Here’s my 15th free track written within a week. Stink, I guess the fonts I’m using on my site don’t include glyphs for vowels with macrons. I might look for different fonts.
Aims for this week
The things I tried to do this week that are different from what I usually do:
- Write house music
- Minimise textural / timbral changes
I also ended up seeing how it would sound if it was either in 5 4 but subdivided into groups of 4, or in 4 4 but using strict quintuplets, however you choose to think about it. In my software I set the time signature to 5 4, and, for example put a kick drum every 5 16th beats. But honestly these kinds of time signature shenanigans are the type of thing I do semi-regularly.
Reckons
I really like this one, very happy with the results. At a certain speed the subdivisions are small enough to not sound too awkward. If the track was down around 80bpm or whatever they would be more obviously not just some kind of shuffle or swing.
I am finding that if I knock out a weekly beat quickly it does inspire me to go start into writing something else, perhaps pulling through a technique or even reusing a sound or progression. So that’s fun.
Process
This week I started with piano chords, the loop of two chords that ends up coming in quite early on in the track. I used a preset from a software piano instrument, imagiro’s Shearwater Piano and sequenced minor chords stepping down a whole tone, which probably puts us in a Phrygian mode. I fed this into what Bitwig calls note fx, basically adding echoes to my sequence / midi pattern rather than an audio delay. These echo notes quietly descend and are constrained into the scale I decided to play in. You can probably hear them best at the very end of the track.
I bounced the piano loop as audio and loaded that bounced piano loop into a sampler, to chop it up. I configured my sampler so that playing different notes on the keyboard doesn’t change the sample pitch, but instead jumps to different start points in the sample. I configured it so C2 on the keyboard is the start of the sample and C3 is near the end. I jammed about it to “tune” the sample points to something I liked, then sequenced an 8-bar loop of different slices. In Bitwig I used the Keytrack+ modulator to change the sample start of the audio loop in the built-in Sampler device.
I duplicated the sampler track and made a second stuttering piano loop, pitched an octave up. You can hear this as the final sound in the track. Much more spaced out than the first one. I made this loop 6 bars long, so these higher piano notes come in at irregular moments against the 8-bar patterns that make up the rest of the track.
I threw out the original piano sequence, just stayed with the exported audio.
I ended up pitching the piano parts down 5 semitones for some added texture and grain. So if I started the track in E Phrygian, I switched to B Phrygian, from memory.
Next I wrote the triangle wave bass part which started as a kind of 808-like kick tone on a single note. As I tweaked it and played around I found it sounded nicer higher up. So I added some higher notes that I ended up splitting out into their own track, and which faded in during the opening 16 bars of the track. This is Bitwig’s Polymer synth.
Once I realised the bass part wasn’t playing the part of the kick anymore I added the most simple 808 style kick, 4 to the floor (but 5 16ths between each). More tweaking of the bass part to make sure the interplay between the regular kicks and offbeat bass was a fun time. Bitwig’s v8 Kick device for the kick itself, with no fx.
I set up a lowcut filter on the bass part, so the low frequencies from the bass are removed each time the kick hits. If I don’t bother to write this out every time, assume I do that whenever I have a kick and a bass part. 😁 In Bitwig, I achieve this using an EQ+ with a 2-pole lowcut filter sitting at 20Hz. Then I use an Audio Sidechain modulator to receive the kick track’s output, tweak the settings so it’s only receiving frequencies up to about 100Hz, and use that to modulate the cutoff frequency of the lowcut.
Next I added a tambourine loop, just a stock loop dragged in and then stretched and warped to work with the quintuplet feel, and a hihat pattern. Bitwig’s v8 Hat device.
At this point I went back to the original, exported piano loop. I fed into a washed out, pitch-warbly reverb. A preset from Valhalla’s Delay plugin, with no changes.
Up until this point I’m just listening to loops going around and around. I sequenced the whole track at this point, with only some volume automation.
I decided to close the track with a copy of that raw piano loop, pitched up an octave.