Month: March 2026

WeeklyBeats #13: OK

Jet Jaguar

Here’s my 13th free track written within a week.

Close up photo of Japanese laurel leaves against a blue sky.

Aims for this week

Things I don’t usually do, for this week:

  • Generate melodies and harmonies, rather than sequencing or playing them
  • Alternate keys throughout the track
  • Write at a faster tempo than usual

Reckons

I quite like where I ended up this week, although it sounds pretty messy to me. In particular the deliberately big, wide chords seem kind of unruly and a bunch of the generative stuff doesn’t quite work for me. I considered exporting all the note data for one software-generated pass and then editing it to make it better, but that was going against my aims and I just wanted to say “done” and move on.

Process

I arbitrarily started at 132 bpm.

Central to the generative ideas was using a preset I found online that picks the next note, using Markov chains. Because it’s using probability it doesn’t run the same each time, which is fun. For the tuned content of this track I didn’t play or draw in any notes. I just used copies of the Markov chain preset and various methods of modulating or shaping its outputs.

I built out the chords first. The Markov chain generates the root notes and I built repeating envelopes every 8 bars that change the speed at which different notes are selected, so there’s more likely to be faster progressions towards the end of every 4 and every 8 bars. Then the patch is built so that every time a note plays it actually plays 5 copies of the same synth all at once, and I spread the pitches so those 5 notes span about 2 octaves.

I configured the whole project so all the generated notes would be forced into a scale, and then configured the project so the key/scale alternates between F Dorian for 4 bars and F Mixolydian for 4 bars. These scales are the same except Dorian has a minor third and Mixolydian a major third. So they sound very consonant but it does make things a bit ambiguous and intriguing.

Next I added drums, using samples of an old analogue drum machine, the Roland TR-66. I sequenced a beat the traditional way, drawing it in with my mouse on a piano roll. Remembering at this stage the track was zipping along at 132bpm, I found the drums felt too fast for the chords. I tried a half-time version of the same beat and really liked that. In the spirit of the generative patches, I configured some modulation to switch between the half-time and normal time sequences every 11 dotted 8th-beats (every 33 16th beats). Because the main track is in 4/4 this creates an evolving beat that unpredictably slows down and speeds up. Good fun! I fed the drums into AudioThing’s Reels, which is a tape emulation plugin, and set it to provide a bit of gritty echo.

Next I created the generative bassline. I copied the Markov chain patch that generates the chords’ root notes, pitched it down an octave, and create a bass patch on a soft synth. I did a similar technique where I used a multi-stage envelope to speed up and slow down the rate at which new notes are played and then quantised the results.

I cloned the Markov chain patch again and wrote a higher, faster melody. I configured the patch so that notes would just come through for the last 4 bars of every 16. I sent the synth patch into a nice big reverb, Valhalla’s VintageVerb plugin.

At this point I arranged the track on a timeline and figured out the structure. Because I was using generative patches, I mostly just used automation to trigger when the Markov chains were enabled or disabled. The drums were really the only exception, where I laid out loops for so long as I wanted them to show up. I added further automation for variation, for example fading out the hi-hats for 4 bars at one point, and cranking up the tape echo effect on the beats at the end.

Once I’d got what felt like a finished track sorted, I exported the whole thing and listened to the WAV file in an audio editor. It was still a bit hectic and weird-sounding in a way I didn’t like, so I tried listening to the entire track at half speed. I liked this a lot better, but it was probably too extreme.

I went back into Bitwig and slowed everything down from 132bpm to 95bpm.

I pitched down all of the sequences just 2 semitones, so the finished track alternates Eb Dorian and Eb Mixolydian. A whole octave down had been way too muddy and there was nothing bothering me about the frequencies of the tuned content. But, I had liked the sound of the drums pitched way down, so ended up with them pitched down 7 semitones. A few final EQ tweaks to try and make things sit nicely, and I was done. Re-exported, converted, uploaded!

WeeklyBeats #12: The National Apple Congress of 1883

Jet Jaguar

Here’s my 12th track written within one week.

Decorative photo of stairs descending between hedges and trees in a suburban setting at night.

Aims for this week

Things I don’t usually do, for this week:

  • Try putting FX on the whole mix (the master bus)
  • Let things not be in time
  • Include cymbals

Reckons

I had bigger plans for what I might do this week and then ran out of energy to follow through, so just thought I’d go more with the loopy jam approach, get something out quickly. My Friday night, as it turned out.

I like the result, it put me in mind of someone with the difficult to remember alias of wzrdryAV, maybe the beat-led but slow and noisy (but not aggro) thing.

I really like the final part that arrives near the end and wonder what else I might do in that direction.

