Music – Pet Pixels

October 11, 2026

Little names

I came across a post by Kiffie on Mastodon thanks to a boost by @elsemusic:

I found the song on Kiffie’s album “This Brings Life” and had a listen. It’s very ethereal, lots of reverb and a big wash of synths, then some nice arpeggiated synth noises for a middle break. My first thought was that it would sound great with much more up-front female vocals and a guitar-based backing, following Kiffie’s “different genre” request. There is not a lot of contrast between verse and chorus, and I thought I could improve on that too, so I said I’d give it a go.

I was about to head off on a road trip to see family in Alsace, so I did a quick bit of pre-processing at home so that I could work on it on my laptop. Kiffie had expressed concern that remixers would have to recreate it by ear, but we have the technology to do all that! The steps involved were much like what I did for Blinding Lights. After dropping a copy of the track into Logic, the first step was extracting a tempo map to sync everything to; it turned out to have a fixed 70bpm tempo, so that was easy. Next up was using Logic’s stem splitter to break it out as much as possible, and that worked OK, though the keyboard parts were all together as they are not very distinct (it’s still borderline magic!). The main thing was that the vocal line was pretty clean. I then extracted a chord map from the original track, revealing a Cm key with Cm, B♭, Gm, and A♭ chords, and applied it to the whole project.

The vocals were the trickiest part. I applied Flex Pitch to the extracted vocal track, which allowed me to generate a MIDI track with the notes in, which I then imported into Synthesizer V. Pitch conversions like this are quite hit and miss, but it provided a good enough guide. I recently picked up a new female voice for SV called “Etta”, which I thought would work well for this track; it has a certain weight and authority. Then came the laborious step of entering all the lyrics, checking pronunciation, splitting/merging syllables, substituting phonemes, deleting conversion artefacts, and adding breaths to get a realistic vocal track working. Getting timings right is the hardest part, and I was tweaking that all the way to the final mix.

As usual, I relied heavily on Logic’s players for the rest of the track. First of all trying a simple drum track in various styles; my original thought was a very pared-down, almost “unplugged” vibe, but having heard the vocal line against a trip-hop/trap-style drum backing thought I’d go a different way. I often find that songs seem to have a life of their own. The sharp, staccato drums needed a complete contrast to run against, so I added a lovely soft pad using Logic’s Alchemy synth; this also provided an element of continuity with the original song.

I was in two minds about adding guitars; despite it being my original idea, it’s not that well suited to a trip-hop feel (though my Groove Armada-ish song “You’re on mute” did that). But I left it in (using UJAM’s Amber2 plugin) providing some quiet rhythmic texture on top of the backing pad during the verses.

I wanted to add lots of contrast for the choruses, as I felt the original song didn’t have enough of that, and the lyrics and melody provide a solid, majestic feel. I used SV’s vocal modes to make the intro and verse voices quiet and smooth, leaving space for stepping up a gear to a much stronger delivery in the choruses, bolstered by (my favourite!) two tracks of backing vocals, using the excellent “Solaria” voice in SV that I’ve used many times before. I’m still constantly amazed by SV; the vocal line is so exposed at the beginning, but it really stands up to scrutiny.

The break section was asking for some kind of solo instrumental line, and the original song used a strong arpeggiated melody, so I thought I’d do the same. The stabby solo part in the break is from Alchemy driven by a “modulated pad” Logic player, and the sharp, tinkly synth patch for the fast arpeggios is courtesy of UA’s PolyMax synth. My favourite bit of the whole song is just after the second quiet break when the arpeggiator cuts in, with an anticipatory lead in from the fat, squidgy, subby bass, also from Alchemy.

After letting the backing vocalists support the last section of the instrumental break, I amped up the accompaniment for the final chorus, and did lots of vocal edits to make it sound more spontaneous and natural. I couldn’t resist adding the “my love” backing vocals to the final fade out; I’m very happy with them.

There’s not much processing on the rest, mostly Logic’s standard track EQ and compressor, though I did use a UA LA-2A compressor on the main vocals.

There is one shared reverb for everything, handled by Logic’s incredible-sounding Quantec Room Simulator. Final output is pushed through a classic SSL bus compressor, followed by Logic’s mastering plugin.

I did this whole project in just over a day and I’m very happy with how it turned out; I think Kiffie is too! So, a big thank you to Kiffie for inviting me to do this.

Anyone else want a remix?

[Verse]
In your arms I felt loved, As I whispered little names, Many words describe you, I still worship you the same.

Parting is such sweet sorrow, Though we talk all night, Making plans for your tomorrow, You'll always be my light.

