also totally truthful. *laugh*

I always used to like to telephone vocals. That’s where I take out a lot of the low end and a lot of the high end frequencies so it sounds like a telephone. This can make it sound purposeful when the full range recording wasn’t necessarily good. This is when I didn’t have the tools to record vocals very well. By tools I mean equipment but also skills, I think. Now I don’t telephone stuff as much anymore because I actually sometimes get recordings that I like the sound of.

I actually can’t wait to start posting newer stuff. You’ll be able to see (hear) the improvement I think. Still I’m enjoying posting these Frosted Mini Wheats tracks because they’re really creative in a lot of ways. I think I actually did stuff musically on this record that I might not have the balls to do now that I think people might be listening.

Oh man the end of this track has a huge mixing mistake. The next track overlaps with it so they can fade into eachother (all the tracks do that) but I forgot to manage the levels and all of a sudden it just gets WAY louder. Bad Aaron. Bad.

In the studio at Ubik Sound here in Albuquerque, way back when I first started, we used to talk about leaving mistakes in on purpose and having a contest for fans – “find the three mistakes in this CD, and you get a free one!” or free concert tickets or whatever.

Later I realized that maybe that could go awry because people would come back saying this is a mistake and that’s a mistake on stuff we didn’t notice or didn’t think was a mistake. So much room for debate there. Could be bad!

Applemania

June 2, 2008 by Aaron
aaron trumm, applemania, free music download, frosted mini wheats, the beatles


Applemania by Third Option

This is the last actual tune on the Frosted Mini Wheats CD. It seems like I posted about this one before. No matter, I’m talking some more! Hmm. Little heavy on the low end in this one too. This is the one with the samples from the National Graphic floppy record of whale song. I have the guy saying “these are underwater sounds”. I also have strategic record noise, which I really kinda dig. Then I have a WHOLE SHITLOAD of Beatles samples, also from an actual vinyl record. The thing that was so novel about this song for me was that I was taking the turntable, recording pieces into an 8 track hard disk recorder/editor, then editing the stuff together using that very primitive interface. In places I felt like I was making it sound like an actual DJ cutup, but it wasn’t.

I have a very long bit of “happiness is a warm gun” and the only real reason is that I like the tune so much that I kept wanting to hear more of it.

I remember also that on the rap vocal at the end, there’s a point where I’m saying “attack it!” and that vocal is combining with a little hit from the record samples and making a sound like there’s a distorted guitar strum in there but there’s not. I loved that. I also was happy when the vocal sounded like it had reverb and was sitting in the mix nicely just with a little delay. That was before I really understood that reverb and delay are theorhetically the same thing. I notice now, though, that the vocal is a bit quiet. Mixing vocals is not easy for the vocalist to do, and the basic rule in recording is don’t do that.

Lately, however, I think I’ve been getting over myself or getting used to it all just enough that my vocal mixes aren’t too bad.

Well – you can be your own judge for freezies, breezies. Download free crap HERE 🙂

Halloween In Denver

May 23, 2008 by Aaron
free music, frosted mini wheats, halloween in denver, third option


Halloween In Denver by Third Option

I’m not sure the music has anything to do with title on this one. The title is interesting though. It’s a reference to being diagnosed with CF in Denver when I was 8 years old. It was Halloween and I lived in Taos, which is 3 hours or so away. It was nighttime, I remember – well I remember we were there a long time doing sweat tests and blood tests and bullshit. Then somebody gave me a plastic jackolantern bucket and I was going around trick or treating in the various rooms. I don’t remember where we stayed.

They were creating a monster. *laugh*

For some reason I wrote about this track twice. Here’s the other post.

Ok – as I say in the other post – want some free music? OK THEN GO HERE! 🙂

Boycott The Record Shops

May 12, 2008 by Aaron
boycott the record shops, frosted mini wheats, rage against the machine, third option


Boycott The Record Shops by Third Option

I remember being proud of something about the drum mix on this one. Something about the way it was compressed or tight or something.

The woman talking is an old old lady and she’s introducing Rage Against The Machine at this concert – I took if off the VCR, off a VHS tape of live Rage footage. It was pretty cool, I think I got the tape for free from Dustin who got it from some label person or promoter – I THINK. I also sampled the crowd noise but then I augmented it in the beginning with about a million tracks of me using different voices chanting “Murph! Murph! Murph! Murph!” Tee hee. Slick eh? It’s very subtle, but listen for it! Listen!

Woo!

You read this far – would you like some free music for your trouble? HERE GET SOME FREE MUSIC RIGHT HERE! 🙂

Amadeus

May 9, 2008 by Aaron
amadeus, frosted mini wheats, mozart, spoken word, techno music, third option


Amadeus by Third Option

Here’s the next track on Frosted Mini Wheats. I almost want to say it should be obvious why it’s called Amadeus, but maybe people won’t recognize the melody. I’m not even entirely sure it IS Mozart. But the strings line is, I think, a Mozart melody which then goes elsewhere of my own creation. I was all proud because I figured it out one day on the piano. The other thing I did with this tune is I figured, I don’t have real strings, so I won’t try to make ’em sound real, I’ll try to make ’em sound fucked up with all this reverb and extreme EQ, and I felt like they sounded much more real that way.

*shrug*

Woo!

WAIT! Don’t forget to go get a FREE THIRD OPTION TRACK or two! 🙂

Still

May 8, 2008 by Aaron
aaron j. trumm, frosted mini wheats, poetry, still, tamara nicholl, techno music, third option

Oh Still is very important in the realm of Third Option! Still was totally different and not as cool, but then I met the poet Tamara Nicholl, and she wanted to record some poems, so I said ok hey I’ll record you if you let me use the samples. I was working on Frosted Mini Wheats at the time, of course. So I recorded her, and put some samples of this short poem “Still” into the song that was then called – i don’t remember – something else ;). Then she listened and had a ton of suggestions and ideas about it. So I rearranged it with her and we had her do this singing, and I did some singing. So that eery vocal is multiple takes of both of us. The reason it’s so eery is because Tamara has a tin ear like nobody’s business. God bless ya, Tamara, love you, but goddamn that girl cannot sing. But somehow that’s exactly what the thing called for.

Ended up doing a maxi single of Still with 4 remixes. Sent some copy, either just Still or maybe the whole maxi-single, to Annie Nightingale of BBC Radio 1 in England. She’s like the premier techno/dance DJ in England. She broke Daft Punk is one thing she did. Well that was probably our biggest “success” as Third Option. She loved Still. She invited me to put together a 30 minute mix set, which I did, and it aired on BBC I in – June of 2002? Is that right? Something like that. Maybe 2001? I don’t know.

That was wicked fun. They called me up from London and everything. It didn’t turn us into superstars though. That’s one of the times that I learned that just having some airtime on a big radio show doesn’t really do anything for your “career” if you don’t have the rest of the infrastructure in place.

Now then – since you’ve been so kind as to read these little rants – why don’t you treat yourself to some free music? 🙂

Smooth Snippet Thief

May 7, 2008 by Aaron
frosted mini wheats, michael jackson, poetry, sampling, smooth snippet thief


Smooth Snippet Thief by Third Option

This one’s called Smooth Snippet Thief because it sounds to me like those vocal snippets are Michael Jackson (re: Smooth Criminal). I did the whole song on a totally different instrument than the others – I did it on an Ensoniq TS-12 which was in the audio lab at UNM. We called that “studio” The Boneyard because it was like an elephant boneyard. Old and dead and ancient relics piled around randomly. I actually rebuilt that whole studio and made it work for my purposes. More on that later maybe.

So all the samples in this one are legal – they were just part of the preset settings on the TS-12. It’s really just sort of this interlude piece, it doesn’t go anywhere really. I played the synth leads live and used the pitch wheel in my performance though! 🙂

Free? What you want something for free, just because I didn’t say much? Ok fine go here and get some free stuff.

