Here’s a free track written within a week, for the 32nd week running. 20 weeks left in the year!
Aim this week
This week’s aim for something unlike what I usually do was to just make something in the style of Joy O, broadly. I was listening to some things from his label Toss Portal the week prior and thought it’d be fun to try.
Reckons
I mean, it sounds like what I do when I’m in a dancey mode, I guess. But it was quite fun. The chords did not hit the tone I was hoping for, ended up almost like some kind of circus organ feel, which I’m not into. If I were to have another go I think the dubbed-out section is more what I’d like to explore.
Bit of a stressy week so also a bit stressful to fit this in.
Process
I picked a mid-120s tempo and got to work on some drums. I sliced up two breaks that are definitely not samples of someone else’s records, one being a 1/2 bar doof kak thing and the other being a 2-bar syncopated thing. I deleted bits out of the syncopated one so it’s a bit more stop/start, and then messed about with pitch shifting, formant shifting, filters, etc. to find sounds I liked. I added the most simple (synthetic) kick and snare pattern: a kick on the 1 and snares on 2 and 4. I also added occasional hihats and ride cymbals, again just drum machine sounds. I grouped up all the drums and chucked a compressor on them to make them feel a bit more cohesive.
Next I wrote two bass parts: a super simple housey bomp on the 1 of every 2nd bar, which sometimes gets doubled, and then the descending bashy 808-like things that land off the beat. I put some bit reduction on both to make them a bit grungey.
Next I wrote the chord sequence and fed it into a vocoder. The carrier is playing the chords on a basic, bright synth tone, and the modulator is the syncopated, sliced break. I ran this through a chain of swirly fx: sweeping filter, phaser, chorus, all from my DAW, and then a tight reverb (Valhalla VintageVerb).
I cloned the chord sequence and played it on a simple synth patch, which I put low down in the mix to sit under the vocoder part. I liked the combo.
I structured the track out at this point. The two big things I did, arrangement-wise, were:
- Fed short bursts of the vocoder into a delay and messed with the timings. I switch to just this for 16 bars and then cut back to it a little later in the track.
- Fed the whole drum bus into a crunchy speaker emulation kind of effect (a free plugin, Unfiltered Audio’s Battle FX).
I added one extra little synth boop, by cloning the basic bass track that goes bomp on the 1, and playing a higher note. A bit of high pass filter to make sure there’s no residual bass. Strangely, this really fills the gap when the vocoder first goes away.
Done.