[Chorus]
Goodnight my princess, My saviour, my queen, I love the beauty of your patience, In worship, majesty.

[Verse]
We have climbed the mountains, As we wondered how to be, As we walked together, We were boundless as the sea.

Holding hands still feels so good, Like palmer's palms do kiss, And spending time together, Will you please remember this?

[Chorus]
Goodnight my princess, My saviour, my queen, I love the beauty of your patience, In worship, majesty.
(My love, my love)

As always, I really appreciate reposts of links to my songs on here or on BandCamp.

September 23, 2026October 10, 2026

This meeting could have been an email

This phrase has been haunting us for at least a couple of decades, and it only seems to be getting worse. Morning “stand ups” that get bogged down in unnecessary, irrelevant detail while everyone else contemplates today’s Wordle, wondering when they will actually be able to start work. I’m lucky enough to work for people that don’t do this, but I’ve been subjected to it in the past, and I pity those who are stuck with it. So, all you poor people currently picking crumbs out of your keyboards while somebody drones on about something that doesn’t involve or concern you, this Muse-style rock epic is for you.

I’ve been listening to Muse’s latest album, “The Wow! Signal”. I’ve liked their stuff for a long time, but never managed to see them live. A couple of months ago I managed to run the gauntlet of TicketMaster’s miserable opening day procedures, finally obtaining tickets to go see them in Milan in November! Much like my previous composition efforts, what I write is quite strongly influenced by things I’ve heard recently (no I’m not going to write a Caity Baser song, though I did have this one idea…), so this was an attempt to do something Muse-ish, and that became the working title for the song because I didn’t have a theme or lyrics. I did have a completely different synthwave type song that I had intended to use this title for, but I thought this somewhat angry approach would fit it better!

If you’re going to try to write a Muse song, it obviously needs to start with an excessive church organ, so that’s where it began. I really like the “galumphing” (in the “triumphant galloping” sense) rhythm of Muse songs like “Knights of Cydonia” and, more recently, “Hexagons”, so I targeted 6/4 time. The relaxed nature of that meter led me to crank up the tempo to a slightly disturbing 141bpm. As a consequence, the drums are somewhat frantic, but I liked that, and it let me run other things at half-time without them seeming too slow.

I was having trouble finding the right chords, so I found a special offer on Scaler Music’s Scaler 3 plugin, which I’d had an eye on for a while. This is not your average plugin, as it’s almost hiding a completel DAW inside, but its primary function of finding chords, sequences, patterns, and letting you experiment with off-key or unusual variants is really clever. That said, I found it quite difficult to get to grips with, largely due to my inadequate music theory, but I would never have otherwise known to use the chords it helped me find.

I thought I’d have a go at playing the guitar parts myself, and this worked well enough to build a framework. I played some simple lead lines in a couple of neck positions and they were almost usable! The bass is a Logic player driving Logic’s electric bass instrument, plus a distortion pedal, grungy amp, ChromaGlow saturator, and Heavyocity’s wonderfully violent MicroFX Refiner (which isn’t in the least bit refined) for compression and limiting. A second bass line uses a very aggressive filter sweep courtesy of ImpOSCar3.

Drums are also a Logic player with one of the studio kits and a lot of manual tweaking. I ran into a problem I’ve had before where room ambience in the original samples becomes too obvious when subjected to hard compression, and again I worked around that by applying heavy damping to the drum kit setup. Fast rolls on low toms are a big feature of the drum arrangement and I tried to let them breathe to make a thunderous backing for the aggressive guitar tracks.

A nice synth strings patch from FB-7999 and a soft pad from UA’s PolyMax, smoothed out a lovely arpeggiated tinkle from ImpOSCar3. A Logic Hammond emulation added some beef to the choruses.

Vocals are using my usual choice of Synthesizer V, but this time the lead is taken by a new voice — “Archie”. Archie is a bit more boy band than “Liam” that I used on my last couple of tracks, and has greater abilities in the upper range, including a falsetto voice mode that worked well here. Backing vocals used NOA Hex, Liam, Solaria, and another new voice, Etta, which I have to use in another song as she sounds great. The second verse’s acapella-ish section was fun to put together, and initially reminded me of 70s folk group, Steeleye Span!

After a while I realised that my guitar parts were just not going to be good enough, so, for the third time, I turned to Wassim Rahmani on Fiverr to do a better job. Wes’ first take was a bit too metal, so I asked him to do another version that was more in the Muse mould, and he delivered a great “chugging” rhythm section and a cool, soaring solo. I did leave some of my playing in — the lead in the first and the harmonies in the closing chorus are mine.

