barryvan

Category: Music

  • [Music] Conflagration

    I’ve been meaning to write a piece in this idiom for years. It’s an industrial/orchestral hybrid. I don’t know why, but I always find this style of music fun, notwithstanding its occasional heaviness.

    More of the usual Native Instruments suspects at play in this piece: Kontakt, Massive, FM8, and Battery. All of them driven by OpenMPT and Xlutop Chainer.

    [audio:http://www.barryvan.com.au/music/Conflagration.mp3]
    (Download)

    Creative Commons License
    Conflagration by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

  • [Music] Juggernaut

    A piece in the same vein as Fluorescent. My wife describes this piece as “dystopian”. I, of course, had to reply with this rather witty riposte: “Dystopia? I ’ardly even know ’er!”.

    This piece is somewhat heavier than some of my other recent endeavours, but hopefully not too much so. In terms of VSTis, it makes use of the usual culprits: Reaktor, Massive, FM8, and Kontakt.

    [audio:http://www.barryvan.com.au/music/Juggernaut.mp3]
    (Download)

    Creative Commons License
    Juggernaut by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

  • [Music] Fluorescent

    So I’ve been playing a bit of Unreal Tournament 3 of late, and UT3 happens to have a pretty awesome demoscene-inspired soundtrack. I guess it was inevitable that I should would go down that path as well! This piece is the result. It gave me the chance to dust off some of my less-often-used VSTis; Reaktor, Absynth and Battery all get a look-in on this track.

    [audio:http://www.barryvan.com.au/music/Fluorescent.mp3]
    (Download)

    Creative Commons License
    Fluorescent by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

  • [Music] Frequency

    This track is, in many ways, a harkening back to my earlier compositions. Its structure is more straightforward, its arrangement is more natural and less synthetic, and it came about from a session in front of the piano. These elements form the basis of much of my earlier work, and, if I’m honest, they probably define my preferred method of composition.

    Let me know what you think!

    [audio:http://www.barryvan.com.au/music/frequency.mp3]
    (Download)

    Creative Commons License
    Frequency by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

  • [Music] Cascade

    This track is actually from a couple of weeks ago. I just never got round to putting it up here. 🙂 It’s really a background track: something you listen to while you do something else. Part of the idea behind it was to make a melange of disparate “instruments”, and smoosh them together to make something that’s coherent. Let me know what you think!

    [audio:http://www.barryvan.com.au/music/cascade.mp3]
    (Download)

    Creative Commons License
    Cascade by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

  • Piece-a-week: Marcato Potato

    And so we continue both the piece-a-week idea and the poor track nomenclature. This week, I wrote a piece that is quite ridiculously positive, but with a kind of twisted almost-dissonance running through it. Not particularly well-expressed, perhaps, but you’ll hopefully understand the meaning when you listen to the piece.

    [audio:http://www.barryvan.com.au/music/Marcato potato.mp3]
    (Download)

    Creative Commons License
    Marcato Potato by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

  • Piece-a-week: The subtle monkey

    This year, I’ve decided to try something new with my music. I’m going to endeavour to produce something each week, and put it up here for public consumption. The idea is that it’ll force me to write more music. Bear in mind that I can’t guarantee that what I put up will be any good! 🙂

    So, to kick it all off, here’s a track I wrote in not very much time, entitled “The subtle monkey”. (Track nomenclature has never been one of my strong points.) Let me know what you think!

    [audio:http://www.barryvan.com.au/music/The subtle monkey.mp3]
    (Download)

    Creative Commons License
    The Subtle Monkey by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

  • Emmanuel: God with us

    My wife and I have just finished our Christmas carols album, “Emmanuel: God with us”. On it, you’ll find brand new orchestral arrangements of ten great carols.

    It’s available for digital download now at bandcamp. You can listen to each of the tracks in full above, and decide whether or not you want to help support poor starving musicians like ourselves. 🙂

    Each track is going for around $1 (or more, if you’re so inclined!), and you can pick up the whole album for $5 or more. You can also get your hands on a physical CD if you like — just let me know!

  • Generative Music

    Continuing my HTML5 and canvas experiments, I’ve put together a generative music system. Essentially, a series of particles move across a field, occasionally triggering sounds — the sound triggered depends on their location in the field.

    There is, of course, a little bit more to it than that. Under the hood, I’ve got a series of HTML5 Audio objects that are used to provide polyphonic audio using a simple round-robin algorithm (I encoded the audio in OGG, so you’ll need to use an OGG-friendly browser, like Firefox). The particles are much simpler than those in my previous canvas dalliance, in that they don’t swarm, and their motion is more linear.


    Generative Audio Screenshot
    View (and hear!) it live

  • [Music] Lament

    About a month ago, I was playing around on the piano, and I came up with a fragment of melody that I couldn’t get out of my head. I played with it, twisting it around, pushing it in different directions, seeing what I could do with it. Ultimately, I turned it into a full piece of music, and this is the result.

    [audio:http://www.barryvan.com.au/music/Lament.mp3]

    Like this track? Buy it at thesixtyone, and help feed an impoverished (well, not really) programmer.

    You can also listen to one of the (early) improvisations I played on this theme by downloading the recording I made on my phone here.

  • [Music] Ventilate

    Well, it’s been a fair while since I last uploaded a piece of music — over two months, in fact! So here’s my latest piece.

    This piece actually started out as an experiment — I recently got my hands on all sorts of shiny new toys, and my DAW got an awesome upgrade, so I couldn’t resist seeing what I could do with them.

    I managed to use all but one of the products that came with Komplete to make this track — FM8, Massive, Reaktor, Guitar Rig, Kontakt, and Battery. Much fun. 😀

    [audio:http://www.barryvan.com.au/music/Ventilate.mp3]

    Hmm… For some reason, the version of this uploaded to thesixtyone gets some distortion on the bass during the intro section. I’ve tried uploading at various bitrates, multiple times, but it still keeps on happening. I think they must be doing some re-encoding. :/ Very annoying.

  • Komplete

    I am so excited, I’m giggling like a schoolgirl. I just unwrapped a package that I received from Germany: Native Instruments’ Komplete. It’s installing now.

    In the (large and encouragingly heavy) box, I found the following exciting items:

    1. Eight (yes, eight!) DVDs full of awesomeness
    2. Seven hefty printed manuals (in a boxed seat, no less)
    3. Four large (5″x1″) ‘Native Instruments’ stickers
    4. Ten small (2.5″x0.5″) ‘Native Instruments’ stickers
    5. A neck clip thing, with a very shiny stainless steel clip and detacher thinggy

    In terms of software, Komplete means that my Native Instruments collection now comprises

    • Kontakt 2
    • Kontakt 3
    • Kontakt 4
    • Battery 3
    • Guitar Rig
    • FM8
    • Reaktor
    • Massive
    • Absynth

    I am SO EXCITED!!!