Intro

So, liner notes.


This is usually the place where the artist thanks their friends and family, followed by a long list of boring credits stating who played what, on which track, courtesy of which label.

Scew that.

Rather than go through that, I'm going to just write. I'll try to write about the tracks I've made for the album and go into the samples I've used. That will get the necessary attribution out of the way, while providing what I believe is a more personal view of how everything fit together. But first: Thank you. Thank you for downloading this. Thank you for listening to my album, and thank you for taking the time to look at this file. Without you I am a tree falling with nobody to hear it. Thank you.

Now some stuff about me. A few of you may be wondering why I'm working under this name, as opposed to my usual alias DJ Rkod. There are several reasons to this. The first is that, musically, DJ was always an alias used by myself and my brother.Sometimes I made tracks, sometimes he did, and sometimes we collaborated. This project, however, is mine alone.

It wouldn't really bother me to release this under the usual alias were it not for the fact that my brother has taken the name DJ Rkod and used it for other, less musical, more social purposes. With this in mind, it feels wrong for me to produce music under a name that I cannot rightfully claim as my own. I bear no ill will regarding this -- my brother plays guitar on several of these tracks, but this is me. This will stay me.

Second, I'd like to credit some invaluable samples and tools.

The Yamaha Disklavier Pro Piano Multisamples set from the OLPC Project. This is a wonderful thing for me, and you can hear the sounds of it on nearly every track on the album.

Angstrom's Toy Glockenspiel pack at freesound. Beautiful sounds, used on most of the tracks here.

Smoseson's Bowed Cello pack, also from freesound. Used in "Someone You Remind Me Of" and "Dreams Float."

DtBlkFx. What a wonderful, unpronouncable sound mangling effect. This was my primary go-to for doing... well, anything. This is also on nearly every track on the album, and I love it dearly.

Finally, before we get into the individual songs, I'd like to say that no (that's zero, 0) MP3 sources were used at any point in the making of this album. Every sample came from a lossless source. Additionally, all of the samples used here were released under Creative Commons licenses. The Commons is a wonderful thing, and whenever humanly possible I've tried to release my work under their licenses. Just to reiterate: no copyrighted soundbanks, no commercial libraries, no sample CDs. Every sound I didn't record or synthesize myself is available to you for nothing online, and wherever possible I've tried to attribute these samples. If you are one of the artists sampled and I have not given you satisfactory credit, feel free to let me know at TheSparkThatThought@gmail.com.

Individual Track Notes:

"Passing Thoughts" (110 BPM, descends to 20 at the end) came about as the child of a song I had been working on during the summer of 2009, which was istelf based on an interlude that had been sitting on my hard drive for months. I liked the song, but when I started revising it I realized that it had very little I really loved. So I took it, and molded it into the intro for the album. There has been a few intros already, but I ended up scrapping them. They felt like filler. I did not love them. The (reversed) guitar was played by my brother, twice to get the chorus effect heard in the last few minutes of the song. It ended up as the foundation on which I built everything else in the song. There's also a pad that doubles the bass during most of the song that I built from a sample, "tk 11 prep guit 1f" by ERH.

"Influence" (90 BPM) was one of the last tracks I wrote for the album. This song came into existence while I was playing around with some vocals by State Shirt from his song "Up Up Up Up Up." This was a frustrating song for me, because I had been trying to remix it for months and always ended up putting it back on the shelf with no progress made. One day, for some reason, I took a small snippet of his singing, looped it, crossfaded it, dropped it three octaves, dubbed some vinyl noise onto it ("BeatExciterNoise" by zeuss) and made a pad. This is the sound you hear at the very start of "Influence," and it plays throughout the entire song as well as coming in at higher octaves occasionally.

After starting the song, I pushed in another track I'd been bouncing my head off for a while: "Fake It" by Brad Sucks. The acoustic guitar from his song runs throughout nearly the entire track. It's been dropped four semitones and run through some flanging and reverb, but otherwise it is remarkably unprocessed.

Then, I took a loop of my brother playing the guitar and made something strange. And then I gave Lady a bone. And then I added a hip-hop beat, and the rest is history.

Other samples in the track are "JacobsLadderLong2" by Halleck, "CoolBD_09" by ORBITALDJ, "oldskoolish_90bpm" and "hunter_90bpm" and "diztheeng_99bpm" by nikolat, "user56891b Natural clochette suonho re-work 03" by suonho and "loop35" by Zajo.

"Clouds Form" (85 BPM) has a forest of clicks in it made partially out of 300+ people imitating eggs being fried ("Frying Eggs2 ses1" by freesound) and uses the "Alone At Night" pad sample set by Corsica S. This song was titled after my method of creating it, which was to lay down the basic structure of the song and build in complexity from there. The drum programming took me many hours to finish.

