Here’s my 14th free track written within a week.
Aims
… nothing I actually achieved. I went back to the aims of week 1 and just didn’t really stick to any of them. No biggie.
Reckons
This is another track that I feel like is a bit of a throwback to where I was at 10+ years ago. Downtempo dubby grooves with some slight edginess / glitchiness to the sound palette. It has a pleasant enough feel, but I’m not passionate about it. It’s another one that I wrote in one sitting, a few hours after a medical procedure, which might be putting a slight dampener on my own thoughts and feelings about it.
I’m past the one-quarter mark for WeeklyBeats: that’s still a lot of weeks to go! I find myself wondering “is doing WeeklyBeats getting in the way of making more personal things or music that’s somehow more significant?” … but probably more important is to ask “so what if it is?” 😄
It doesn’t really matter whether I’m making more music that I would be serious about putting out in the world as a “proper” release, nor how quickly I make that music if I do it.
If nothing else, I started 2026 with a backlog of about 2 albums’ worth of unreleased material I am really happy with and that I could look to get out in the world.
Process
I did start out at around 130bpm. I began with a minimal bass part, which is actually a vocoder, going into a bunch of reverb.
I sequenced drums around the bass part – a kick and snare from built-in devices from the software I use, Bitwig, and then handclaps and a tiny ticking sound trimmed from a field recording, which functions here as a kind of hihat. I stacked multiple handclaps at once and added some randomisation that loosens up the timing of the stack so they don’t quite land on the 4 of the bar perfectly in time. (In Bitwig I’m doing this with the note fx Multi-Note and Humanize. The clap is not set to play at different pitches so Multi-Note just triggers the same sound many times at once.) Lots of tweaking – EQing, filtering, etc. as always.
I decided to add a classic disco hihat on the off-beats between every beat, but went with making hihats from a stream of pink noise and a gate that just mutes that on every beat and unmutes it again an 8th-note later. A low-cut filter to only leave the high-end. All-pass filters for a slightly more metallic ring to it.
I added a second bass part, the square wave bass synth hitting towards the end of each bar. I’m modulating the pulse width using a sample-and-hold kind of effect that picks a new modulation amount with each new note.
Next I worked out some chords, very staccato stabs. This is yet another instance of the same simple Bitwig synth, called “Polymer”. Working up from the bass notes I ended up in G Lydian mode (like G major with a raised 4th). Much filtering and such.
I cloned the stabs and made softer, slow attack chords, basically flipping the envelope so they slowly fade in and then stop suddenly. Paired with the stabs this is a fun way to make
I started tooling around with a big granular slurring effect, which I tried on the drums first. Basically I took a whole series of pitch shifters, 3 shifting the pitch down and then 3 shifting it back up again by the same amount. The result is you end up back at the original pitch, but the timing of the grains has moved around enough that it’s a kind of metallic, slurred mess.
I decided to put the slurring effect on all of the tuned stuff (the bass and the chords), and take it off the drums. Changing the transpose amount live started to sound pretty dubby and interesting, because in effect it is changing how randomised the timing of the sounds are so much more like changing delay speed than actually like changing pitch. so I sketched out an arrangement and automated some changes specifically to that transpose amount. The slurring effect fades in through the first minute or so and then I start automating changes to the transpose amount at about 1:15 or so. I added a final swoop of the mix amount to the end of the track, so the final chord is only the slurred version and with the highest transpose amount. One too many negronis.
Somewhere around the time of doing the arrangement I slowed the track right down from 130 to 93bpm.
I added one more hihat part, the clanky one that arrives around 1:20.
I finished up with a new portamento sine tone wiggle – just the root, the sharp 4 (flat 5), the 5, round and round, trying to centre us in that Lydian mode. A classic SH-101 kind of sound – just a squeaky monophonic synth line with no filter and plenty of glide / portamento, running into a bit of reverb. This fades in from the point when that hihat arrives, and then fades away again by the end of the track. Yet another instance of the stock Bitwig synth Polymer. I think that’s four instances in one track, which is not unusual for me.