Here’s my ninth free track done in as many weeks.
Aims for this week
- Make ice-cold techno
- Use atonal / enharmonic sounds
Reckons
I’m pretty happy with the results this time. I was questioning whether to make it more aggressive, louder, faster, just to keep taking it further from what I usually do. But I ended up with something that’s more in line with some music I actually listen to.
Process
As always, I’m using the DAW Bitwig but try to say enough that you’ll get my process if you make recorded music.
I took a kind of three-step approach here:
- Make the main beat that would happen throughout
- Process that whole beat through effects and export the results
- Arrange the exported results and make whatever changes to complete the track
The first thing I started with is actually the first sound of the final track, which is sort of outside the above process. This is just one note on a synth, but that one note actually triggers 12 voices at once (voice stacking), with a spread in the pitch of those voices and a bunch of modulation so each time it plays every note does a sort of “THX tone” swoop in a slightly different way. Basically a deliberately out of tune stack of notes that changes pitch a bit each time. This is running into a massive reverb and delay, which rings out over 4 bars. (In Bitwig this is the Polymer synth, multiple Stack Spread modulators with some cross-modulation (e.g. an LFO changes the mode of one Stack Spread) and then Delay+ with a lot of diffusion.)
The main beat is just a drum machine kick, hihat, and clap, using some of Bitwig’s built-in drum synth devices. The kick is tuned and I added those high pitch offbeat kicks for a bit of variety. I fed the kick into a delay effect that makes scattered, rolling sounds fairly quietly on top.
I added one dubsteppy synth growl at the start of this two-bar loop, just a Bitwig synth preset.
I sequenced a single note on a squelchy synth patch with very high resonance and a lot of cut off tweaking which creates out-of-tune sweeping pitches.
I isolated only the frequencies from the beat + dubstep growl that were quieter than -85dB, leaving only quiet, weird slushy sounds. (This is Bitwig’s Loud Split, with the quiet frequency bin soloed.) This creates the main really scooped-out and kind of gurgly beat. I exported 64 bars of this.
I repeated the above process for that squelchy synth patch, which left only a very high frequency raspy resonance.
I put these two 64-bar exports into an arranger timeline and turned them way up, so they were now the loudest things in the mix. This brought out all the artefacts and scratchiness.
I discarded the original sounds apart from the opening voice stack sound, the synth growl, and hihat. I mixed these back in on top of the exported slushy beats. I tweaked the hihat to make it much higher and tickier, to fit in better.
I fed the now scratchy squelchy synth into a convolution reverb with a synthetic impulse response that comes included in Bitwig called “Atonal Stasis”. This adds bell-like ringing to the sound. You can hear this best in the middle of the track when the beat drops out.
I added a layer of trickling, crackling sounds which sound a bit like rain and a detuned radio. These textures fade in and are present through the second half of the track. This is an oscillator loosely trying to track track the pitch and volume of that opening voice stack sound. The tracking goes really fast and loose and so rather than sounding like a theremin or something it makes a bubbly sound. (Bitwig’s much maligned Treemonster device.) I sent this into a high-pass filter to take out the low end and then into lots of echoes.
Finally, after laying out a simple structure, I added two last percussive sounds, which fade in during the second half of the track. This a modal synth patch with deliberately enharmonic tuning and a synth cowbell sound which is similarly weird tuning-wise. Both of them are running into Unfiltered Audio’s Silo plugin, which is a granular delay plugin that plays them back -10 semitones down in pitch and smeared about. I copied in layers of the above convolution reverb with that “Atonal Stasis” impulse response, and pitched those layers up and down to add more harmonic info. They’re mixed quite low.
