#8 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
It’s kind of hilarious to me that this is the fastest track on the album at a breakneck pace of 103 bpm.
A new name for “glitch”?
So, I had a moment staring at my phone where I thought the phrase “data roaming”, read out of context, could be read like noun + adjective…
There’s a person standing nearby.
Can you smell those cats yawning?
I can hear some data roaming between my speakers.
This led to me thinking of it as a way more fun way to label glitch or computer music or experimental electronic music. And once I’d latched on to this idea this particular track seemed a good fit, with its various crackly textures and lurching rhythmic stuff, especially at the start.
I chucked a comma in the title because I thought otherwise no one would give ‘Data Roaming’ a second thought.
The main, stumbling synth stuff
This is where the track began.
I’m sampling myself here and end up using three different versions of this recording in the one track.
First I wrote a wandering synth part, a chunk of which sounds like this:
It’s in D harmonic major. I have no memory how or why I went there. I think this is likely one where I just watched or read something about this scale and decided to try something out, rather than writing something and afterwards going “huh, this sure is a major scale but with a flat six, isn’t it?”
I exported out a much longer version of the above and loaded it into a sampler. I stretched it out and play it back down an octave, so what you hear in the track is 1/4 of the original speed as well as being lower in pitch.
What you actually hear in the track is me playing back random-sounding, two-bar slices of this sampled progression. Because the original recording has plenty of silence, these slices do too, and probably more so because it’s slowed down so much.
I’ve put an EQ on the sound and am moving the frequencies around, like if you sat in front of an old stereo with EQ knobs on the front and swept them while the music was playing. It creates the swirly, phaser-y kind of sound.
In the final track this then has a long, slow echo applied to it.
Added technical info for the heads: On the piano roll you’d just see two bars of C2 over and over again, and I’m modulating the sample start point with a wavetable LFO. Then I’ve got two other simple sine-shaped LFOs, one modulating the rate of the LFO and the other the index of the wavetable. So the LFO that picks out what slice of the sample we hear is changing shape over the course of the track. This is part of my weird obsession with not using true randomisation, so that any time I listen back to the track it sounds the same.
“I ate Daniel Lanois and he repeats on me”
The above is the hilarious name of a preset I am using to manipulate a second slice of the above synth part. The preset is from a pack of presets by Empty Vessel, a fine soul who also makes his own music as cole. I’m mentioning this because we’ve collaborated on an EP, which I’m very much looking forward to having out in the world!
So, from memory relatively late in the piece, I decided to reverse and further stretch a clip from the above recording and put a shimmer reverb on it. This being an effect made famous by Eno and, yes, Daniel Lanois. Greg / Empty Vessel’s preset did just what I needed. I’m manipulating the feedback amount, but it’s otherwise his sound.
Sans shimmer:
Avec shimmer, a bit longer because of the tasty tail on the end:
Stuttering doves and an angry light bulb
You’ll notice the final track starts with doves in the mix. I have a big folder of field recordings. In this track I dredged up two recordings from years earlier:
- from early 2020, doves outside our window during a holiday in New Caledonia, and
- from 2018 … the electrical hum and “pinking” sounds of a nasty flickering fluoro tube in the toilet of a government building in my town.
Equally glamorous locations, definitely the same vibes.
In the track, these alternately fade in and out, and get kind of mangled. The crunchy digital noise you hear in the final track is actually that second recording just processed.
Here’s the opening section of the track with just those two recordings dry.
Here’s the same chunk of time, as it is in the final track.
The stuttering effect is what’s called a high-pass filter that I am messing around with a lot. The name means that only the high frequencies of the signal are allowed to pass through the signal chain, to eventually reach your ears.
No, you do not get a Gandalf gif.
The stuttering comes from sweeping the filter really aggressively, so it’s jumping from an unfiltered sound with all the frequencies passing through to a fully filtered sound where if anything’s coming through it’s probably only enough to annoy your dog. I’m sweeping the filter at different speeds throughout the track, but also different speeds in the left and right stereo channels.
The sounds are then going into an echo with a phaser (the swooping sound) and a reverb. The reverb in particular has the effect of softening the potential nastiness of the hard-panned motion. I think!
Techies: this is all Bitwig default devices, apart from Valhalla DSP’s Vintage Verb in the delay’s feedback path. A stereo splitter, a high pass filter on each channel, and a similar kind of thing to earlier in this post, where an LFO modulates the filter cutoff but then other LFOs modulate the shape of the LFO. I’m making use of the Curves LFO, where you can hand draw your wave shape. Lots of spiky shapes! Then it’s Bitwig’s Delay+ with a Phaser+ and Vintage Verb in the feedback path.
A pretty ending
I don’t know about you, but I find the opening combination of the unclear rhythms and that stuttering stuff kind of full on, even if the harmonic material is not. While I started there and always liked it, I deliberately structured the track so that it gets nicer as it goes.
So, towards the end, as well as these earlier sounds and other ear candy I’m skipping over, we’ve got:
- Full-sounding chords with an even pace and a trad resolution
- Chill, easy to follow percussion with a one-bar repeating pattern, and
- A lusher sound world.
Here’s the extra harmonic stuff separated out from the other things going on near the end:
You really hear the not-a-normal-major scale on the fourth chord in the sequence: the progression opens on F#m, goes to the root D major, D major again and then back up to F# but this time it’s the major chord. I really like it!
The chords are picked out on a synth sound but also stacked with, yep, me on the ukulele again. Just individual chords chopped out, and then layered down an octave for a bit more bass. That’s where a bunch of the noise is – you may have guessed I’m quite a fan of not trying to clean up shitty home recordings.
Then, adding to the lushness I was after, there’s the third instance of the same synth part I talk about at the start of this post, this one reversed, slowed down, and washed out through reverb. You can hear this part most between the other chords in the above sound file. This part is actually slowly fading in from about halfway through the track but is still pretty quiet throughout.
Everything goes out with about the most trad closing cadence: the louder synth chords ending on a V chord (admittedly inverted), resolving to a final, slightly murky I chord on just the sampled ukulele. Done!