#5 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Blending two tracks
This track’s title fits a classic pattern for me, where I wrote down some wordplay, riffing on some existing phrase, and found a home for it later. This track is a medley of two tracks, and the two parts have different tempos (= times) and time signatures (beats per bar, and measures are another way of saying bars).
I wrote the two parts of this track separately and, unable to find a structure for either part that I liked on its own, I decided to combine them.
There are many ways you might combine two musical ideas, including just doing a cold cut between sections. In this case I tweaked the tempos so they flow in a way I like and added a new synth part, with notes in common, as a bridge.
What it sounds like when I’m counting along
Here’s the transition section with me counting over it. It’s pretty rough, but hopefully enough of an idea. (My voice fades in.)
Matching up the bar lengths
The first part is 11 8 time and the tempo is 96bpm. I count each bar “1 e and a 2 e and a 3 and a”.
The second part is 4 4 time and at 70.4bpm – which is a bit of a precise tempo, but means each bar in the first part takes the same amount of time to play as each bar in the second part. This part wasn’t originally this tempo, but somewhere close, so I matched it up to see if it would work. I just count each bar “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”.
Bridging the two parts, harmonically
The kind of soaring synth string part that bridges the gap is the bit I wrote after.
I picked out 4 notes in common between the keys of the first part and the second. I’m just playing one note per bar, so, because of the tempos, this plays out at exactly the same speed throughout and there’s no clashy polyrhythmic subdivisions to be heard. You couldn’t tell if this was 11 8 or 4 4, in other words.
Notes-wise, the first part is G# Mixolydian mode and the second part is F#. The progression uses F#, G#, C# and A#. These notes are not at all spicy in either harmonic setting, so I reckon it flows effortlessly.
Using “out of the box” sounds
I don’t have too much to say about the separate tracks, but do want to say that almost all of the synth sounds in both parts are using default devices from the software I use (Bitwig).
I want to say that because sometimes music makers get funny about using niche and cool tools.
The second part has marimba and xylophone samples on top, hardly messed with. Again, as a sound source they’re nothing fancy. Not fancy like Holger Czukay, anyway.
I do use a software drum machine called XO primarily to audition sounds more easily than browsing directories. It doesn’t affect the sound of my music at all, if I do use it I then export sounds and patterns to Bitwig devices and clips pretty quickly. It’s a game changing workflow hack, though – as the broducers out there say.
I also tend to use some delay and reverb fx from Valhalla DSP, Unfiltered Audio and AudioThing (Reels, Wires).