#2 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Mood first
My memory is this track came from an idea to just make a certain kind of mood happen. I can’t really articulate even what that is, just a certain set of sounds that might have a certain feeling. Sparse, loopy, dub vibes but more ambient than either reggae or techno.
Descending chromatic harmony
Having said last week it’s easy to fall back on progressions that stick to one key, this is another one with a chromatic descent that steps outside of a traditional key. The track is in D minor, for sure, but the opening plonky stabs are hanging around A much more, and to be honest I’m not even sure how to describe some of the chords. 3 out of 4 notes are the same in every stab, but in each bar there’s this line stepping down in semitones. This introduces a flat 2nd in the third bar (E flat) before that descending line lands on D.
The stabs are both percussive enough and murky enough that the pitch content is kinda obscured anyway.
Shortwave over the internet
One source I added to this was clips of a shortwave radio station picked up via a Dutch university’s website. I played about on that site until I found a sound I liked, made a recording, and then added random-ish slices of that recording almost like punctuation into the track.
For the music production nerds, I did this by loading the recording into a sampler and modulating the start point of the sample so each time a note is triggered a different section of the sample is played back.
I’ve done this trick since the late 1900s.
I added stereo space using all-pass filters, as well as a different low-pass filter on the left and right channels with modulation on various settings so it shifts around. (Bitwig’s Blur, Stereo Split, Filter+ devices…)
Coming to land at the end
I remember very intentionally deciding to switch up the bass so the track kind of comes to ground after being much more floaty, and when I went there it felt like that was a fun, surprising place to stop almost straight away. So the way it plays out the last 8 bars pick up a little… and then we’re done. It makes me smile.
Serendipitous hailstorm
I recorded a hailstorm happening outside my home studio, complete with hail bouncing off the windows.
That’s the raw recording.
I dumped this straight over the track as I was structuring it. There’s really no special production tricks here:
- I EQed out some of the noisy low end,
- I faded the start, and
- I faded the end!
There’s actually an email notification from my computer just after 2 minutes that I didn’t do anything about in the track.