Almost halfway now! Here’s my 25th free track written within a week.
Aims this week
This week I decided to aim for the same things as last week, but do it differently. Those were:
- Use one sound source
- Use more silence than usual
- No filters
Reckons
I don’t like the result as much as last week – can you make music with marimbas and not sound like a ringtone? – but I like that I tried for the same things, because of course there’s a million possible ways to approach it with a squillion possible outcomes. I went for a kind of programmatic phasing thing again – I could’ve written a whole damn song instead!
Not really sure I achieved the aim of more use of silence, except there’s a big ol’ fade in.
It’s quite a thing for me to do absolutely nothing in terms of manipulating the sounds in a track. I guess I added one effect. But no other tweaking at all of the sounds I downloaded. They just play back as recorded.
Process
I arbitrarily picked a key and a tempo.
I decided I would make polymetric phrases that rub up against each other. Just think of it as different length loops, but unlike last week where I pushed things only a little out of time with each other so it creates a slurring effect, this is whole 8th beats different.
I loaded up a sampler with free marimba samples and sequenced a 4-bar pattern in 5/4 that just repeats one note and then steps to a different one on the 4th bar.
I copied the sampler to a new track and did the same kind of sequence 3 more times, with different length notes creating different time signatures.
I dragged all the resulting tracks into an arrangement and let them loop for as long as sounded good to me.
I made each track fade in over 8 repetitions of its sequence, which is an inconsistent amount of time because the loops are different lengths.
I added a washed out reverb to the master track, and had this fade in towards the end of the arrangement. I used Valhalla’s free Supermassive plugin.
After a few listens through I thought to count out 8 repetitions of each phrase and pitch everything down an octave for 8 and then back up again and repeat.
Finally, I pitched the entire track up by 2 semitones and then by an octave. It had been getting pretty low and bassy, which I did like, but I thought I’d like it even more if it was in a higher register, and I was right.