Here’s my 18th free track written within a week.
Aims this week
Things I tried to do differently to usual:
- Modulate keys multiple times under a stable repeating riff (tick)
- Just use one instrument (oops)
Reckons
How the heck are we a third of the way through 2026 already? Tracking the time like this has been a surprising side-effect of the WeeklyBeats adventure.
I quite enjoyed the results of this week, and was fine with deviating from my original aim of just playing it all on one instrument once I had something developed. I tend to think of any kind of rule or constraint this way – it’s often useful for getting started or giving something direction, but if my intuition is to let it go I will.
Process
I started with loading up a software piano instrument in my DAW, Felt Instruments’ Lekko.
I sequenced one repeating progression. Only two notes (F and C), to give lots of possibilities for chords that would sit under it. It’s a 4-bar loop playing in dotted minims, to create a bit of rhythmic interest against the chords I had in mind…
I sequenced evolving chords, just the same chord 4 times, change, and so on. I went for 4-note chords (basically 7th chords). I started in the most obvious key to me (C major) but I actually started on Em7 and down to Dm7 so you could argue we’re in E Phrygian mode, I guess.
Every 16 bars I just picked a new scale that has F and C in it. Then I copied and pasted the previous 16 bars of chords and dragged them around on-screen to find new chords in the scale that might work, so they typically hold the original chord shapes (the first two chords are minor 7 chords, for example). I changed things more if the results sounded crap.
When I had what sounded like enough sequenced out, I decided to let the whole thing resolve to Cmaj7 and we’re done.
The Lekko piano is deliberately muffled and murky, but I wanted to emphasise the repeating line a little more. So, I decided to double the piano line on an electric piano sound, an older version of the Applied Acoustics Lounge Lizard, with a little reverb.
I also decided to make the arrangement a little fuller, by adding a simple bass pedal under every chord. It’s just an out of the box Bitwig synth – its semi-modular additive synth , Polymer – playing a preset.
Then I made a little noisy arpeggio, which probably sounds more like a drum sound most of the time. I copied the chords to a new track, scrubbed out any repetitions so each chord is just held for however long, and configured an arpeggiator to take those held notes and, well, arpeggiate them. On this track I custom-rolled a patch on an FM synth to make noisy, sparkly sounds. Modulation changes the decay time on each note, so they’re a mix of short and long. The amount of this modulation ramps up every 4 bars, so at the start of every 4 bars all the notes are consistently short, and more variation comes in over time. In Bitwig, I did this by using a fast async LFO modulator to modulate the index of a Sample and Hold modulator. Sample and Hold is set to hold mode, triggered by gate, so it picks a new value with every new note received. This then modulates an FM-4’s amplitude envelope. Then I set the modulation amount on the Sample and Hold to 0 and used a Curves modulator synced to every 4 bars to modulate that. Easy in practice, maybe hard to write out in words. 😊
I put a big reverb on the arpeggio, and automated the wet/dry mix so it fairly suddenly goes from completely wet to about 40% wet around halfway through the track.
Lastly, I sequenced a simple drum pattern with sounds I treated as kick and snare, and automated the volume so that fades in through the track as well.