On January 13, 2024, the "Studio Day", a small but nice studio session, took place in our music recording studio.
The Toolbox music studio had suffered greatly from neglect during the Corona period. Last year, however, it was tidied up and rearranged, improved and expanded by hard-working hands, so that we were able to hold a music production workshop in it for the first time last October. After a few more improvements, it was now time to "inaugurate" the newly renovated studio and celebrate it with a small studio session with the aim of producing our own track.
To this end, we met in a small group in the recording studio on a Saturday morning. At the beginning there was no concrete idea, except that the title of the track should be "In The Box". For those of you who are now scratching your heads, "in the box" is a common term in music production language to express that a process takes place entirely in the computer, be it the creation of a synthesizer track, the addition of effects to a track or even the complete production of a piece of music. Of course, the latter should not apply to our piece - but it should be created in the Toolbox, which gives the title a certain ambiguity.
But how did our piece of music come about? First, the foundation was laid with a bass line in D minor. This was recorded on the Novation Bass Station 2. A matching beat was programmed on the MPC 2000 XL with the help of samples from the BOSS DR-110 drum machine. To make the drums sound a bit "crisper", they were deliberately overdriven in the analog mixing console. Then we improvised on various synthesizers, such as the Roland JP-8000, the Behringer Octave CAT, the Doepfer MS-404, and last but not least on the Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field brought along by one of the participants. This device was also used to record a small part of a radio program, which coincidentally contained a suitable competition presentation that could be integrated perfectly into the song. There were also a few so-called "happy accidents", i.e. unintentional events, which, from the participants' point of view, were beneficial to the result and should therefore remain in the finished piece.
The song itself was arranged and mixed in the OpenSource-DAW "Ardour ". It does not have an overly typical song structure, but rather reflects the production process, which on this day can rather be described with the motto "The journey is the reward ". One of the participants aptly described the structure as a "structured jam session", another drew comparisons with the electro classic "Egypt, Egypt", which also does not follow a clear thread in its structure. But even if this circumstance is no guarantee for an almost comparable cult status - in the end, the conclusion of all participants was that they had once again learned a lot at this event.
The finished song can be heard in the video here: