Here’s the mastered track (Ozone 10) plus I asked a talented friend of mine to replace my previous midi guitar track (Kontakt Picked Acoustic) with the real thing. I’ll be doing this with most of my tracks from now on… it’s amazing how just a little bit of a “real” instrument helps to focus the entire piece. Also very excited about learning how to master and take what I’m doing with Scaler to the next level. This piece is the first movement in a 4-part suite reflecting my feelings about meditation and non-duality.
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Very nice work! What is the source of the space footage? I really like the audio and vid fade-in at start.
Thanks! I grabbed that footage from an astronomy site on YT, using it under Creative Commons license.
Great stuff! You’re right about adding some live playing really adding to the piece.
What is it about mastering that you want to learn?
There are lots of mastering tools out there that get you started in the right direction, including Ozone.
It’s a nice piece. If I may, and since you mentioned mastering, there are a few ‘glitches’ near the beginning, like at 00:52 which sounds like a sample editing problem more than anything else. I mean, there are no reasons for them to take place within the audio and visual context, unless you will refer to machine-induced virtual reality later on in the suite, which might very well not be the case. All in all, a good piece. Cheers.
Thanks, I’m glad that you enjoyed the piece. And… you’re referring to the “reverse glitches” that are quite deliberate… those are backwards guitar samples with hard attacks on them, so the attack comes at the end of the note. These discontinuities are an essential part of the song, and are created with a wonderful VI from Output called Rev. Rev VI from Output
Thanks Martin! I’ve been doing Ozone tutorials and more generally studying mastering concepts… mastering used to seem like a black art but with Ozone10 that world is opening up to me. Very exciting!
Nice choice! Could you narrow that down for us a bit? 
Good question, and here’s an attempt at an explanation… a “narrowing down.” Backwards figures like this are a standard trope in music to connote an altered state of consciousness, primarily within the psychedelic genre. It was started by Geoff Emerick when he was engineering Tomorrow Never Knows on Revolver. Quite a popular effect now and for the last 50 years.
I’m retired by the way, and one of the things I use to augment my meditation practice is to go into remote forest locations and use psychedelics to connect deep into the unconscious… the transpersonal consciousness underneath everything. I use this kind of composition as a way of musically journaling about these experiences. There’s nothing more to it than that. They are all ephemeral, they mean nothing more than simply being a reflection of the Universe.
The discontinuities that you are hearing are a way of reflecting on how, while in these ineffable states, there are always little shifts that take place which are hard to describe, and they are not actually discontinuities, but by creating a tiny little discontinuity in the composition, it’s a way of reflecting a certain aspect of the experience and helps me to remember the feeling of particular qualities. The Rev VI is a very effective tool for doing this.
These compositions might as well be representations of feelings that come from dreams. Because all of life is a kind of dream, in some way for me at least, music can represent moments in which the dream fades away, and I feel the presence of something more. Or less. Or nothing. No one thing matters more than any other thing. It’s all just feeling. All honest feelings are legitimate opportunities for expression.
Here’s a link to some of my other compositions… The first 6-7 in this gallery are part of this oeuvre. Music Videos - Gary Yost Portfolio Site
Thanks for your subsequent explanation. I’m doing zhan zhuang since quite some years, I can relate to what you are describing in general although the reverse, backward samples did sound odd to me at first in the context of meditative states, hence my initial observation.
You seem to have an interesting creative output, as time goes by I’ll peruse your creations. I see you have a video of The Residents 
Saw them live a couple of times many moons ago. Quite the original band.
Cheers.
Zhan Zhuang, very beautiful and deeply still form of Chi Gung. (FYI I’ve practiced Tai Chi for many years.)
Re the backward samples sounding odd… yup that’s the point.
The Residents are friends and creating a virtual reality hybrid animation experience with them was a joy… took almost two years… if you have an Oculus Quest you can watch it in headset here: The Residents - INSIDE A CIRCLE OF DREAMS
Wow, beautiful work, musically and visually. I am happy to have come across it here.
What role did Scaler play in the creation process?
Hey thanks denarius! I really appreciate the positive feedback because it’s all so subjective… hard to say what anyone else would really think because it’s so personal, not really in any genre.
I used Scalar to develop the chords and then used Keys-Lock in a freeform jam. Played a melody on top of that and saved it all as midi - from there I split the melody from the chords on different tracks and did a bunch of note editing to get it closer to what I was feeling. Most of what I’m doing in Scalar these days has to do with Keys-Lock and further midi editing… keeps it much more human and messy. (A friend asked me to do a soundtrack for a 10-min video this week and it’s all Keys-Lock again.)
Interesting. Thanks a lot for spelling out the process. Scaler can be used in so many ways!
I look forward to exploring your collection of videos.
He he … So you’d be the one to ask about who The Residents really are ! I promise, I will keep it secret !
Cheers.
LOL… the Cryptic Corporation has sworn me to secrecy!