Procedure for recording Third Option “Frosted Mini Wheats” CD

November 13, 2006 by Aaron
frosted mini wheats, recording

Basic Setup:
  • Initial Recording Format: 8 Track Darwin Harddisk
  • Mix Destination Format: DAT
  • Final Format: CD Master and Duplicated CD’s
  • Mixer: Mackie 12 Channel VLZ
  • Outboard Processing: Art SGE Mach II Efx Processor
  • Synths: Alesis S4, Yamaha TG100, Boss DR660, Ensoniq Mirage
  • Mics: AKG D1000E
  • Mastering: TC Electronics Finalizer
Procedure:
  • Tracking: Most instrument tracks were tracked to Darwin through an Art tube-preamp. Mirage and Darwin provided sampling capabilities. Samples were taken from movies, original poetry, PlayStation games (Overblood) and even a cassette of a play version of The Crucible. 
  • Mixing: If seperated, most of the songs would’ve been something like a 24 or 32 track mixdown. But I only had the 8 tracks of Darwin to work with. So I ping-ponged, trying to stay very careful along the way. The singing vocals were double and tripled up (there were four of Tamara and two of Aaron), and then a stereo mix was created of those tracks. The drums were made another stereo pair, and basses and synths made up other pairs, etc. Sometimes I would deviate, but this was the general rule of thumb.Kick/snare/hats etc. were usually seperated, mixed on the Mackie, and run through the Art tube. The Art tube has only one channel so they would be transferred in sync one channel at a time. Interestingly, when you do this, it spreads the stereo spectrum out a bit. It’s a great effect, but sometimes it’s not good for things that you might rather feel very dead center (like kicks or bass or even vocals). I could listen to synth tracks “live” (played back by the sequencer) while mixing a couple of basses, for example, to make sure that in the context of the whole, things were coming out ok. Some pairs were mixed digitally inside Darwin to make room for this method.I sort of reinvented the trance wheel on this. For some reason at that point I had never really heard a trance record, or I guess any dance club music on CD, because after beatboxing for about an hour one day, I had the “revelation” of progressive trance, which is pretty stupid considering it had been around for years! Nevertheless, the whole project was about writing techno instead of rap songs for a change (even the concept of “writing” techno is a little odd, I guess), and doing this “revolutionary” thing where all the songs just morph into one another. *sigh* Still, even though it didn’t take long to realize I wasn’t even remotely inventing anything, it turned out a bit different, because my process was inevitably odd. I didn’t have the normal techno tools, which seem to usually involve progressive style looping and generation and tweaking of parameters over time, and I didn’t even really know how people did it (I suppose I still don’t, really, now that I think about it), so what I did was write a song on the sequencer, using some drum patterns and such like I always did, then improvising some piano over time, and mixing it down. Then I started a whole new sequence, and started it off using themes from the other song, more like a composer might do, and then morphing the riffs. I used similar synth patches (sounds) in some cases and different ones in others, but totally wrote, tracked and mixed the song seperately. I did this for all the songs, all the while strategizing in the sequences how the BPMs would be matched up and how many measures they would overlap (usually six). I would offset each song so that tracking to the Darwin, it was already at the right place in time and would overlap with the previous song. I used one project in Darwin, using virtual reels to create new songs. When I eventually had a mix down of a song, I would just copy it to the clipboard, and paste it in place into the “main” reel. The first song was on tracks 1 and 2, the second song on 3 and 4, and so on, looping around and around the tracks. Meanwhile, I had another master “volume” sequence on Cakewalk which would just be used to do the crossfades (Darwin’s internal mixer responds to MIDI volume and pan messages). I would carefully map the tempo changes that might happen within songs onto the master sequence to keep the SMPTE time and measures lined up, and create the fade ins and outs using the very powerful event editor in Cakewalk. Over time I kept adding to this master sequence as I mixed new songs. Interestingly enough, when the sequence was about 30 minutes long, it wouldn’t sync to tape if started after about 30 minutes. I had to take it out of sync mode and put the transport at the same spot as the Darwin transport and play them manually at the same time to get an approximate audition of the crossfades. This worked fine, because they didn’t need to be sample accurate in time. Eventually, I would sync the sequencer to the main project, and it would follow along for an hour, creating crossfades while a master CD and DAT was being dubbed off the SPDIF output of the Darwin (which outputs the result of the internal digital mixer). This worked fine, and I went back onto the DAT to create new track markers, then dubbed another CD for the master to be sent to the plant (so that there would me more than one track 🙂 ).

     

  • Mastering/Editing: I explained the bulk of the final edit down above, but mastering was a little tricky because of lack of space on Darwin (it has 1 gig, which is pretty much full at 70 minutes of stereo audio plus a couple other multitrack projects). I also hadn’t really forseen wanting to remaster the mixes before I had alreay set up a whole crossfade sequence, etc. This is because I didn’t expect to get an opportunity to borrow the Finalizer. I thought I might get a short time in the studio where the Finalizer lived, so I planned to run the whole project through a setting on the Finalizer that would hopefully do them all some good (this would be a lot quicker). As it turns out, I got to take the Finalizer home, and given this opportunity, I couldn’t stand to take such a short cut. So, using virtual reels in Darwin, I ran mixes through the Finalizer and back to Darwin. Since Darwin of course is in sync with itself, I could just paste the new mastered mix over the old in the main reel, and voila. Where it got tricky was I could only do one at a time, and I had to delete the old one. This doesn’t sound that tricky right now, but it really wasn’t easy to deal with for some reason. The crossfades didn’t need that much tweaking, but I was glad I did each song seperately, because the settings on the Finalizer were vastly different from song to song.
  • Notes:

    Ultimately, FMW has never been duplicated en masse. The artwork and masters were at the plant, and I got a call saying they couldn’t do it because of all the samples. Funny thing is, I don’t think they listened to it. They mentioned the liner notes, and I think if I hadn’t given credit on the liner notes, they never would’ve known. Funny thing is, only a couple years before, they had pressed Artistic Apocalypse, where I used the same technique of using movie samples and giving it credit on the notes. But in those couple of years, the industry landscape changed dramatically, and it was no longer alright to use samples of that nature simply by giving credit. In the days of Martyrs And Heroes and No Apocalypse (my first CD’s), you could use a sample from a movie or something, as long as you gave it credit. At least that was the word on the street. Apparently the law was unclear about it. Now it’s a bit clearer, and the answer is, no damn samples ever any time, which sucks, because the only people who get to do that kind of art are either major labels who have access to the people, or people who never get to actually reproduce the work. So now, we will dub a copy of Frosted Mini Wheats if it gets ordered, but no duplicated CDs. I spent awhile trying to track down sample clearance, but no one even responded. Finding the people, in most cases, was impossible. Later on, with Cult Of Nice, I had one sample, and was by some miracle able to contact the people, pay them a fee, and actually obtain clearance. There have been several times when songs from Cult Of Nice were rejected from liscensing organizations because of samples, only to have me write back to them saying “THAT’S NOT A SAMPLE, that’s original poetry, performed by us!!” Even if something SOUNDS like a sample (which was the whole point of Cult Of Nice – poetry that sounds like samples, but is original), people go berserk. That’s how much the landscape changed in those 2 years.

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