Here’s a free track I wrote within a week, for the 41st week in a row.
Aims this week
This week, to do something different from what I usually do, I tried to:
- Make music from EMF microphone recordings (which I had recorded the week before), and
- Use a non-standard hypermeter (I landed on phrases repeating every 5 bars instead of every 4).
Reckons
The results are pretty scrunchy – the massive brightness of the EMF recordings is quite different to my usually fairly dark sound palette. But I am tempted to run with the main chords again, try something else with them. I was OK to call this particular track finished for the purposes of the Weekly Beats challenge, but I would like to explore other directions and work them through more.
I was going to call the track “What the fuck was that?” after the muffled vocal sample that repeats throughout the band EMF’s ‘Unbelievable’. This played uncensored on commercial radio in my country, and I think in a lot of places, because you hardly parse it as words. But, yeah, I didn’t. I went with a spoonerism that I found reminiscent of Radio Shack and therefore home-made electronics.
Process
Might try the bullet point approach again this time:
- Loaded one EMF recording into a sampler, ran a trick in the latest version of my DAW that spectrally pitch shifts the entire sample to one note, and wrote a simple two-chord progression on EMF sounds. I picked mixolydian mode as the most poppy option, for contrast with the character of the sounds, and decided to make the track 7/4. I set velocity to change the sample start point, not its loudness, which allowed me to make each repeat of the same chord play back a different slice of the fairly long recording.
- Duplicated the above and loaded in a different EMF recording, which created a much noisier result. Added an LFO that ramps the volume of each chord up from silence to max. This is the sound you hear at the start of the finished track, pretty quietly.
- Dragged in a third EMF recording, which was recording the sound of an Instagram story looping around off the face of a phone. You can hear muffled voices. Delay and some envelope shaping of the audio clip.
- Added a bass part, playing on a sine wave. Some saturation to give it some more high end.
- A kick drum, a hand clap, both using Bitwig drum synth devices.
- I arranged the track at this point.
- I dragged in one more EMF recording as an intro, before the rhythm section comes in. A similar ramp up on the volume.