Here’s my 20th free track written within a week.
Aims this week
This week the things I tried to do differently were:
- Make something kind of dancey
- Not worry about sticking strictly withing a key at any given time
- Keep the mix dry
On the second point, I semi-regularly modulate between keys, but I don’t often have a melody or chord progression that includes notes from outside of a given scale.
Reckons
Feeling super ambivalent this week – I kept vacillating between spending more time on this to raise it up a bit and just putting a pin it and doing something else. Like there’s a bunch of things I could do that might meet my aims of stretching a bit from classic JJ stuff, but still feel more characterful. Anyway, I landed on the side of just calling it done and uploading the thing.
Process
I started this track with the beat. I decided to make something in 7/4. I actually loaded up a drum sample browser plugin thing, XLN Audio’s XO and played with presets. I don’t use it very often, but it’s a good time. I found a preset I liked as a starting point, exported out both MIDI pattern and processed sounds to my DAW’s built-in drum machine, and edited the thing to taste – and in particular to make it 7/4 instead of 4/4. I enjoy playing with the back and forth between groups of 4 notes and groups of 3 notes like this, the kick landing clearly on beats 6 and 7 of every bar gives it this sudden momentum as it pushes back round to the start of the phrase. If I just think in this way (subdivisions of 3 and 4 or even 2 16th beats) it’s not hard to make something feel pretty ok in a non-standard time signature. IMO. It’s when you just act like you’re in 4/4 and then, e.g. chop 2 16th beats off the end of a bar that things sound really clunky. Which might be what you want, sometimes.
I split the sound of the beat into two layers running into separate copies of a pitch- and tone-shifting plugin (Nudist’s new one, Fermenter) to change the character of the sounds. One copy is basically pitching things up and emphasising high end clickiness, the other doing the opposite. In the final track there’s none of the unprocessed drum sounds coming through, just this result where the midrange is scooped out. A very non-rock sound.
Then I wrote some chords, which actually stick within a diatonic scale, but then I put what Bitwig calls a “note fx device” (Multi-Note) on them so any time I played a note it automatically adds a 5th on top. This thickens everything up harmony-wise and also, yeah, means the results don’t stay in key, but I found with short synth stabs it just sounds housey and accessible.
Next I wrote a repeating bassline that rhythmically follows the kick drums and then pitch-wise does single semitone ascending steps, which means we end up with a bunch of flat seconds in the mix. This will always, always make me think of Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” and I guess I leaned into that kind of synth bass sound, although I went for more of a wah squelch thing. I didn’t try to follow the chords but to make something that would work under any of them.
To add some more character, I doubled the chords on a xylophone. This is a pack of free samples from the music department of the University of Iowa, of all places. I am using another Bitwig note fx device, Humanize, to randomly offset the timing of each note a little (maybe 20 milliseconds or so) each time, which to me sounds more like how people normally play a xylophone.
After introducing that in the mix I adjusted the synth version of the chords to have a slower attack, so you get the xylophones on the beat and to some extent the synth part swells up underneath them.
I recorded and layered hand claps three times. I made one recording, edited the claps around to make say a 10-bar loop, then duplicated that and edited it so it starts in a different place and is only 9 bars and duplicated and edited it a second time and made that one, say, 11 bars. Then I panned copies hard left and right, leaving one in the middle, and added small delays to the panned copies that are 100% wet and have an LFO changing the delay amount. The result is that although the claps follow a consistent rhythm, it never sounds exactly the same, with subtle variations in timing and sound. I’ve done this kind of trick for I swear probably 20 years now.
On top of all of this I sequenced a melody on a marimba, using another set of samples from the above website. The chords are kind of doing a Lydian kind of thing, so I put the melody around the fifth, the raised fourth that gives the Lydian mode its flavour, and the major third. To add some interest sonically there’s some Bitwig delay preset that randomises settings on each new bar. I exported a good chunk of this (16 bars of 7/4, which is quite a lot) so that randomisation would actually play back predictably when I revisited.
Unlike many of my tracks so far this year, it was right at the end of the process that I went from a bunch of loops to sequencing out an arrangement. The two things I added to the mix during this process were a little flourish of echoes at the end of every 8 bars (it’s pretty quiet) and then a reverb fading in at the end (Bitwig’s Delay+ device with 100% diffusion).
So, that’s three different instances of using delay fx, which is maybe counter to one of my aims, but the main instrument parts are very dry and upfront, IMO.