I spit Wild fyah! – new Dubstep track

Written by Foona
March 10th, 2011

I recently got an android phone a “HTC Wildfire”, and I wanted to tell you how I use this new piece of “gear” to actually create music. These androids/smart phones are pretty amazing. My model has got a processor with a power of 512MHz and a RAM of 384Mb and this is a smaller less powerful model. Now I remember a time when only computers where this powerful.

These android phones have a lot to offer in the form of widgets and applications, “apps” for short. Though very quickly I discovered that applications for musical creativity where scarce. When browsing the market I found just a few drum machines, voice recorders, synthesizers etc, as I said not much to offer at the moment. Also most of these applications need more power than my droid can offer. Bigger models wouldn’t have this problem so make sure you get the right one if you consider purchasing a droid. On my phone I also experience most apps being laggy and somewhat slow, some of the apps even ending up crashing. I almost started regretting my purchase just one day after opening the package my droid came in. But then I found “Uloops Studio Pro” and finally I saw light!

“Uloops Music Studio it’s a complete composition environment for android devices. Make hi-quality tracks using three concepts: Song, Loop and Devices (including Synthesizers, Drum Machines, Modulators and Recorders). Publish your songs in our community and adapt the work from others to your compositions.”
-copied from Uloops.net.

Here is a link to my first published track made solely with Uloops. Some external devices where used for the vocals but expect from that, it’s all Uloops. Pretty amazing coming from one little droid I might add.

LINK: Foona – Respect My Droid

Thanks to the hard work and Ingenuity of Juan BordónSebastián Marconi and the graphical design skills by Darío Georges , we droid musicians have a really versatile platform to work with and it won’t make you poor either. I purchased a 6 month subscription for about 5€ and with that you also get a full version of Uloops (there is a “Lite” version for those who might want to try it out), 200Mb of server space among other things. Now this is a web based app and everything you do within this app gets stored on a Uloops server, so you’ll need internet access etc. I’ve been working with this app for 5 days and I love it. Uloops isn’t perfect but as with anything new, bugs are to be expected, found and dealt with. Both Juan and Sebastián are working hard to perfect this wonderful application. Keep up the good work guys!

So if you’ve got an android and want to use it for creating music? Then you seriously need to check this out. Trust me! :)

LINK
: Uloops home

LINK: Uloops @ndroid market

Love an’ Blessin’s
/Foona

Studio 5
P.T.C-Crew
Rub-A-Dub Stockholm

Rootz Underground feat. Foona – Herb Fields Dub

Written by Foona
December 19th, 2010

Finally People!

I was supposed to release this song last Christmas, so it’s long overdue, but better late than never as they say.  For those who have no clue of what I’m writing about, I was contacted almost 2 years ago by Charles Lazarus from the Jamaican based roots band “Rootz Underground” about doing a dub collab with them. Of course I jumped at the chance and Charles even gave me the freedom of choice in their catalog. I only searched for a few minutes until I stumbled upon the song “Herb Fields”, a track I completely fell in love with! I informed Charles about my choice and a few months later I had the track ready for some nice dubbin’!

So here it is people some new dub for the mummy masses! I Foona from Studio 5 and Rootz Underground proudly present “Herb Fields Dub”. And the best part, it is free people!  If you want to listen to the track before you download it, just follow the link to SoundCloud.com.

Listen to Rootz Underground feat. Foona – Herb Fields Dub on SoundCloud:
http://soundcloud.com/foona/rootz-underground-ft-foona-herb-fields-dub

Click here to download the song!
(right-click and choose “save as”)


Merry Christmas everybody!

Love an’ Blessin’s
/Foona
Studio 5
P.T.C-Crew

Never really satisfied?

Written by Foona
September 25th, 2010

Allot of time has past since my latest updates. This is due to my new employment that started this summer.
I am so thankful for this; even though I don’t have any time over for the things I love doing. Not much music has been produced, no updates etc. I am not being negative about my situation just a bit frustrated. I am a producer and producing is what I should do. Then again I am also a hardworking “all-in-one-handyman”. Customers are always more than satisfied whenever a job is done and after the first month of my employment, my bosses decided I was worth a raise.
I feel like I have a personality split. One side of me hates the fact that my job is taking time away from music, and the other half hates that my “musical-self” is stopping me from really appreciating the job I am so good at. Haha, never really satisfied with anything, how arrogant of me! Life throws me a nice piece of chocolate cake and now I’m craving for a whole bakery? I guess I’m only human.

Regardless of the lack of time I have been making some progress with my music. Two new songs have been released on two different labels and in this post I will present one of them.

