Here’s my tenth free track done in as many weeks.
Aims for this week
I’m trying to do something I don’t normally put out as Jet Jaguar each week. This week:
- Build a track around tuned percussion
- Use an odd hypermeter (normally phrases are 4 bars long – in this case I went with 5)
- Keep it shuffly
Reckons
I’m happy with the results of this one, for something quickly knocked off in a pretty busy week. I think I spent so many years in the territory of downbeat or taking in the influences of various flavours of funk and hip-hop that it feels both awkward and somehow all too easy to cover similar ground again. The formal constraints, particularly phrases being 5 bars long, adds some interest for me.
I really like the beat. Shout out to Tim Jaray for pointing out sometime last century that on the opener of Herbie’s ‘Headhunters’ the drummer does this snare pattern, where the first snare is a full 16th beat early.
Process
As usual, the track is made in Bitwig, and I’ll try to describe my process in a way that I hope makes sense if you make music yourself using some software but not specifically Bitwig.
I started with a bassy, tuned frame drum kind of sound, almost like a timpani, that bongs away throughout the track. It’s most obvious after 2 minutes or so into the track, when the guitar sound has gone away. The sound is a patch I made from scratch in the Madrona Labs synth Kaivo. I’m playing simple triads on this sound, changing notes every bar. Within the bar each layer is tapping out evolving Euclidean rhythms, so you’re always going to get all three notes of the triad on the first beat of each bar but then it’s pretty likely that the rhythm within the bar is different every time. The progression is 5 bars long, looping round and round. For the Bitwig users, this is 3 different note clips all being sent to the one group track. Each note clip is being sent into a Note Repeats device set to Euclidean mode and I’m using an LFO to modulate the Density parameter which controls how many notes get played per bar. Each LFO is set to a slightly different speed, from memory it’s like 0.2 Hz, 0.3 Hz and 0.35 Hz.
Second, I added a dry, normal-sounding conga pattern, using stock samples that come with Bitwig. Normal me would be to substitute or process these sounds somehow. I decided not to. They’re just dry in the mix. A 5-bar pattern again, with a little bit of humanisation so it’s not fully robotic sounding.
Next I sequenced a drum machine beat using Forever 89’s Visco sample-modelling drum machine. I made a 5-bar sequence for this and then duplicated that twice and edited the last bar of each variation to introduce a drum fill. Later I’ll alternate between these 5-bar clips when I lay out the structure of the track. I split Visco’s drum sounds to separate outputs so I could add compression and such to individual sounds. Visco lets you morph between two sounds in any given “slot”, like between two snare drums. I configured LFOs to sweep between different snare and rim shot sounds, kept the kick and hihats how I liked them. I added an LFO to modulate the length (“timescale”) of the hihats so they get more splashy sometimes. In Bitwig the type of LFOs I used are called Curves, which allow you to draw your own repeating shape. A trad sine-shaped LFO moving between two sounds is going to give you surprises, but not always good ones. I drew curves that mostly step between only 2 or 3 points / states that I think sound good.
The combo of the first three elements suddenly had an almost afrobeat feel to me, and I decided to bring in muted guitar sounds. Again these are just stock samples that come with Bitwig, dry and unprocessed.
I grabbed female vocal samples from Freesound and tweaked one of these to try and get something interesting. I ended up with 3 different snippets, which I arranged into a 20-bar pattern. They’re pitched quite far off the woman’s natural pitch, mostly down about 5 semitones from memory. Muddy, grungey echoes courtesy of Valhalla’s Delay plugin.
Lastly I added a synth bass part, ascending in semitone steps. I guess I was really riffing on Herbie Hancock’s ‘Chameleon’, which I referred to but didn’t name under Reckons above. So, the track is in E mixolydian, but the bass sneaks in a flat second: E, F, G flat. This only happens twice every 5 bars, so is pretty subtle.
I got all of these parts together before I arranged the track. I laid out the track, starting with all elements immediately in, and then taking things out. This is the opposite of how I might traditionally arrange, where either things slowly build up – or build up and then back down.
At the very end of the track I added automation to mangle the drums, turning up the Visco drum machine’s master frequency (this is a spectral frequency shifter, not the same as a pitch shifter) and its timescale (making each sound longer).
After a few relistens, I wrote a second, simpler guitar mutes riff and played around with adding a tape echo effect (AudioThing’s Reels). I was already using Reels in its tape emulation mode to add some grit to the guitar sound and switched it into echo mode.
The end!