Here’s my 22nd free track written within a week.
Aims for this week
The real thing I tried to do differently to usual was just make house* music that has that pitched down sludgy feeling to the rhythm section.
I don’t even know if I could link you to examples of what I had in mind, but I had a sound in my head that seemed to be around a bunch maybe 10 years ago.
* Maybe it’s slow techno? Microhouse? Whatever.
Reckons
When I started out doing WeeklyBeats I wondered if just doing genre exercises distant from “classic” Jet Jag was actually a good use of my time. This week I had that thought return and dismissed it. If I’m having fun while making music, that’s all there is, right? I can’t be thinking about some hypotheticals to do with the output.
I deliberately kept this track bare bones because that felt right, but even so I feel like it could be expanded on, refined somehow without any of the negative connotations of “refinement” when it comes to doofy stuff.
Process
The summary of my process this week was very simple:
drums ➡️ bassline ➡️ chord ➡️ structure ➡️ congas!
I sequenced a 2-bar kick pattern with 3 different kick drums (each a drum synth device from my DAW Bitwig) and applied some initial compression.
Hats and claps are samples I dragged in, pitched down and cut short. Clap gets some stereo phaser. One pattern each, no variations. 😅
I made some slurpy, echoing FM percussion sounds starting from a preset in a modular soft synth (my DAW Bitwig’s The Grid). This first shows at about 0:30 in the final, it’s just a couple of hits at the end of every 16 bars. Left and right channels are sent into separate instances of a chaotic pitch shifter (Nudist Audio’s Fermenter) with different settings, and then into a stereo ping pong delay.
I grouped up and fed the combined drums into more compression.
The bassline is an out of the box synth from Bitwig (Polysynth). I just started with a preset, wrote a very simple 4-bar loop, then tweaked the sound.
The chords are another out of the box synth (Polymer). The synth is playing a “swarm” of simultaneous voices. Again, zero variations on the base pattern, but I recorded some knob twiddling – live changes to phase distortion, the spread of the swarm voices’ pitches, and overall stereo detune.
I laid out the structure. I kept it largely very on/off – parts arrive and they go. There are only two exceptions:
- To introduce the chords, I put a high-pass filter on the chord sound and slowly brought the cutoff frequency down.
- To add some development near the end I added a reverb to the chords and faded in the wet mix. The wet signal ducks under the dry sound. A pitch shifter in the reverb chain makes a classic shimmer effect.
I decided to add one more part, and one more fade: a conga loop made up of 3 hits sampled from a Roland TR-727. I tuned them down and in key with the chord and bass notes. I automated a big slow volume fade in, so the congas ever so gradually arrive in the mix and you only really notice them when they are almost soloed near the end.