Process

I started with the idea of picking a field recording with lots of high-pitch sounds, then slowed and pitched down. I didn’t really have an idea of how beaty or not the track might be at this point. So the recording is a whole bunch of starlings swooping around and around outside a cathedral in Hungary. I remember the others I was with were inside and I sat in the carpark with my recorder. I like this aspect of field recording a lot – a little memento! It was on my mind a lot when I called an album ‘Recording‘. I EQed out the low end of this field recording, otherwise just left it alone.

Next I made drum machine beats with tape-saturated 808 samples, sounds picked out of various sample packs from Goldbaby.

At this point I added deliberately grungey sound processing to the master track, this being the very silly-ly-named (oof) Unfiltered Audio LO-FI-AF effect. Using this effect you can send your signal through any combination of speaker/microphone emulations, spectral processing that usually makes it sound like a watery MP3, bit reduction and CD-skipping effects, and an “analog” section that emulates detuned radio and other kinds of interference. I played around with possible sound combos and put that spectral stuff last in the chain. I configured a repeating envelope that fades up the amount of that spectral slushiness that is applied in a 4-bar loop (Bitwig users: a Curves modulator with a custom curve shape). I set the mix on this effect so what you hear is 50/50 dry, unprocessed sound vs. the LO-FI-AF processing.

I sequenced a single chord to play for 16 bars, a G#m flat 9? I played that on an FM synth pad sound, bounced that to audio, chucked the results in a sampler and switched it to play back very very slowly in a grain mode, and pitched down an octave. I ran this into a bandpass filter and added an LFO to slowly sweep the cutoff frequency. I stacked 6 versions of this chord with different pan settings and different LFO sweep speeds. The grain sizes also have some randomisation which adds some shuffly motion to it all. I fed this into a long, big delay. Bitwig folks, this is just the built-in Sampler in Textures mode, with voice stacking turned up and Stack Spread modulators modulating an LFO’s speed and pan.

At this point I felt like I had enough for a minimal noisy groove, was quite happy just letting the thing play for ages. So I arranged the loops on a timeline and did some automation to fade things in and out.

I added a panning synth arpeggio, which I ended up fading in during the second half of the track. Do you know Depeche Mode’s “Waiting For The Night“? I had that kind of thing in mind. I’m not even a Mode fan. I did this by configuring one synth, duplicating it on a separate track, then padding the two synths hard left and right. Both synths are just playing the notes of that same G#m flat 9 chord. The synth is just one pure sine tone, but this immediately sounded more textured and packed with overtones because of that LO-FI-AF plugin on the master bus.

I set the arpeggio on the first synth to run freely, not in sync with the tempo of the track, and then put an LFO on that speed, so it goes slower and faster. I used a second, very slow LFO to slightly modulate the speed of the first LFO, to make it more unpredictable. After seeing how this sat in the mix I kind of compromised on my “out of time” goal and quantised the results, so the notes land on the nearest 16th beat.

Once I was happy with the settings on the first synth, I duplicated the results as I described above, and then changed all the speed settings slightly, so that the two channels play different notes at different times, creating this ever-evolving patter of tones.

For a little more texture, I added a quiet snare pattern that fades in over the first 32 bars then vanishes. It’s in 7/8 against the main 4/4 track, and it’s smeared about in time. I did this by sending the mix into a pitch shifter that sends it up an octave, with really big grains that make it sort of stammer and stutter, and then back into another pitch shifter that sends it back down to its original pitch, but with big grains again. It’s a cheap way to make a deliberately murky live granular delay effect. I ended up inserting some allpass filters between the two pitch shifters for extra spacey feels. In Bitwig this is just the stock devices Pitch Shifter > Blur > Pitch Shifter.

I created an 808 cowbell part, tuned to play a little melody using notes from the Phrygian mode that would fit on top of the chord and arpeggio. I ended up making this a lot weirder by sending it into a convolution reverb with a 30-second-ish recording of someone* hitting things inside a concrete radar dome as the impulse response. This created scattered layered versions of every cowbell hit, stumbling around out of sync with the track’s tempo. I arranged this to fade in about half way through the track and automated the volume so it becomes louder near the very end of the track. The actual sequenced notes have long since finished playing by the end of the track, but the 30-second convolution effect means you still hear stuff bouncing around that much later. The resulting part is definitely not in time with the track and I like it!

And finally I added one cymbal crash every 16 bars. 😅 Kinda funny for this to be the last touch. I just never do the classic thing of having a cymbal punctuate the start of a phrase like this, so wanted to try it and see if I was happy with the result.

*That someone is Mugwood / Antony Ryan, who masters almost all of my music and has done lovely remixes of both Jet Jaguar and Montano tracks. Thank you Antony, I keep coming back to these sounds!