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Music CD Collections
Shown below are the current CD collections available. Next to each cover picture are buttons that allow you to listen to some samples of the music. If available, full length samples in near CD quality Windows WMA and MP3 format are available to listen to. Listed below is a short list of the equipment used to produce these pieces along with links which may be of interest to those who use their computers to write and produce music.
Music by David Hutchinson
David has been writing music for many years, and has played in local bands in the South-east, and can also play brass, bass guitar, and keyboards. After years of playing in bands, he decided to go solo and produce his own work, which includes various styles, being mainly classical, ambient and atmospheric. The advent of computer based music opened up a whole new sonic canvas along with the ability to use more realistic orchestral sounds for his compositions, the first result of which is the following collection - ‘Conquest II’. This is a re-work of 'Conquest I', and he has also produced other CD's and is currently working on a new album.
Conquest II
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WMA | MP3 |
| Sample 1 | Sample 2 | |
| Sample 1 | Sample 2 | |
As mentioned in an earlier edition of Decanto magazine, David was lucky enough to be selected as one of the ‘Readers Demo’ for issue 65 of Computer Music magazine. The piece selected was Conquest II - the title track of his latest collection of music. It is a collection of classical style pieces using traditional orchestral instrumentation and arrangement and has 12 tracks with a running time of approximately 58 minutes. The buttons below will allow you to hear a WMA or MP3 version of the track (Sample 1), along with another from the collection. |
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Poems by David Francis
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David Francis a singer-songwriter based in New York. In 2006, he toured England twice and appeared and sang on BBC Radio Gloucestershire, "The New Grey Whistle Test" in Birmingham, and "Monochrome Museum" in Stourbridge. |
Equipment used for recording Conquest II -
Main sequencer - Sonar
Orchestral virtual instrument - Edirol Orchestral Canvas
Other Virtual synths - Crystal, RXP, Sampletank, SFZ soundfont player, Synth 1, Pentagon 1, Claw
Outboard synth - Alesis S4+
Reverb - Perfect Space convolution reverb (included in Sonar)
Mastering tools - Sonitus equalizer, Sonitus multiband compressor, BBE Sonic Maximizer
Monitoring - Edirol MA-10D and headphones
Sound card - M Audio Delta 24/96
Some useful links -
IQ4 Dynamic EQ - An excellent plugin for treating individual tracks or across a master output to treat a whole mix. Dynamic EQ is a cross between a normal EQ and a multiband compressor in that the gain of each EQ band alters in response to the level of the incoming signal. This particular plugin has 4 channels of EQ/compression and is available from www.platinumears.com and downloadable from www.platinumears.com/iq4gui.zip. Give it a try as it certainly sounds different to using separate EQ/compressors, and is very flexible and inituitive to use. It only appears to be available as a VST unit at present, but is a work in progress so new versions may become available in time.
Crystal VSTi - I'll quote from the crystal manual: ‘Crystal is a semi-modular synth featuring both subtractive synthesis and frequency modulation (FM) synthesis. It offers abundant modulation control with over 80 parameters which may be modulated, multi-stage envelopes with graphical editors, extensive tempo sync of envelopes/lfo rates/delay times, built-in effects for chorus/flanging/comb filtering/echoes, and a band splitter for effects processing by frequency band.’ If you like ambient or slightly out of the mill sounds, get a download from www.greenoak.com/crystal/ and give it a try. It's a CPU hog(!) if you’re not careful and can be tricky to program, but it does sound good. You can also use your own soundfonts as oscillator sources if you put them in a folder called CrystalSoundFonts in the folder where the Crystal DLL is located. My only gripe is that as far as I know, none of the parameters can be controlled by automation (but I could be wrong).
Another nice synth I've used is Synth 1. Available in both DX & VSTi versions from www.geocities.jp/daichi1969/softsynth It claims to be modelled on the Clavia Nord Lead 2 Red Synth, but I couldn’t tell you if that’s true as I’ve never seen or heard one! Either way, another useful synth freely available with some pretty good sounds.
A good soundfont player with no frills, but seems to sound good especially with the quality setting set to Max is the RGC audio SFZ soundfont player This one is available from www.rgcaudio.com/sfz.htm
A useful tool I found while mastering to check for low frequency rumbling (because the MA-10D have limited low end response is the Voxengo Span FFT spectrum analyzer. This is a free download available from www.voxengo.com/freevst/ along with other freebies to try! I normally use it with a quarter octave setting with the slope set to 0dB and a reasonably fast speed and a block size around 8192. With a bit of eye-balling, you can normally spot any nasties.
Finally (on a slightly different note), check out Blender if you are into 3D graphics and animation - tricky interface, but stunning results. Blender is also available for windows, but you will have to install python if you want to run any external scripts. If your setup doesn't have python, don't worry as Blender runs fine without out it. To obtain Python visit www.python.org for a free download.