Marmalde - The How

So somewhere along the way, I lost the original copy of this post and its subsequent “Why” post so I’m going to do my best to recreate it from memory. As to how one loses a blog post, it’s all very simple really - you create a blog in Wordpress, realize you hate it because it has too many options, then you think you have the posts saved somewhere safe on your PC, migrate through several re-installs of Manjaro until finally you settle on Garuda Linux (and settle is doing a lot of work there).

So diving in, the drums were largely done using (drumgizmo)[https://drumgizmo.org/wiki/doku.php], specifically the CroecelKit, with a couple notable exceptions. The synths were largely created using (Helm)[https://tytel.org/helm/]. The piano was using a Steinway Grand soundfont that … I honestly don’t know where I found it anymore it’s been too long. The guitars were recorded by me, as was the bass, as were all vocals except the one line in Fallout that’s clearly a woman - that was Katherine Mazoyer. As far as effects, it’s a mix of Airwindows (saturation, debess), Dragonfly Reverb, and LSP Studio plugins (compressor, gate, the like)

Diving in, Opening Night uses Jacob Collier’s idea of (negative harmony)[https://youtu.be/H3mBFACpK0o] to create the melodic structure. It uses (TAL-Noisemaker)[https://tal-software.com/products/tal-noisemaker] for the arpeggiated sound over the bridge.

Wall of Cogs uses (Fabla)[http://openavproductions.com/fabla/] for the tabla and drum sounds.

Outside, The Power of Faith, Discordia, and Mein Schmerz were all done using the above mentioned tools that were used across the album.

Architect of the Past featured (Rich)[https://intoapathy.bandcamp.com/album/oceans-of-sorrow] (Staats)[https://richstaats.bandcamp.com/album/the-void] (who I have done several musical projects with, most recently being (Astral Chaos)[https://astralchaos.bandcamp.com/] where I played bass), doing a guitar solo and antogmusic (no longer on Fiverr - based out of Italy). Great players - it was a real honor to work with them both.

Nightmares, The Torchbearer, and Lowdown Showdown were all created using the above mentioned tools.

Here’s where I’m going to make a note that I fucking lost the raw project files in Ardour for this somewhere in the computer migrations mentioned in the first paragraph, and although it’s on my mind to re-create the entire album in Bitwig using Vital, Pianoteq, and native Bitwig synths … just fuck me for letting that happen. Never, ever again. Please learn my lesson - back your music projects up somewhere once you do the final master bounce, and make sure the backup loads. Tuck it on an external hard drive, or whatever cloud service you use … just don’t do what I did. I’m still mad about it and I found out I’d lost those files 9 months ago.

As per usual, you can (stream Marmalade)[https://ditto.fm/marmalade-fusterclucker] or you can (buy the album)[https://fusterclucker.bandcamp.com/album/marmalade].