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[butthereisaway]

Hey :-)
I am Krissie from Germany. Although my first tracker experience was in the Nineties with my Amiga 500, I haven't continued twenty years - till last year, with MilkyTracker on Ubuntu Linux.

Here are the XM-Files
https://archive.org/download/butthereisaway

Here as a Bandcamp
https://butthereisaway.bandcamp.com/

One criticism I got could need further technical advice: the quality of the vocals. I just used my smartphone to record my voice, and I guess, I had trouble to get the voice to the volume, I wanted, so there are often two tracks with the vocal samples. Do you have same tipps for me?

About the songs

(1) Song for a ZeroCovid Strategy (zc2.xm)
This song was originally created with guitar. Genre is Rock with wave elements.

(2) General Strike (gs.xm)
This song is noise. But I loved it. The main sample (2) is a feedback noise sound. Genre: Hardcore Punk(?).

(3) Munchhausen (mh.xm)
A cover of a Seventies chanson. This one needs in fact better vocals quality and a better tuning of used samples. You can't find it at the bandcamp.

(4) Theorie (methode.xm)
Techno. The idea was to make some dialectics with three vocal samples.

(5) hōs en allō kosmō, „wie in einer anderen Welt“ (signallost3.xm)
An older piano playing by me, as a 6-min-sample, going to the tracks, where other instruments are added. This was an experiment, that failed somehow. And it was a fight with synchronicity. And at the end, the effect of the added instruments was not very impressively.

(6) Don't Donald don't Spiderman
This was just a funny attempt with only one vocal sample, punky guitars and a wavy instrumental refrain part. No further comment needed.

(7) "Don't be blinded by the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel"
The title was a CNN headline. It was a playing with cutting synth samples and let them play another kind of music.

(8.) You just ignore the material conditions
Another attempt with singing a whole song, with especially low quality. No further comment needed. It's just archived there.

(9) Trans*revolution (trans.xm)
This attempt of singing a whole song is my favorite at the time. It's a genre crossover with hard synth sounds.


(1), (2) and (7) I tried to upload at modarchive, without success. (9) would be a candidate to make another attempt, I think.

But first I would like to know your meanings.

Much regards,

Krissie

[Saga Musix]

One criticism I got could need further technical advice: the quality of the vocals. I just used my smartphone to record my voice, and I guess, I had trouble to get the voice to the volume, I wanted, so there are often two tracks with the vocal samples. Do you have same tipps for me?

While smartphones are pretty amazing all-round devices these days, I wouldn't rely on them for recording. Their microphones are typically not designed for the best possible quality but for small size, and you never know what kind of post-processing is applied on the software side. A good field recorder / dictation device or desktop microphone would probably sound better and isn't all that expensive. Generally there are many techniques to add volume and power to samples, including effects such as compressors / limiters, reverb and equalizers. This is a broad topic that cannot be summarized in a single forum post, but there are many tutorials explaining that kind of stuff. It requires effort but so do all self-recorded samples if you want them to sound good.
Double-tracking (recording the same vocals twice, as you did) is also a common technique in music production to add volume, but to be honest you didn't seem to spend any effort on it: The two samples playing at once e.g. in "Theorie" have completely different timing, so syllables from the same word appear at slightly different times, and more importantly, with completely different intonation, which sounds pretty bad to my ears. If you want good results, you cannot just recording the same vocal lines twice - you have to do it again and again until you have two samples that fit together, with timing and intonation as closely together as possible. Everything else will just be perceived as poor quality.