This is my 45th free track I’ve written within a week this year. Nearly done!
Aims
This week the things I tried that were different to usual were:
- Riff on Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’ (really just a dinky little triangle wave riff, but something)
- Repitch the entire track
- Use a preset drum pattern.
Reckons
Another one I knocked off really quickly, this one actually during a flight, so maybe the mix sucks more than it should.
It makes me laugh that I thought to riff on the dinky, well, riff from ‘Popcorn’, when I put it in a downbeat Dorian context that makes it feel nothing alike.
Process
I loaded up XLN Audio’s XO drum explorer / sequencer / thing and sifted presets to find a beat I liked. Once I found one I bounced out the midi pattern and drum sounds and I did end up tweaking the drum sounds, in particular figuring out a scale implied by the pitched sounds (the kicks, for example) and in some cases tweaking things to fit.
I made a Rhodes piano part (an older version of Applied Acoustics’ Lounge Lizard) that is mostly just a couple of sustained notes and then midi note fx that trigger a whole bunch of notes in my chosen scale to play and then scatter the timing and velocity of the notes around. Something about a Rhodes works really well with this, just sounds like some fusion-y noodling to me. I recorded a 16-bar loop of this stuff that I liked.
I wrote the ‘Popcorn’-ish synth wave riff. There’s two variations, one that’s a bit busier than the other. I made the busier one by literally just copying and pasting the original riff slightly off beat and dragging it up a few steps in the scale, then tweaking anything that ended up out of key.
I arranged the track. Aside from normal fades I did a kind of midi fade on the Rhodes part, so I used more midi note fx to sweep the velocity values over the first 16 bars of the track, so they all start at close to 1 and then increase to their normal amounts.
I wasn’t thrilled with the results, just felt like it was only good enough, so I repitched the entire track a couple of days later. I put a pitch shifter on the beat with the intention of making a slushy chopped and screwed feel, but in the end cranked it up 5 semitones and found the 808s got into a kind of log drum-y range that I really like. Then I just transposed the midi for the Rhodes chords and riff. In the end I tried a pitch shifter on the Rhodes, to push it down an octave. I liked that more. I mixed back in some of the higher stuff, but quite quietly.
Done!