The mix on this was about the biggest I’ve done, with around 27 tracks spread across 35 channels, and this proved quite difficult to manage. It’s hard to discipline yourself to keep levels low enough to leave some headroom to expand into. I was intending to get each individual track peaking at under -6dB, but it’s difficult when you’re trying to rock! Reverb and delays are very nice, but add too much and things turn into mush, so much of the mix involved backing off these things.

I picked up another new plugin alongside Scaler: Sonible’s smart:chain. This is similar to their smart:eq plugin that I really like, but adds compression, saturation, “de-harshing”, gating, and level riding on top of the eq. It shares smart:eq’s ability to coordinate settings across multiple tracks, prioritising mix parameters between front, middle, and back for each channel it’s applied to. I’m not convinced by their “AI” claims; it mostly seems to be algorithmic presets that are a little hit and miss. I’m not that keen on its compressor; I find it harder to use than Logic’s stock plugin even though it has fewer controls. Overall, its multi-channel system is really good, though I didn’t get as far as using its automatic mix levelling — maybe next time.

I’ve noticed that when mixing my other tracks on my Sennheiser HD598 headphones, my mixes come out way too bass-heavy (making my car windows rattle!), so I’ve been consciously mixing bass-light. This is not a reliable approach, so I took up an offer on Sonarworks’ SoundID Reference plugin, which happens to have a calibration profile for exactly my headphones:

A screen shot of Sonarworks SoundID Reference plugin, showing a calibration curve for my headphones. A purple line shows the original response, a green line shows the applied correction, with bumps in the bass and lower treble ranges, and a white (flat) line shows the result

The (green) compensation curve provides a big bump at the bottom end, a broad dip in the upper bass, and a bump in the lower treble. It necessarily drops the overall level quite a bit (-9.1dB apparently), but my SSL 2+ interface goes plenty loud enough to make up for that. It took a bit of getting used to, but the mix is definitely far more even as a result. This plugin also does virtual monitoring, but I’ve not really used that yet.

Anyway, my sympathies go out to all those that have to endure miserable, interminable meetings. At least you now have something vaguely on-topic to listen to surreptitiously, though be aware that your colleagues might hear its epicness leaking through your headphones.

[Verse]
After this stand up I’m gonna need a sit down
I woke up early with dreams of getting things done
but now it’s 11 and I’ve got nothing to show
This meeting could have been an email

[Chorus]
I’m slowly losing the will to live
Sinking into my chair, I'm drowning in detail
I can hear you, but no, I’m not listening
This meeting could have been an email

[Verse]
Don’t need the whole team to solve a 2-person problem
Yeah, I’ve got blockers; I can hear one right now
I'm itching to hack, but you busted my stack
My AI's contemplating unplugging itself

You just trashed a big chunk of my day
my schedule torn to pieces by some jumped-up MBA
we're all bored to tears, heading off the rails
This meeting, it could have been an email

[Solo]

[Chorus]
I’m slowly losing the will to live
Sinking into my chair, I'm drowning in detail 
I can hear you, but no, I’m not listening
This meeting could have been an email

As always, I really appreciate reposts of links to my songs on here or on BandCamp.

July 24, 2026July 24, 2026

Blinding Lights

A screen shot of Full Bucket's FB-7999 synth plugin

I was zooming along on my turbo-trainer on my balcony listening to some random playlist on Apple Music and ran into this great song from 2019 that’s had a lot of airplay: “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd. It’s very synth-pop (despite its own classification as R&B), and I thought that it would be quite fun to cover it in more of a rock style, with guitars doing all the synthy bits of the original. So that’s what I did.

I’ve only released one other cover version: “Setting sail, coming home” from the Bastion soundtrack. Cover versions are nice and easy to do because you don’t have to think about the songwriting part. That said, this was almost more of a reverse engineering effort than songwriting!

To start with I imported the track into Apple Logic Pro X, where I used its stem splitter to break it out into separate tracks for vocals, drums, bass, and synths. A quick trip through the smart tempo function revealed that the whole track is nailed to a fixed 85.4 bpm, keeping things nice and simple. Then I used the chord identifier to extract a chord track from the synths, and found a matching key (F minor). I applied Flex Pitch, which is typically used for fixing up vocals, to the bass track, making use of its ability to identify the individual notes and clean up the pitch tracking. The bass synth goes very deep, so when I looked at re-playing it on my bass guitar, I initially attempted to drop the bottom string tuning all the way to a B♭, but that was really too far and it was unplayable. So I switched it up an octave, and added an octaver effect to reintroduce the growly lower notes. The main bass line is very simple, mostly long sustained notes, and after all the processing, my bass comes out sounding pretty synthy anyway!

