Here’s my 19th free track written within a week.
Aims this week
This week the things I tried to do different were:
- Process the master mix
- Groove-based / staccato sounds
- No reverbs / delay fx
Reckons
I really like this little beat, including the swampy filters. My temptation is to take some aspects of it and sit them underneath lusher, more typically me stuff.
I’ve had the same aims before, but saw no reason not to repeat them and see what else I could do. I’m not going to make up 52 different completely different approaches to music!
I knocked this out incredibly quickly in one sitting. I was left feeling doubts about whether to develop it more or whatever, but in terms of just trying to get something done each week, I decided my preference is to call it done and, for example, leave myself more time to try what I described in the above para.
Process
I actually started with the gloopy, rattling chords that you hear on their own at the end of the track. This was just a bit of an experiment with Madrona Labs’ Kaivo. Grains of vinyl crackle glitch about at different rates and then are sent into a physically-modelled chime sound which adds a bit clearer tone. I semi-randomly assembled some notes and ended up with two min7 chords moving up then back down a tone – a classic Dorian vamp a la ‘Moon Dance’. That’s why this track sounds exactly like Van Morrison.
Next I made the beat, using drum machine samples recorded to tape by Gold Baby. I really like dropping the kick on the one of the 2nd bar in the 2-bar sequence. It’s a fun feel of suspense or something. I emphasised this by having a pause in the hihat pattern too.
I wrote the bassline next, using a simple subby sine tone. I just follow the root notes of the chords, and also emphasise the kick pattern so again there’s nothing on the first beat of the 2nd bar each time around.
At this point I started processing the master mix: some pretty hefty saturation, a low-pass filter (swept with an LFO, out of phase stereo-wise), and then compression to glue the results together.
Next up just a quick little riff on top. I found myself singing something, which is not something I normally do, and I tried to write the thing I was singing, just with whatever simple sound I first grabbed (Bitwig’s Organ device). It’s definitely not quite the same as what I sang, but it was fun enough. I did briefly explore extending the riff out with variations, but nothing felt as good as just letting it go around and around. I did a dive through Bitwig presets for a lead sound and landed on quite a simple square wave synth sound. With all the fx on the master there was enough interest there.
Along the way I kept turning off and turning back on the master fx just to check if I actually liked what they were doing. I did.
I thought one sustained note would be good, I went for high and squeaky. Something about where I was getting to (at least if I turned off the fx) was reminding me of Detroit producer Waajeed and I thought this would keep taking things in that direction. This is just a straight sine tone, pitch bent up a tone to follow the root note of the chords.
I sequenced out the elements I had, kicking off with that classic 4-beat intro popularised by The Neptunes. I played with the filter cutoff on the master mix, opening it out at the end, and then tweaked parameters of the Kaivo patch at the very end to close, shifting the pitch of the grains and the pitch of the resonator in different amounts and sometimes directions. Done!