Here’s my 17th free track written within a week.
Aims for this week
Things I tried to do differently to usual:
- Fast tempo
- Hard beats
- Minimise melody or harmony
Reckons
Kinda gruff and rough, I particularly like the found sound elements that kick things off and add variety throughout. I can imagine re-using that stuff somewhere.
I listen to a fair amount of music like this, but I get bored of it pretty quickly, so it was hard to sustain my interest throughout. I played it really loud semi-regularly, to see how it hit.
Process
I started by ripping a bunch of randomly-found audio off YouTube videos. There’s a site called ObscureTube which “displays recent, low view count YouTube videos with random names like IMG 1234, MOV 9876, or DSC 5678.” I just sat with that running in the background for a while, and when I heard something of interest, used one of a million ripping sites to grab an mp3. The audio files include someone demonstrating a toy glockenspiel, a Buddhist ceremony with chimes and gongs, but otherwise they’re mostly clicks, rattling, scuffing, and occasional beeps and alarms. A few voices.
I then opened my DAW, Bitwig, and set a tempo of 155 bpm. I dragged in six audio files and set them to all play at once and just loop whenever they finish, independent of the track tempo or bar lines. So they all go round and round in weird phase relationships with each other.
I created a repeating volume envelope that gates the found audio in time with the track, then fed it into a massive reverb. This imposes a tempo-based structure on to the sounds, but because they aren’t looping in time, unpredictable stuff is let through e.g. at the start of every 4 bars. This stuff is the first thing you hear in the finished track.
I put an aggressive limiter on the master track, figuring this would be the right character for what I was trying to do.
I sequenced a kick part with three different kicks, a snare part, and clicks that serve as hihats. I ended up making 3 different 8-bar kick sequences and played around switching between them. Snares and clicks just do the same thing every time. I’m just using out of the box Bitwig synth drum devices (v8 Kick, v8 Snare) and an old click sound sitting around on my hard drive. I pitched the click sound up a lot and high-pass filtered it to make it extra ticky.
I wrote a super-simple bass part, another Bitwig out of the box additive synth (Polymer). I just started from a preset but stripped off built-in fx. I based the tuning off the glockenspiel YouTube clip.
I did my usual side-chain dynamic EQ tricks, so when the kicks, the bass, the YouTube audio clips all have bass frequencies at the same time things are a bit better balanced.
At this point I arranged the track to see what else it needed. I ended up adding various small fills and tweaks to existing parts to add some more dynamics. A good old high-pass filter on the kicks acting as a kind of fade in.
I decided to create a modular feedback patch that takes the snare drum as an input and then has a whole lot of feedback on itself with delays and reverbs, to make some kind of outro part. This shows up about 2:30 in. I ended up feeding the whole modular patch (Bitwig’s FX Grid) into a convolution reverb that is using a recording of the inside of a glass bowl as an impulse response. This adds quite a definite pitch and means the snare sound rings out a lot even without feedback. I fed this into a pitch shifter and automated changes to the pitch, so it makes swooping sounds. One more delay / reverb (a delay with lots of diffusion) for luck. 😅 At the very end of the track I brought everything down to just the snare and the convolution, with the feedback and that final reverb removed.
Finally, after a listen through the whole thing, I added a ride cymbal to the end of every 8 bars when the track is most “all in”. This is just some sample off my hard drive.