I wanted the drums to have more of a live feel than the original drum machine style, and Logic’s drum kits and players are great for that. I applied a lot of compression using MicroFX’s Refiner plugin. This did make it sound very punchy, but as it also boosts the very minor ambience present in the drum kit instrument, it ended up sounding a little too reverby, even though it was actually a dry signal, but I thought I’d live with that, and turning up the damping in individual drums helped. In places it sounds remarkably like the drums in A-ha’s “Take On Me”, though that was unintentional.

I replayed the recurring synth melody on my guitar through a nice amp model and lots of reverb and delay. That was all quite straightforward and I didn’t need to do much else to it.

I dropped the vocal split track into Dreamtonics Synthesizer V and asked it to convert it to notes and words. It didn’t do a great job and needed a lot of cleanup, but it was still easier than entering all the notes manually. I used the same “Liam” voice database I used on “You make me smile“. I built the backing vocals manually using the same voice. For both tracks I used SV’s unison feature to fill things out, aside from the verses which remain using a single voice. Then followed lots of fine tuning of the timings and voice controls to make it sound natural.

Despite the rock intention, I felt it could use a little sparkle, so I dropped in an instance of UA’s PolyMax synth with some nice arpeggiated tinkles driven from the chord track. To add a little more substance to later sections, I used a lovely synth strings patch from Full Bucket’s FB-7999 synth, a great software emulation of one of my favourite early digital synths, the Korg DW-8000.

At this point the verses sounded a little flat, so I added a little muted guitar with lots of delay to add movement and interest. Then I thought of really stripping back the second chorus to just bass and drums and almost acapella vocals. The bass line I had was just too slow and smooth for that kind of exposure, so I added a much more energetic slap bass track, played good and loud along with the vocals; that was fun to do!

With so much bass going on, the kick was getting lost in the mix unless I made the drums unreasonably loud. I then received a very timely email from Adam Audio (I have a pair of their T5V monitor speakers) giving me a free copy of Denise Audio’s Motion Filter, which provided a great way of using the drums as a side chain to filter the bottom end of the basslines for a few milliseconds just when the kick is happening, and it really helped to give the kick some space and much more impact without making it louder.

A screen shot of Denise Audio's Motion Filter showing a high-pass filter driven by a side chain from the drum track.

The mix was gradually coming together, and many tweaks were applied while listening in my car and on my other headphones. While I feel my mix is quite bass heavy, the original track is even more so, but I just didn’t like how my mix sounded with that much bass. Mastering was done using Logic’s stock mastering plugin.

Anyway, it’s a great song that was fun to cover. If you like this song, please consider supporting me by buying my albums on Bandcamp, and sharing links to my music on your socials.

June 28, 2026July 1, 2026

You make me smile

I was looking back at all the tracks I’ve written and realised that I’d never written one for or about anyone in particular. Then I was thinking of what I’d write in a song like that, and that made me think happy thoughts, of all the nice, kind things I could say, and also all the inside jokes I could use that wouldn’t mean the same to anyone else. So who else to write a song for but my wife? So Sarah, this is for you!

When I think of “happy” songs, I think of Maroon 5, The Lightning Seeds (is “Jollification” the happiest, sweetest album ever??), Jamiroquai, The Feeling, Mark Ronson, Bruno Mars (though I’m not sure “Grenade” is all that happy!), all very much in the mainstream pop/funk genre. So off into the bowels of Logic Pro I go…

For this kind of funky sound, it’s all about up-front bass and drums; Logic’s players are just great at this kind of thing. I started out with a very conventional ii – V – I chord progression in E major using a clean, sharp, jazzy-sounding drum kit and almost no effects on either drums or bass. Next up was something to hold up the middle – a crispy, groovy clav seemed in order, followed by the mandatory funky guitar courtesy of UJAM’s excellent Sparkle 2 virtual guitarist plugin, told to play some chords with a few 9ths sprinkled here and there. The chorus switches to A major, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find more optimistic key changes.

