Here’s my 44th free track in as many weeks.
Aims
Aims this week for something different:
- Make some washy minimal techno
- Sample myself
Reckons
This was a last minute lash at getting something done, probably an hour’s effort. It’s fine. It’s easy after decades to knock out some good-enough minimal workout, because I know all the gestures so well. It’s hard to make something really good and unsurprisingly I don’t think this quick sketch is really good.
I rushed something out to maintain my streak and I did challenge myself as to whether I was actually getting thing out of doing that. What does it matter if I maintain my streak? Did I get anything out of actually writing this? Not really, but there was the chance I would, and given it only took an hour or so plus however long to write this it’s not actually a great loss. A crap movie would be a worse investment of time and energy and lord knows I’ve seen a few of those.
Process
I started with the idea of sampling and looping chunks of my track from 2 weeks back. I dragged in the MP3 and played it back 3 semitones lower. Sounded good, so I figured out a new tempo based on that pitch/speed. I configured the sampler in my DAW so that note velocity changes the sample start point, not the loudness of the note. I then sequenced a bunch of repeating crotchets and changed velocity every bar. I made an 8-bar loop that I liked, and ended up pitching it up an octave. I cloned this, pitched it back down, and tweaked the second loop so it’s 6 bars instead of 8. I applied a bandpass filter and mucked about with key tracking so that the particular frequency bands are quite different for the higher and lower loops.
Next, I added simple percussion parts – a kick, a handclap, a hihat. I EQed these pretty severely to make them quite murky and clicky. I had old Porter Ricks in mind.
I cloned the week #42 sample to make chord stabs. I configured the envelope to have no sustain and relatively short decay. As a shortcut I dragged in the same multi-tap delay combo from last week’s project. I mucked about with velocity to find nice sounding stabs and ended up with a very basic 2-bar pattern.
I arranged the track, using a lot of EQs / filters to fade things in and out.
I decided to add a vocoder beat part, as an additional layer in the second half of the track. It’s pretty subtle. I cloned the same old sample again and tweaked the settings to create a sustained granular drone out of one section, which became the carrier for the vocoder. Then I dragged in some funk break, sliced it up, got a pattern going I thought worked, and used this as the vocoder modulation source. I added some modulation to occasionally “freeze” the vocoder. The modulation loops every 13 beats, which of course is hard for a human to keep track of, so there’s this kind of regular but hard to predict disruption of the vocoder rhythm. I added this to the arrangement, making it fade in by opening up the filters on a highpass filter. It’s pretty subtle imo.
That’s it! 6 elements.