Here’s a free track I wrote in the last week, for the 33rd week in a row.
Aims this week
The things I tried to do differently to usual were:
- Go at a fast tempo (154!) in a non-standard time signature
- Use 12-bar hypermeter (I usually group stuff in 8 or 16 bars)
- Use a bunch of different kick drums
Reckons
I enjoyed writing this one and feel like I landed somewhere that’s pretty me, even if there’s some stylistic tweaking. Not sure I’d put this on a Jet Jaguar album, but maybe!
Process
So, I started with the idea of having multiple different kick drums, pitched up, pitched down, whatever to create an interesting sort of rounded percussion set. Because kick drums aren’t nearly so noisy as say a cymbal or even a snare, I figured it could sound quite punchy and quite soft at the same time.
I picked a tempo and time signature (5/4) and started making loops of kicks. I ended up with 3 different kick sounds, and 1 of them I then processed 3 different ways by applying different convolution reverbs. That’s the gated-sounding reverbs you hear. Switching between dry and reverbed kicks suddenly put an obscure 1992 Massive Attack song in my head! It’s fun to realise some technique a million years later.
The pitched up synth kick sounds also remind me of a bunch of dubby techno type stuff from a relatively similar time, e.g. early Porter Ricks.
I added two more percussion sounds to the beat, just sort of popping or finger snap-ish sounds.
I grouped up all of the drums and set up some sweeping EQs on the top end of the mix, so everything above about 300 Hz is getting swept about, in some pattern that doesn’t match the time signature of the track. This is modulation of the one big morph knob on Minimal Audio Morph EQ, being modulated in a pattern of 53 2-beat steps. Some compression and limiting after the EQ to try and keep it relatively level.
I wrote a simple 4-bar bassline. Different notes are configured to not play every time, adding a little variation each time it plays through. The bass is very subby, I mostly just hear the pitch bend down at the end of every 4 bars.
Next, I made a 12-bar chord loop to work as a pad, that mostly sits on one chord for 8 bars and then switches to somewhere else for the last 4. The base sound is a basic subtractive synth patch, with different amounts of triangle, pulse, saw wave shifting in and out at different rates so it’s just a little different each time. I did a lot of subtle tweaks to filter cutoff and resonance as well. I deliberately made the envelope of the sound as on/off as possible – no attack, no decay, full sustain – so it clicks a little at each new note. This adds a very subtle rhythmic pulse and a bit of noise to feed into reverb… So then I sent it into two different convolution reverbs (one instance of Viiri Audio’s Aava) and made sure one of them was something that was itself pretty noisy. This creates the kind of texture I used to chase more often by sampling noisy things.
I duplicated the chord loop and turned it into short, quiet stabs, just one per bar. I wanted the stabs to be higher pitch than the pad, so pushed them up an octave and then inverted them. So what would normally be the root is now the highest pitch. I kept the same synth sound, but tweaked the envelope so it is just a very short bip, put that through an energetic, modulated filter and then into a reverb that is offset with a delay, so the reverb drops in 5/16ths after the dry signal. (These stabs only show up after about 1:30.)
For the last element, I dragged in a Mellotron flute part I had written for another track and then just dragged the whole thing up and down in my DAW until it was in a scale that was in tune with the rest of hte track. Similarly, I rearranged the timing a bit so it sits OK over 5/4 and made two variations of 12 bars each. This is sort of popping and stuttering, that’s because it’s playing back two layers of Mellotron samples which are each playing back as very sparse, short grains. There’s some deliberate motion in there, meaning the time between each grain varies. (Bitwig folks this is the new beta Fragments mode in the Sampler, with very low density.) I smoothed it out a little by sending it into a big reverb wash, but relatively quiet in the mix.
Finally, I arranged the track, moving from loops to a structure over time. Apart from the usual game of bringing things in and out, I changed the sustain amount on the pad sound, so at the start of the track it comes in with zero sustain, so it’s more like stabs and more obviously rhythmic. I did a similar thing on the way out.