I put out my first ever ‘official’ release today! Never before have I committed so much time to making a finished piece of music – I’ve always spontaneously put bits and pieces up on soundcloud and deleted them later when I look back and see all the issues with them. This time I went through a more extensive process of mixing and (AI) mastering – maybe a bit amateurishly but better and more carefully than I’ve ever done before.
This piece is all modular synths. I was so lucky to be commissioned to make it by the coolest place in my city, Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio - I’d really recommend you check them out if you get the chance. They have a really big collection of old and new gear and I got the chance to use whatever I wanted to make this. No pressure! I worked really hard on this - I originally composed it to be octophonic and presented it in March in full 8.2 surround sound, but in iso I’ve mixed it down to be stereo.
My process was very unstructured: essentially I made hours and hours of improvisational recordings on different instruments, and went through them later trying to find my favourite moments and somehow piece them together into a cohesive whole. It was hard to sustain this for a half an hour piece though – I went through a few iterations and really pained over the lack of ‘thematic integrity’ or whatever you would call it. In the end though I’m really proud of how it came together. I’d love to hear if this is similar or different to your process, or if you’ve had to find different techniques when working on a longer work. I’d be grateful for any thoughts, comments, feedback 
Just for those interested, some of the significant sound sources I used:
Buchla: 200/e system
Verbos: Harmonic Oscillator, Bark Filter
Xaoc: Kamieniec
4MS: Spectral Multiband Resonator
Mutable Instruments: Rings, Clouds, Elements
Make Noise: Erbe Verb, Echophon, DPO, MMG
Intellijel: Rainmaker
