Here’s my 16th free track written within a week.
Aims for this week
The things I tried to do this week that are different from what I usually do:
- Build a track around pitching a sample up and down like changing tape speed, letting the track change tempo with the chord changes.
- No custom sounds.
- No fx.
Reckons
I really like this one, it was a fun technical process to follow through on and even though nowadays I normally do a lot of sound design, the sounds I fell back on remind me of ancient, more classic “downtempo” things I have written and released as Jet Jaguar.
Process
I started by making the “sample”, a one-bar loop. I loaded up an electric piano plugin I got free with some software or another (an older version of Lounge Lizard), sequenced up a simple minor 7 chord with the root note emphasised down an octave. Just super trad. I was thinking of house tracks that just re-pitch one dominant 7 chord around.
Then I made a one-bar beat, using CompuRhythm CR-8000 samples (an ancient Roland drum machine).
Before turning the above into audio, I explored a 4-chord progression on the electric piano, transposing the one minor 7 chord shape to do different pitches. That helped with figuring out what might sound good. The progression just goes like root -> down 2 semitones -> back to root -> down 3 semitones. The last one breaks out of the key, but still sounds good to me.
I mirrored the root notes of the chords with a bass guitar sample pack that comes included with the software I use, Bitwig.
I broke my no FX aim and put a kind of tape saturation effect on the piano, bass and drum machine, in the hopes this would glue them together. Re: my aims, this was just a Bitwig preset (“Magnetape”) I pulled up and didn’t touch.
I bounced the one-bar loop as audio, muted all the source tracks, and then created a 16-bar progression where I shifted the track tempo to change the loop’s pitch and speed. So it sits on one pitch and speed for 4 bars, then bends to the next, and so on. This loop doesn’t actually show up in the finished track until 1:30. I used an online calculator for the maths. I’ve used that webpage since forever.
In coming up with the progression and listening to how the loop sounded at different speeds, I decided to pitch (and speed) the entire thing up 3 semitones. This made the opening bars just shy of 140bpm. Once it got to this point I decided to sequence accompanying parts in half time. I did a little EQ trimming off the top, as the CR-8000 hihats are pretty fierce and especially bright when pitched up.
Next up in unmuted and synced the original 4-chord electric piano part to the new 16-bar loop.
I loaded in some drum sounds, someone playing brushes on an acoustic kit, from an old free sample pack called Organic Drum Loops that I can’t find a link for. I literally pasted these into the arrangement view I was working with, just dragging them around on the timeline and copying and pasting. Some volume tweaking, no fx, no edits.
I wrote a simple bass line on one of Bitwig’s out of the box synths, mostly just following the root of the chords. While this is a custom sound, it’s about as basic as an additive synth gets.
I thought some texture would be good, so found a recording of rain and barking dogs on Freesound, and dumped that over the track. A little EQ trimming off the bottom, just to take some boom out of the low end. I set this in a repitch mode so it would change pitch as the track tempo changes. Not sure you really hear that, but it was quite fun.
I added guitar mutes following the chord progression, just another out of the box sample pack that comes with Bitwig. The preset had some optional chorus and delay built in and I turned them up. Even when I’m supposed to be using no FX I end up using a little!
At this point I sequenced out the arrangement, so I wasn’t just listening to 16 bars going round and round. I found the track worked pretty well not introducing the repitched loop for quite some time.
I stumbled upon the idea that at the end I would wrap up with only the repitched loop, and decided to pitch the loop down to a completely new speed and pitch, 7 semitones below the root. This takes the track from almost 140 to 90something bpm, and I really liked this more downtempo feel.
The last element I added ended up as the siren-like wee-oo wee-oo that comes in at 2 minutes. I timed its arrival with the field recording wrapping up. I had decided it would be good to have one more tuned element, and was thinking of a sort of ostinato on a squeaky sine or triangle tone synth with some portamento (like it’s still a G-funk era). If I really wanted the progression to stick, I needed notes that would work over all 4 chords. For better or worse it turned out the only notes that really worked are a flattened fifth apart. 😅 I put it very quietly in the mix (like the volume on the track in Bitwig says it’s turned down to like -35dB!) finding it really cut through regardless.
Finally, again arguably breaking with my aims, I decided to filter the top off the slow, repitched loop to end the track. I already had a high-cut filter to rein in the CR-8000 hihats, so I just automated bringing the cutoff on that right down to 20Hz, while bringing up some Q / resonance to accentuate the filter sweep.