[Bon Jovi song softly playing] Week 26 of 52!
Here’s my free track created within a week for this week.
Marking the passing of time feels right – here’s a photo from 19 years ago, in Tokyo.
I didn’t have specific aims to do something different from typical Jet Jaguarisms this week, just tried to get something done that I was half happy with.
Reckons
I quite like it, and still feel happy to be participating in this whole endeavour. The thing I’ll take away from it is how dotted 16ths can create a sense of momentum because they suggest double the tempo.
I have loose plans to travel in the second half of the year and wonder how to keep it easy. Should I investigate the world of making music on your phone? I can’t say the idea thrills me.
Process
I started with just wanting to try some Karplus-Strong techniques from a video I had watched in the last few weeks. So the writing process began with the noisy pluck sounds which fade in about halfway through the track. I got those looping and set up a bit of modulation that changes how they play out each time – how much the ringing feeds back on itself and the cutoff frequency of the lowpass filter within the feedback loop. (Bitwig user(s) reading this, this is one of the snare devices into Filter+ with the filter set to Comb mode.) I basically arbitrarily picked a starting time signature, key and tempo here.
Next I created the glitchy choir samples by loading up an old Mellotron choir sound, the thing that starts showing up just before 1:00 in the finished track. I was having a play with new sampler features in my DAW, Bitwig, and this is a granular synthesis mode and I experimented with modulating the starting position of the sample, so the sampler is generating grains from different bits of the source sample. Once I was getting something I liked I duplicated the sampler, panned the two instances hard left and right, and then tweaked the modulation settings of one instance, so they don’t play back the same. I really like how the resulting sound alternates between quite high drama choral stabs and almost complete noise. I deliberately did not wash this out in delay or reverb, as contrast with most of the other elements in the track.
Next I wrote the hihat part, dragging maybe 6 different samples into a drum machine and creating a 4-bar pattern using all of them. One sounds a lot like a rim shot and I emphasised that. The result was sounding that reminded me strongly of dub, even in 5/4, so I added a dotted 16ths delay, making it more explicitly dub and giving a double-time feel.
I added a sine bass tone and kick drums. I was inspired by the classic one drop feel from reggae with the kick placement, where you put a kick on 3 (and drop the more normal kick on the 1) in a bar of 4/4. Admittedly I normally hear that as a kick on 2 and 4, but I guess I count half-time to how the drummers who came up with that rhythm thought about it. Trying to do something like this in 5/4 was fun. Technically if you subdivide a bar into 20 16ths, you can put kicks on what feels like 2 and 4 of a 4/4 bar with a quintuplet feel… I did not do that. 😅
To keep the mix less hideous, I did my usual trick of using the bass as a sidechain for the cutoff of a high-pass filter on the kick drums. So when the two sounds coincide, you only get the top end of the kick. Given the quiet and low-energy kind of role in the track, I decided to go that way around, while I would often do the opposite (have the low end of a bass part ducking under the kick).
I created a shimmering pad from an arpeggio with a lot of delay and reverb. This is a synth arpeggiating in some weird group of like 13 dotted 8ths, with occasional modulation doubling the speed so it jumps forward at slightly different places each time it plays back. I’m in the Phrygian mode and the chords are just the i and the (flat) II. Or more specifically, for 4 bars, each I play F minor triad, then F minor 11 with no 9th in there, then G flat major triad, then G flat major 11 with no 9th in there. Who would know? Sound design-wise there’s some spectral blurry stuff (Unfiltered Audio SpecOps) on the upper frequencies, a straight 8ths delay and a big old reverb (Valhalla VintageVerb).
At this point I arranged the track, with very simple blocky arrangements, bringing something in or out every 16 bars, either cold or just a straight volume fade.
Last I wrote the vocal parts, which was again using a free vocal pack I think I’ve put to use 4 or 5 times now. My DAW Bitwig has a new feature in its sampler where it will pitch detect changing pitch across a sample and squish it all to one note and this was me exploring that. Like if the original vocal sample had 4 notes it is all flattened out to one note. I sequenced simple two-note chords and per-note pitch bends to try to make it sound a little human again, like two vocal takes moving in harmony. I loaded in 3 different vocal recordings in 3 different samplers and had them all playing the same note information. I set up a 12-bar round robin pattern switching between the 3 samples. If the singer originally went “wahhhhhhh” or originally went “doo bee doo” I kept the sample doing that, only adjusting the timing a bit. So, on a screen you just see sustained notes, but each sample is actually playing back its own rhythmic pattern over 2 bars.