Here’s my 42nd free track written in as many weeks. You can guess where and when I made the field recording in the track and the photo below.
Aims
This week my aims for doing things differently to usual were:
- A faster tempo, but no drums
- Start straight in, no intro or build up
Reckons
This was another very quick one and I’m pretty happy with it given how little time I spent.
Only 10 more tracks to write, which is kind of amazing.
Process
I picked an arbitrary tempo of 145 and built up a bunch of looping stuff that I didn’t like much. I came back to it a few days later and ended up throwing away. The one thing I kept was the one chord on a shimmering pad sound, slowed the tempo to 120, and built it up again from there.
The pad sound is actually a 16-beat arpeggio, but then sent into a 100% wet reverb (Bitwig’s Delay+ device with 100% diffusion). We’re in E mixolydian and the notes are a dominant 7 chord, inverted so the 7 is in the bass. The arpeggiator nudges the pitch of some notes to elsewhere in the same scale.
Next I wrote the little synth melody, which plays for 4 bars then gets sampled and held and loops around for another 4 bars, with the loop points changing so it sort of glitches and buzzes out of sync with the track tempo. I achieved this using Unfiltered Audio’s Sandman Pro, which is a delay plugin that allows you to “sleep” the input and just keep the delay buffer looping. LFOs modulate the start and end points of the buffer, which only kicks in when it’s in sleep mode. To add some sparkle to the synth sound, I am modulating wave folding and split two separate instances of the Fermenter pitch shifting plugin on the left and right channels. I tweaked the settings of each to add some flavour and reduced the mix amount so the signal is mostly dry but just has some slightly grunged up top end. Unexpectedly this added some popping and clicking that reminds me of keys being released on something like a sax or even a pump organ.
Next I wrote a bassline, which is just a 4-bar pattern that goes round and round. Chorus for stereo width.
Finally, I went through my decades of field recordings and dragged in one that I made in Annecy, France, in December 2022 (duh). This was the first one I tried and I thought it worked well. I rolled off the bottom end so it’s not so muddy, but otherwise didn’t touch it.
I arranged the track, basically just letting these 4 elements all play out constantly, but removing some things towards the end. The Annecy recording happened to run for just over 96 bars which is a bit of a classic sequence length in my world, so I wrapped up the synthy elements there and let the recording play.