This very first ever EP thing…

Get this at archive.org. There are Ogg Vorbis, low- and high-quality MP3, and FLAC files, and you can stream in the Flash player or from an M3U, and download MP3 ZIPs or separate tracks in whatever format you want. For an explanation of the formats the EP is delivered in, go here. For tag information, go here.

Track listing

  1. Prisoner
  2. A Breeze from Hell
  3. Tunnels and Open Skies
  4. Close Them and Never Open
  5. As Time Flows
  6. Falling Down
  7. Sane Again
  8. Help Me Cry

Notes\commentary\diary, whatever you’d call it

  • As Time Flows Went through a multitude of names before finally being named “Save the World Button” until the realization that that name was stupid. All is drum samples (one from MIDI), two synths and a white noise sample, made with ModPlug Tracker before the actual discovery of VST. 2007-05-06
  • Tunnels and Open Skies Pretty speedy. Reminded me of some crazy sci-fi chase on hoverbikes with lots of bullets and slow motion or something, hence the name. Uses two VSTi plug-ins and a VST effect applied to the whole mess. My first track with VST on OpenMPT. 2007-06-16
  • Sane Again This one uses three different VSTi plug-ins. I consider it my masterpiece so far. 2007-06-21
  • Close Them and Never Open Assembling this from different module files (because stupid OpenMPT doesn’t apply VST effects to channels so far, even though it’s supposed to) took plenty of time, but it was totally worth it. At least in my opinion… Weird glitch in the end, assembled in Audacity. Two different VSTi plug-ins and two VST effects. 2007-07-05
  • Falling Down Dancey club tune in the beginning, glitchy drum samples I had no use for before plus a sine wave with varying pitch envelopes afterwards, everything mashed up together in the end, and a VERY cool pure tone groove in the VERY end - I recommend looking towards hearing that one. It was abandoned, thanks to SketchMan for asking if I’ll continue it (since I did). 2007-07-08
  • A Breeze from Hell Finally loaded String Theory, took a preset and modified it a little to my liking. Then did this. Added a menacing sample of the lead instrument in the next track (”Tunnels and Open Skies”) that fades in slowly and then kicks it off. It’s going to be the first track. 2007-07-09
  • Help Me Cry Starts the same as “Breeze from Hell”, only with distortion. The distortion wears off and there’s three more chords without it. This will definitely be the last track, lasting 47 seconds. 2007-07-09
  • Prisoner Dark. A very dark tune. I thought that “Breeze from Hell” will be the first track, but now this is. “Breeze from Hell” is at the second place. 2007-07-10

Notes

Well, technically I’ve been working on this even earlier than the 6th of May ‘07, since I intended to do an album with MadTracker 2 once that was going to be called “A Mild Breeze from Hell”, and that was a long time ago. MadTracker is the program thanks to which I’ve discovered VST (although I’ve started using this extensively only, indeed, in this project). Some of the plug-ins I’ve used here are included with MadTracker 2 as well - Drumatic 3 and Superwave P8. I actually know these from there and I tried really hard not to overuse them. Yes, that’s why I use another two seemingly identical drum plug-ins. Wait, so why didn’t I use MadTracker and used OpenMPT instead? Because OpenMPT is open-source, and I’ve became a snob that attempts to use only open-source programs on Windows. And I’m also strangely used to the crappy graphics and UI of ModPlug Tracker rather than MadTracker’s. And MadTracker doesn’t export to WAV, unless you buy it - that sucks. This EP is semi-conceptual. You can try to guess the story by the track titles and by the music (obviously). Or, make up some things by yourself. One thing though - it’s not about hell, heaven, or death. The character here is quite alive. The tracks themselves went through a lot of titles. “As Time Flows” was originally named “He Died Saving His Planet” to go with the tiny story I crafted after it, then “Save the World Button”, and when I realized this track should be on this EP, it was renamed to “Failed”. I tried to record something on a real guitar once - I can play at an intelligible speed on my mother’s acoustic guitar, barely knowing any technique. But my shitty microphone (it’s not even a microphone but a one-ear headset I managed to squeeze into that guitar), combined with my 1997 sound card, produced distorted sounds instead of normal guitar sounds whenever I played too loudly (normally, that is). Try to do something with that when you don’t know what will come out! Speaking of real instruments, there’s no vocals on this EP. Also, I never tried my hand at writing songs, but I’m sure I suck at doing that too. Well, I did think of recording something and then doing the singing itself with a vocoder, but there came the most-likely-bad-at-song-writing part. Yes, it is this short. I didn’t feel like forcing myself to try and do some other interesting tracks after finishing “Prisoner”.

Stuff used

Plug-ins

Instruments

  • Superwave’s Superwave P8 (”Prisoner”, “Falling Down”, “Sane Again”)
  • E-Phonic’s Drumatic 3 (”Tunnels and Open Skies”, “Falling Down”, “Sane Again”)
  • Ugo’s String Theory (”Prisoner”, “A Breeze from Hell”, “Help Me Cry”)
  • Audiosonic’s DigiDrum Pro (”Prisoner”, “Close Them and Never Open”)
  • Andreas Ersson’s ErsDrums (”A Breeze from Hell”)
  • Odo Synths’s A-Bass (”Tunnels and Open Skies”)
  • Askywhale’s Osc321 (”Close Them and Never Open”)
  • E-Phonic’s SoloString (”Sane Again”)

Effects

  • SimulAnalog’s Guitar Suite:
    • Tube Screamer (”Tunnels and Open Skies”, “Close Them and Never Open”, “Help Me Cry”)
    • JCM900 (”Close Them and Never Open”)
  • mda’s RingMod (”Close Them and Never Open”) It’s only used at the end of the glitch sound. Barely notable.

Software

  • ModPlug Tracker\OpenMPT
  • Audacity Used for normalizing, cropping stuff, generating the original sine sample and the random percussion for “Falling Down”, and making the glitchy cacophony at the end of “Close Them and Never Open”.

A lengthy explanation on formats available

This release is delivered to you in four formats: MP3 of low and variable bit rates, Ogg Vorbis of variable bit rate, and FLAC. MP3 is currently supported by any modern media player you’ll stumble upon, so there will be no problems playing it. Ogg Vorbis is a format similar to MP3 but of a smaller size and of a better sound quality on lower bit rates, and FLAC is basically WAV of the minimum size (meaning maximum quality). Ogg and FLAC, however, are not as widely supported as MP3, and you’ll have to get plug-ins for playing them on media players like Windows Media Player and iTunes. On the other hand, some players like Winamp and foobar2000 have native support for these formats (and are the media players I’d recommend to use instead of WMP or iTunes anyway). foobar2000 can even convert any format it supports to Audio CD format before it burns tracks on a CD. The album is distributed under a Creative Commons license that allows remixing or whatever else you want to do with the audio files (if you give me credit and use the material for non-commercial purposes), so I’d recommend getting the FLAC version of the track if you want to remix it or whatever else - if you need an audio editor that supports the format, you’ll have to get Audacity.

Tagging along

If you’d like to tag your MP3s or OGGs of the album, you should tag it with the following information:

  • Artist: Litis
  • Album artist: Litis
  • Album: A Breeze from Hell
  • Year: 2007
  • Total tracks: 8

The title and track number of each track are told in the file names. I’ll try to upload properly tagged tracks of each format some time - these tracks are derived automatically by the Internet Archive from the FLAC files I uploaded and weren’t tagged. The FLAC files themselves are tagged properly with FLAC’s own tag format - foobar2000 reads them, but I’m not sure about Winamp or any other media players.