RGB/Just Run To Heartbreak

BombJack - RGB by BombJack

Phoenix - Fences [BombJack Remix] by BombJack

Phoenix - Fences [BombJack Remix] Remaster by BombJack

begone dull care - capricho en colores

¡Maravilloso!

Año 1949, pintado a mano por Evelyn Lambart y Norman McLaren frame a frame y musicalizado deliciosamente a jazz por Oscar Peterson Trio.

Visitor - Los Feeling [BombJack's Tiny Epic Rmx] by BombJack

Visitor - Los Feeling [BombJack's Tiny Epic Rmx]  by  BombJack

have you had enough?

oooh... did I say too much?

My personal rendition to this summer hit from Visitor. They gave stems (multitrack recordings) to whomever dared to remix them. I ended doing it off the clock but happened to be a nice rendition more 80's neon-style than anything. Their original track is closer to this, but I tried to make it more spectacular, ambient-driven with those nice 80's gated reverb drums and some french-touch vocal samples.

Hope you enjoy and DanceDanceDance it!

love letter

There's no robocop without robocop 2, there's no gremlins without gremlins 2, there's no terminator without terminator 2 (altho I can't say the same about Alien saga, damn).

So there's no Oblique remix without Oblique remix 2.

Better for my taste, more story-driven, lush beginning to dream a little on this hot spicy summer and marathon-alike second part to run away without hassle/dazzle.

Fully done with VST's and internal mixing too, altho my friend everlast helped with mastering. Neat sound.

Cheers, and have a good summer!

Oblique - Sincerely Yours [BombJack rmx] [right-click to save]

starboy

Here's a tiny remix I did for Oblique guys in a hot sunday afternoon. Used only VST's and internal mixing/mastering. The clearness of sound comes from the lack of many layers. As clearer it is (meaning less complicated stereo sounds or ambient/fx) the easier to mix.

[right click to download]
Oblique - The Boy from The Stars [the boy from hell rmx]

Cheers!

Oh, and sorry for the lack of entries. It'll grow over time.

UPDATE: they decided to use this arrangement for live/gigging, Kudos for them!!

reach a plateau

Ambient tech-house, very focused on ambiance and deepness.

Get it here (or click it for a Quicktime or WMP pop-up):
bombjack - reach a plateau

neila (alien backwards?)

Oh man, how much I loved to tweak that BlueFilter band-pass (or BPF) cutoff slider on that killer drumloop!
Listen from 03:12 to 04:00

This old tune was created when I decided to try some time-stretch in a drum'n'bass environment dynamically. This means that you can assign at point A or file beginning a tempo, let's say 160 bpm, then choose point B or file end another tempo, like 80 bpm. Thanks to dynamic time-stretch, you can change tempo without changing pitch or, said in another words, glide from one speed to another without pitch or tune interference.

But this wasn't possible in 2003 just inside a sequencer or audio editor -not in a clunky way. This was possible because of a little freeware app called GranuLab which, basically, slices your audio (any .wav or .aif) in zillions of fragments (called grains) and lets you manipulate their repetition, elimination or even applying pitch or volume envelopes (besides reversing them, phase-offset them...)
funny stuff. This app is the one Mr. Norman Cook used in his smash hit The Rockafeller Skank to do that roll-up with the whole track going from slow to fast. Clever! And of course I've found GranuLab after some research about that tune ;)

Therefore, after renderning the resulting parameter manipulation into a large chunk of audio, it is ready to insert into your preferred audio sequencer/multitrack.
Listen from 04:11 to 04:30

Those pads, nice pads they are! Starts the song and you're almost there, the ambiance is defined, the journey begins. Some typical drum'n'bass notes to define the lows, a thin arpeggio to add some nerve and... the drone, the tension. Thanks to a pair of soft-vocoders and some percussive synth-line pattern in 4 bars, plus lots of dark reverb and some alien language spoken-like notes here and there as triggers... here it is. The neila concept.
Helps the fact that one of the soft-vocoders fails from time to time adding that weird sprut, spit, execration, noise, saturation... you name it... gritty and cool aesthetics to it.

All in all, one of the most adventurous and spontaneous trips made through my fingers so far.

Get it, hear it, enjoy it here:
bombjack - neila

melangia

...or melancholy, derivated from Nostalgia.
Cited from wikipedia: The term nostalgia describes a longing for the past, often in idealized form. The word is made up of two Greek roots (νόστος nostos "returning home", and άλγος algos "pain"), to refer to "the pain a sick person feels because he wishes to return to his native home, and fears never to see it again". It was described as a medical condition, a form of melancholy, in the Early Modern period, and came to be an important topic in Romanticism.

So I desperatedly wanted to go home on this very christmas eve. But I was home. Not that kind of home.

Get it here:
[right click save as or click to listen]
bombjack - melangia [edit]

showreel

Two years ago I collaborated with a net-advertising company whom worked with some big industry names besides doing really cool motion-graphics and flash advertisement.

Check it:

Content: Herraiz&Soto.

