Kind of amazed I haven’t done a track title where I flip the order of words in an English phrase. I thought there’d be a few pieces and bits out there, some ends and odds. But no? Anyway, here I am writing about the eighth free track I’ve submitted to the WeeklyBeats challenge. The name hopefully fits the idea of being jaded and over everything, but also describes the music’s noisy textures and that it’s actually finished within a week.
Aims for this week
- Get noisy
- No percussion (however ambient I get, I very regularly have some kind of rhythm section)
Reckons
I feel like this beatless-but-noisier effort would much more easily fit in with your average Jet Jaguar release than upbeat and doofy things I did in the first few weeks. Which is fine, just an observation.
Process
Pretty simple this time, there’s only three sounds in the whole track! As usual, I’m using the software Bitwig, but will indicate if I’m being specific.
I started with the chord progression that makes up most of the track (although it fades in, is not the first thing you hear). I went for the Phrygian mode, because I thought for a noisy beatless thing I probably wanted something fairly dark sounding, and voicings that bunch notes up which makes things a bit murkier and more dissonant feeling. Ignoring the inversions involved, if we’re in C# Phrygian, we’re going from C#m(b9) to Bm9.
The chords are on a little pad synth plugin, Tweakbench’s Padawan, which is run into a lowpass filter (which makes it muffled), a hand-rolled effect that uses a Hilbert transform to essentially add phase distortion (which makes it crunchy), a dub delay effect (which adds echoes). (Bitwig nerds, the hand-rolled effect is an FX Grid patch using what I learned from a video about the Dome filter.)
I added a two-note bassline played on a sub sine wave. This just pedals away throughout the whole track.
At this point I took these two elements from just loops and laid them out on a timeline, then explored a bunch of automated changes to the filters and amounts of distortion on the pad. This is most of the track’s development!
I added a kind of electric piano sound, Felt Instruments’ Ciemno. Believe it or not this is using an arpeggiator, which is very slowly playing arpeggios of the notes of the two chords. I added an unsteady LFO to modulate the speed of these arpeggios, so the progression moves from like only one note a bar all the way up to playing notes every 32nd beat and back. The LFO is not in sync with the track’s bar lines, so the way the arpeggio plays is never the same. (In Bitwig, this is an Apreggiator with its base rate being modulated by a Curves with the out of the box “Hedgehog II” curve, followed by a Quantize set to 16ths.)
I added a lot of echoes to this piano sound and sequenced the track so this is what you hear first, with the pad and bass sounds fading in. (In Bitwig, this is a Delay+ with high feedback but also high levels of diffusion, blur character = Reverse.)
I decided to make the pad get even crunchier by adding a Chebyshev waveshaper. I automated this to fade in at the end of the track, which adds more distortion and gets very loud. I put a hard limiter after the waveshaper to keep the overall volume of the pad less insane. (In Bitwig, this is a Filter+ with the filter section turned off.)
That’s it!