Toxic

Finally managed to get my studio back up and online. As a direct result of that and also sorting out some problems I was having (see below), I've got a really good draft of another track for the EP!

"Toxic" is now available on the Dirty Fire Project Myspace Player.

I've recently tried to upgrade the PC I do music on, including getting a proper sound card for it instead of relying on the onboard Realtek chipset. However I've had to fight to get any sort of performance out of it as the latency was massive (> 100ms) and things were just sounding completely wrong (even if games were sounding fine). One new version of Asio4All later, followed by reducing the buffer size (counter-intuitively) and the latency is holding at around 21ms which is just fine! Also, with this track there was some kind of problem with the arp synth line spazzing out occasionally and hitting a note at maximum velocity on a change. Finally narrowed it down to a difference between two settings for the LFO synchronisation - one for some kind of MIDI clock that is internal to the synth and another that takes the signal from the host (Ableton Live). The problem hasn't completely gone away, but it has made it miles better! Had to try things like separating out the arp synth in the break to a different channel and starting it early but enveloping the volume until it's official "trigger" time. And still it seems that it's pot luck whether the problem will happen at render time. Most annoying.

However, I'm really pleased with the track. Points awarded if you can tell what two sci-fi programmes some of the samples come from ;)

~mouse:dFp