The music seems easily done when you see the whole reel (with sound effects and all) but trying to beatmatch (to keep tempos thus making programming reliable) different video slices with such different flows is a real pita. Thanks to some real cool tools in daws nowadays you can stretch or warp audio as you wish, keeping audio transients and musical motives on tempo with a streamlined non-matching video.
Also, at the very beginning you can hear an Oxygène-alike drumloop that was created in regular 4/4 measuring. If you pay attention you can hear it makes triplets between tonic measures, thanks to warping original regular quantization points to triplet (1/8T) quantization. You can do as you like without tempo nor measure restrictions.

The wonders of digital domain.

come back (acidorro spin-off)

Here's the acidorro p'a las penas with vocals thanks to Mob. She's the co-composer and singer of my side project, Crano Ráreo.

Took off most of the bassline and smoothed various things, like strings and bass, to make it more pop-friendly. In the end this sounds like a john hughes' influenced 80's techno-dreampop-with-breaks.

Hope you enjoy it!

[left click or right click to Save As...]
bombjack vs crano - comeback.mp3

acidorro p'a las penas

There's a spanish slang phrase that says: ¡Tintorro p'a las penas!
When you're down, sad or screwed up you go to a Bar, drink some glasses of cheap red wine (Tintorro) and try to cure your pain (p'a las penas) but in the end you finish totally wasted... :D

Some days are better than others, and as a well-known artist's topic says pain can evoke art. So here I'll post one song evoked by some pain and nostalgia, where the synth full strings pad flows with my fingers, following my hard-earned emotions like a river of teardrops.

Enough emo stuff.

You can hear a nice 303 pattern flowing through the song matching the groove thanks to its accent punctuations and some melody note programming that accompanies the main harmony. I think it's the catch of the song, as I thought it was an inspired bassline and it doesn't get old fast.

Then you have the bass, oldskool analogue sound with oldskool sequence-alike. Maybe I can update it a little to sound more à la page... then the base, with this hard kick and a lot of hi hats... making it defined in lows and highs but lacking mids... so I can accomodate the rest, 303 and rough analogue bass.

Tell me what you think, let the strings flow and drink a cup of harmless acid! [put smiley here]

Click or right click: bombjack - acidorro pa las penas.mp3

thursday

When you have a spare night on your own, with those desktop dimmed lights and a couple ice cubes with coke...

Thursday night everyone went out, so I did what I do with my spare time: videogames. Not really.

Trying to use three sidechain modulators for just one track can be a hassle, but after some rehearsal I found that using the pre-fader send is a joy. When you have three different dynamic tracks that you can use to duck that juicy pad everything could happen, and it happened.

You can hear when the pad starts to fade in a subtile dynamic change, followed by more drastic ducking, besides going off-tempo to do a nice atmosphere movement side to side that repeating chord pattern and drum programming. In the end you can hear the ducking itself fades in and out with some different patterns, thanks to kick drum and that percussive chord pattern.

Also, there's a little melody that comes near the end with some sort of synth pan-flute that adds some mystery.

Check it out (and try it mixing upwards another rhytmic song ;)
bombjack - thursday.mp3
[right-click, Save As... to download]

(let's talk about) ssexs

sexual innuendo here

This track came to me when trying the infamous sidechaining effect where a signal ducks (lowers the volume) another with the required attack and release. Cubase is very tricky on this matter, because of no native sidechain routing. You need to do it using a Quadro (four channel surround buss) group. Sending one track pre-fader through inputs 3&4 (thus controlling the ducking level at your wish without affecting the track level, as a modulator) and routing the track you want to be ducked through group inputs 1&2. If it sounds tricky (it is at first) check here. Video not done by me.

The cool thing is applying this technique to a 303 bassline with some crazy delaying with spectral shifting and stuff, check yourself: bombjack - ssexs.mp3 [right-click, Save As... to download]

noname

A month ago I decided to try some of the automation tricks learned after battling with VST-instrument tracks into Cubase.
You can hear the pitch changing up and down (about 7 st.) with the help of a little VSTfx called Pitchwheel. This fx lets you change pitch accordingly with a large wheel AND the possibility to click outside the wheel, following the out-ring, to do some cool pitchshifting instant effects. Also a glide parameter can be configured, so you can do a portamento-effect between semitone steps.

The next thing I did was using a chopper-random-swissknife tool (like the freeware dBlue Glitch) to process some loop and add a rusty malfunctioning mechanics effect. Quite satisfying.

I've done in the past a lot of tracking with my Trinity Plus thus when I've had the possibility to permanently connect it to the soundcard I've recorded a lot of takes. Like this awesome pad. Lots of filtering, phasing and pure Korg quality-oscillator coolness. You can hear it washing everything else midways and in the end.

Then it came the idea to add a main line synth, to add some bass and expressive, non-cold-programming instrumentation. So there you have, a bass line played almost at 5/4 measuring growling and eating frequencies :D
To accomplish the presence I saturated a vintage compressor pushing input to its overdriving then controlling (lowering mostly) the output. Like it was analog gear (I wish) [thanks for the tip everlast!] plus a little stereo widening to separate it from the mid-center. You should try it.

The track: bombjack - noname.mp3
[right-click, Save As... to download]

Hello World

This is my first entry. A little presentation:
My name is Guillem Pascual, former musical producer of all kinds of electronic stuff, pop and everything worth spending time in it.
This blogspot is related to everything that comes by my spare time, from free productions downloadable directly here (however take in account that a limited 5GB-per-month bandwidth is present) to some production tips and some musical and VST reviews.

Cheers and see you around! :)