At the same time I’d been thinking about lyrics, and came up with a couple of lines, firstly “You complain that I’m a perv when I compliment those curves“, just because it’s true, closely followed by the title line “you make me smile“. I thought of all kinds of things that were quite inappropriate for a family audience, but I thought I’d leave them out 🤭. I love the line “Let the duvet battle commence“. Towards the end I realised I’d written a line almost straight out of Frankie Valli’s 1967 classic “Can’t take my eyes off you“, so I thought I’d run with it and make it exactly that line, and also found I could borrow the melody used for it too! I also spotted a very close similarity with the Bee Gees “If I can’t have you” from 1990, but avoided going down that particular rabbit hole. Most of the lyrics are quite conventional, but I’m not going to explain the ones that are not (but no, my wife does not have a foot fetish!)

As usual I created the vocals using Synthesizer V, for the first time using the “Liam” voice database. I’d previously ignored this voice, but realised it sounds really great when pushed hard in higher notes, with a great raspy, breathy style when it’s going for it. Some of the timings are quite tricky, so I sang parts of it myself and extracted the timings from that, making it much more natural-sounding. The “that’s our secret” timing took me ages to get right! I used Heavyocity’s MicroFX Refiner plugin on the vocals. While they like to talk about “finesse and extra polish”, it’s really a wonderfully aggressive compressor with great feedback and control.

I love doing backing vocals, here using SV again with my go-to Solaria II voice for both voices. BVs add so much, and this time I got to use unison mode to thicken them up, a feature only recently added to SV that uses multiple voices with minor pitch and timing variations, spread in stereo, driven from a single source track. The lyrics for BVs are so silly — I’ve got “la la la“, “ahhh“, “doo doo doo doo“, and quite a few “oooh, yeah“s — but they’re just such fun.

You can’t really have a funk song without a horn section, so I used Logic’s Studio Horns driven by a Logic player. It took quite a bit of cajoling to stop it from playing too much, but I got there in the end. To fill out the backing a little more in the final double chorus I added a warm, slightly sweepy pad using UA’s PolyMax synth.

Songs are boring if they are all verse and chorus, so I like using a breakdown to make a little space, just as I did in “Call me back“. That space is a great place to drop in a solo, and who can resist a dangling Bsus4 at the end of the break? I commissioned a sax (what else?!) solo from Ukrainian saxophonist Neruk M on Fiverr, whom I chose based on his excellent rendition of the solo from The Beloved’s lovely “Sweet Harmony“, which came out when my wife and I were at university together in 1989. He did a fantastic job, adding real class to my song.

The ending is a little abrupt, so I thought I’d go with the fiction of the singer finishing a take and walking off to do nice things with his wife.

The mix eventually heads through a classic SSL Native Bus Compressor 2, and then to make sure I was on-point, I used a match EQ with Maroon 5’s “Moves like Jagger” as a reference, but found that was really bass heavy, so pulled it back quite a bit. Mastering is through Logic’s built-in mastering chain. I got some good feedback on the Dreamtonics forums that led me to amp up the drums more, especially the kick (TBH I’d not really paid them much attention), and back off the vocals a bit.

Overall, I’m very happy with this song (is any songwriter ever disappointed by their own stuff?), and I don’t think the song could be much more joyful if it tried.

Hey you,
the one beside me,
my partner in crime,
the one that I call mine

Yeah you,
the one I’m talking about
this is for you
‘cause I’m not going anywhere without you

When I’m looking for some strength
I know you’ll swim the extra length
So take off all your clothes
and I’ll let you touch my toes
You complain that I’m a perv
when I compliment those curves
but you wouldn’t have it any other way

(You make me) smile
When I think of you
(You make me) smile
Can’t get enough of you
(You make me) smile
I’m crazy about you
(You make me) smile
Can’t keep my hands off you
(You make me)

Let the duvet battle commence
In a bed for two, there’s no defence
You’re what keeps me up at night,
what I like to see in the morning light
There’s two of us but only one of you
Not gonna say what I’d like to do, no
that’s our secret (I’m not telling you),
and it makes me smile

[Break/Solo]

(You make me) smile
You’re just too good to be true
(You make me) smile
Can’t keep my eyes off of you
(You make me) smile
I’m crazy about you
(You make me) smile
Can’t keep my hands off you

(smile) When I think of you
(smile) Can’t get enough of you
(smile) I’m crazy about you
(smile) Can’t keep my hands off you
You make me smile

I found the sample for the chair/footsteps on freesound.org: Footsteps, pull chair back, sit down, stand up, walk off – Bluebird 219.wav by minimumlabyrinth – License: Creative Commons CC BY Attribution 4.0.

In case you were wondering, there is no AI in this song. We have enough slop from AI without it interfering with nice human things.

I added this song to my “People Music” album, since it’s clearly not a song about web dev! If you like this song, please consider supporting me by buying my albums on Bandcamp, and sharing links to my music on your socials.