Here’s my 11th track written within a week – or in this case, one day.
Aim for this week
- Just get a track done, in one day – I got to the end of the week and for reasons, including the announcement of a new album, just hadn’t made time for writing new music.
Reckons
I’m surprisingly happy with how this played out. It certainly was a matter of falling back on tried and true techniques, but it’s still not exactly typical of what I put out in the world these days.
Process
As usual, I’m writing in Bitwig, and will do my best to make these notes make sense to a music maker who hasn’t used that software.
I started with the beats, just dragging in a drum kit I had used on another project recently. I made a 4-bar sequence, writing at about 135bpm, before deciding to slow it down to 87bpm.
I put the main drum kit through a sweeping bandpass filter, which makes it smaller sounding and alternately more muffled or tinnier.
I underpinned the main drums with consistent kick drum and rimshot patterns.
Next I picked a scale and wrote a simple bassline. I literally wrote two bars, duplicated it, dragged it up a tone, duplicated that, dragged it up a tone again, and then did one last copy that went back down a tone. Somehow this fitted into a Mixolydian scale. I decided to make the first note of every bar the root to keep things a bit more grounded – I anticipated that if I laid out chords that followed this stepwise up and down it would just be a bit much. For the bass noise I just cycled through Bitwig presets (this is a Bitwig synth called Polysynth) and I didn’t end up tweaking the sound at all.
For a synth pad, I rolled my own sound using another Bitwig synth (Polymer). Once I had laid out some chords I decided I wanted the sound to be grungier and so I used a kind of (not-)tape emulation plugin, AudioThing’s Wires. This actually emulates a Soviet wire recorder, wire recorders being a particularly lo-fi way of recording audio that are described a bit at that link.
At this point I had a bunch of 8-bar loops. I dragged in a recording of a gong being struck in a noisy street in Taiwan, which became the opening sound of the track. I EQed it a lot to focus on the frequencies of the gong and strip out a chunk of traffic noise and similar. I did some slight stretching and dragging of the timing of the elements in the loop, so the gongs in particular land on a beat. I trimmed this into a 31-bar loop, which is about the most zany part because that means the gong hits land in different places relative to the track’s main, generic 8-bar hypermeter. I fed the whole sound through a very simple, one-bar long delay, which you can hear very clearly at the end of the track.
At this point I laid out the above loops on a timeline and arranged the whole track. Apart from when elements come and go, I mostly just did some simple volume fades, e.g. the pads at the start, the kicks over the opening 32 bars, as well automated the cutoff filter on the pad sound at the start and at the end, so it kind of opens out and then closes back down again.
And that ended up being it! Not bad for a couple of hours noodling about.