Album compilation: C303 -5 Years of DIY
Featured artists: Foona,  Daniel Arya, reset, Ars Dada, DJplaneten, jgb, Pitchplant, Lisa & Kroffe, Pehr Meldert, Node, jgb + mr, enapa, Suzywan

These artists have all performed live on the Camp303 stage at the NorbergFestival, an electronics festival that started over 10 years ago in the Swedish town Norberg. This festival gets more and more visitors every year and it is packed with electro based and influenced music. DIY builders meet to show off their excellent builds to the electro horny crowd. I myself have had the privilege to perform two times at this festival and with great success.

A few months ago Daniel Araya aka “Dar303” and Kristofer Ulfves aka “Kroffe”, two of the hosts of Camp303, decided they wanted to make a compilation album featuring artists that had performed on the Camp303 stage. I was asked to contribute to this album and so I did with a remix/new version of one of my songs from my album “Foona’s In’I Sound”. The song on that album is called “”. In this song one can hear the phrase “When you step into the gates of Zion, your soul will be touched by the lion”, and I really like that phrase.  As worked progressed with this new version the song took an interesting turn and I infused it with some Dubstep influences.

“Lion’s Den part 2 transforms into Lion Dubstep”
The song basically starts up with a weird waltz together with me laughing over it. I didn’t want the listener to know what to expect next and I though a waltz would do the trick. I actually produced an entire Waltz track just to get the right feel before I cut the first 15 seconds to use for my intro. I then grabbed my KORG Kaossilator and recorded some synthesizer grooves and at this stage I knew I was walking the right path. I also poked deep into my brain back to the times when I was producing Trance music (like the works of Astral Projection) and with the help of a plug called “Delay Lama” I was able to inject the track with some vocally filtered Psychedelic arpeggios.
I also wanted a reggae backdrop feel in my track but this time I didn’t want to use an organ as I always do, so I searched my archives for a piano instead and found an old shitty sounding SoundFont. The funny thing is I was going to change that sound to something else but totally forgot about it while I was working with every other element in the track. It even escaped my attention during the mixing part.
About two and a half minutes into the track I decided to transform the song and put more Dub and Dubstep into it. I recorded some new vocals witch I’m still not satisfied with, but since I couldn’t do it better it had to do. I hardly practice my singing enough, something that needs changing. I also put my favorite “Lion” phrase in it and finally I could start mixing my track. There are two things I regret, the fact that I didn’t pronounce the bass enough and I also should have cut out some of the high frequency’s, to give my track a more “Foona” like sound. Well there you have it people and the result can be heard on the C303 – 5 Years of DIY compilation album.

You can download the entire album for free at NorbergFestival.com. The album includes 13 tracks in total and personally I love all the different flavors from all these excellent artists.

Link:  C303 – 5 Years of DIY release page @ NorbergFestival.com

C303 – 5 Years of DIY promo video on YouTube

Take care people!

Love an’ Blessin’s
/Foona

Studio 5

Delayed album release!

Written by Foona
March 30th, 2010

Here we go again and this is the last part of “Not Rocksteady, Reggae, Dub or Dubstep

1.Back in the daysP.T.C-Crew
I and Arize have been working together for almost eight years with music and we’ve had some real fun doing it. Since Arize is part Dutch we decided to produce something dutch sounding….electronically dutch sounding. So we sat down for a week during the summer in 2005, pounding the studio with some old school hardcore techno. The result was the album “Gunnerizing“. Fact: Almost every time we sit down in the studio, stupidity rules. We tend to play around for hours, days even before doing something concrete.

Arize n’ Foona – Clown Clones (democlip) Album: Gunnerizing / Unreleased

Arize n’ Foona – Horny Gonner (democlip) Album: Gunnerizing / Unreleased


Me and Flim had to go through a lot of wierd projects before we finally were able to produce the CoffeShop album. Our collab was something new that had to be tested and experimented with, and so we did. We made a few songs that got “trashed” and here is one of those wierd projects.

Flim n’ Foona – Enter Coffeshop (democlip) Album: Lost Songs / Unreleased


Game Music
I worked a lot with game based music in my years. I’ve mainly made music for fantasy based games since that’s my favorite genre when it comes to RPG games. Here is a very old track that I made for an RPG game I was developing (that project totally died). I can ad that the game I was working on was based on the Final Fantasy series that I love so much. Imagine walking through an Ice cave when listening to this track.

Jngaelin – Sassou ICE CAVERN.2 (democlip) Album: Siforia Soundtrack / Unreleased

2. Nowaydays
Every time a friend visits me I always take the opportunity of doing something creative. This is a fun way of getting to know someone on a different plane then just going out drinking or watching movies etc. This is a project I made with Alexander Vagianakiz, an old friend that lives in Greece now. He and his brother Andreas usually comes once a year for a visit and at the last visit we made this trashy track together.

Foona n’ Bolloxology – Invaders (democlip) Album: Borderline / Unreleased

In this time I have no more parts of this series planned. I’ll have to dig deeper into my old archives and see if there might be some stuff I left out (there most probably is).

Till next time, stay tuned people!

Love an’ Blessin’s
/Foona

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