Other samples: "cymb crashlite2" by mattlohkamp, "Gol Ses2" by freesound and the sound of my dialup modem failing.

"In Every Direction" (80 BPM) was the last song I wrote for this album, and contains a direct sample of "Dreams Float," the main theme of the album, tuned down about eight semitones. This is also one of the simplest songs on the album, containing realtively few instruments.

Drum samples: "
CoolBD_09" by ORBITALDJ, "Loop22-02" and "Loop24-02" by Zajo, and the chopped and resequenced sound of me banging on a tamborine.

"Pieces Of Thought" (125 BPM) is one of the most complex pieces I have ever produced, and was assembled almost entirely out of samples. It begins with a manipulated guitar, "guitar.clean.harmonics.01" by dobroide, then dips into a warped sample of a song I made but never titled. This song contained the samples "Dramatic Pad 4" by jobro, "91elfy20" by pushtobreak, "301D" by casualdave, "78bpm madcrew" by nikolat, and a sample of "Lies" by Trifonic for good measure.

That's the first 30 seconds of the song.

Beyond that, I put in a direct sample of an unrealeased mix of "Transgenic" by Trifonic I'd been working on. This mix contained, amongst other things, a vocal pad I made from "New Blues Jeans" by The Hexyl Circle, "Loop01-01" by Zajo, "bite" by Heigh-hoo, "cymb crashlite" by mattlohkamp, "linn tom 3" by NoiseCollector, and "static bird", "suction shock hit", "bird 1", "rock in a soda can", "chain link fence abuse" and "piano bat flys away" by batchku.

Phew.

The samples in the song itself are "Suck Slush 2" by hello flowers, "Marching drum 02" by LG, "udarach 100bpm" by nikolat, "hhat open-close3" by mattlohkamp, "aa017 Sabian AAX crash 16 edge normal" and "aa018 Sabian AAX crash 16 edge strong" by Robinhood76, "water05" by junggle, and two hard boiled eggs. Oh, and a direct sample of "Influence" from 500 paragraphs ago. And another sample of "Dreams Float" from two paragraphs ahead.

"Someone You Remind Me Of" (93.89 BPM) began as the six note guitar figure that plays through the entire song. I heard my brother playing it and decided to produce a track around it... and this is it. The kick, appropriately titled "kick" by mattlohkamp, needed a little beefiness on the low end so I ended up layering a couple synthesized sounds under it. The gated pad that turns up a little over two minutes in is a processed version of "strings02" by orbit over luna. Other samples are "051228snarker" by starpause, "hhat open-close2" by mattlohkamp, "linn kick 2", "linn snare", "linn clap" and "linn tambourine" by NoiseCollector. The song closes with the sound of me unscrewing a microphone stand, as all songs should.

"Dreams Float" (64 BPM) is the oldest song that made it onto the final album, and it's probably my favorite. The sample it is based around, "choral strings sbhnmr b2 11" by ERH, ended up beoming the two chord theme for the entire album, and with good reason. It's a beautiful sample. I've heavily processed it, dubbed some vinyl noise over it and looped it. There are also a lot of send effects that are applied at various points in the track. Through thiis song, ERH's sample appears on almost half the album. Other samples are "Shaker1" by marvman, "Pad 007 - Space Violin - G3" and "Pad 007 - Space Violin - D4" by Jovica, "Cheer" by acclivity, "bite" by Heigh-hoo, "cymb_crashlite" by mattlohkamp and "jungle_beat_1" by ronlybonly.

The cover photo was taken by bushn, who I keep locked in my basement. Used with kind permission.



What If You Want To Help?

If you really, really enjoyed my album, there are some things you can do to help me acheive my goals of world domination through music. The first, most effective, and easiest way is to tell a friend how awesome I am. This album is free, and some of the samples I'm using would prevent me from selling the album even if I wanted to. So spread the word. Post about it on your blog. Tell a family member. Tell everyone. The more ears listen to this, the happier I am.

If you'd like to tell me more personally how great I am, E-Mail me. I'll try to read everything that comes in, but don't expect a response unless you're asking a question or have said something particularly interesting.

What If You Want To Pay Me?

Frankly, this section feels like total fantasy to me, but if you're just one of those crazy-generous people who wants to give me money... you can't. I don't sell my music, and I don't take donations. With that said, there are things you can do. As above, speading my music is my #1 priority. But if you want to lay out some cash... you can get me things. Like a website. I don't have one, and I don't have the funds to get one. My E-Mail address is TheSparkThatThought@gmail.com. Talk to me. I like being talked to.

And Finally...

Thank you. I know I said that in the intro, but after this long it bears repeating. Without you there would be nobody to hear this except me, and that would get pretty boring. So thank you.

-The Spark That Thought.