A question we often get asked is 'how much of your music is real?' Well, duh, all of it. However, we do push the envelope technically speaking, since otherwise we couldn't make music at all. There's just not the local facilities. However, almost every artist putting decent music on the net uses digital assistance these days. And a lot of 'live' music happens thanks to a sound technician filtering the performers through a digital black box somewhere offstage. In fact some musicians can't perform live at all, and mime playing to stuff they recorded earlier.

So how does an Ainsley track get made? Here's the Blackwell guide to making music (mostly) at home. We start with the lyric. This consists of our friend Maty sitting down and writing it late at night and usually having a firm opinion of how it should be sung (which Ainsley generally ignores).

By mocking the internal rhyme scheme of the lyric (he produces stuff that rhymes and scans - Maty is old-fashioned that way) we get the basis of a melody. This then gets scored with a lot of debate about things like key changes and discords. If you have been following, now comes the technical part.

You need a DAW (digital audio workshop) - such as Avid's Pro Tools. We use that with Kontakt 8, Reaktor, and the Native Sounds Library. Use this to lay a basic track with a snare setting the rhythm. Rope in any local talent to add what live sounds you can. (We have a piano and a lyre.) The sounds you can't do live you need to fold in using a MIDI synthesizer. Then use the DAW and a mixer - Ozone 11 in our case - to make sure the tracks are properly synchronized and the different instruments play well together.

Then we hand it to Ainsley. The songs work best when she sings alto, but when she gets carried away she slips into a soprano that can pierce the ozone layer. Usually we get something editable in ten takes or so. Now we load this into another DAW called Audacity, with the Vine IO loaded. A high-pass filter for when Ainsley has strayed over 120 hz, usually with something like a 6db roll-off, and a spectral multi-edit to smooth things out. We run some other filters for clarity and do some overlay pads and reverb to add depth to the sound in selected places. Then we send the files in digital format for mastering, and our distributor uploads the result.

Is that 'real'? Listen and decide for yourself.

The Ainsley Blackwell team