Here’s a free track written within a week, for the 29th week in a row.
Aims this week
The things I tried to do differently to standard Jet Jaguar fare were:
- Use one loop throughout
- Make it hip-hop-ish
- Chopped and screwed
Reckons
This was pretty last minute. I touched on various other ideas during the week, including the big deal of wondering about writing an elegy for my old cat George, who we said goodbye to on Monday.
By the time it got around to Friday that still felt like too much, though the challenge of trying to write instrumental music that was intended to be about something in the world was still kinda intellectually interesting – very far from how I normally think about expressing myself. Obviously (or not!) I didn’t go there.
Process
I started by writing a loop to chop and screw. I picked a tempo of 95bpm as a starter, knowing I would slow it down later.
I made the main drums first, by loading up XLN Audio’s XO and browsing its preset drum patterns and making use of a feature where you can audition different sounds while the pattern plays. I exported the separate drum sounds and the MIDI to my DAW and deleted the instance of XO. I added compression to the drums and that was it.
The drums had me thinking of the classic slow-mo disco groove of Lowrell’s ‘Mellow Mellow Right On’, which you’ve probably heard sampled somewhere (Massive Attack’s ‘Daydreaming’?). With this in mind I wrote a simple bassline using a stock subtractive synth (Bitwig’s Polymer), and gave it a little of that squelchy feel. When mucking about with it I accidentally dragged a copy of a 2-bar pattern I’d written so it was off beat, and found that kinda ruled. So then I had a 4-bar pattern. 😁
I added a one-bar repeating chord. I seem to be defaulting to a minor 9 chord! The sound is on a little phase distortion synth and I set the amounts of modulation between its 4 voices to vary slightly on each bar. I also modulate the volume so at the end of each bar there’s a tiny silence, to create an extra looping feel. I fed the synth into Nudist Audio’s Fermenter to grunge it up.
I wrote a drum fill for the end of 8 bars.
I exported 8 bars of the above drums, bass and chord as a single audio file, and then dragged that back into the project.
I slowed and pitched down the exported loop by 5 semitones and dropped the project tempo to a bit over 63bpm to get it all looping in time again. I put a slow phaser on the entire loop and an EQ to boost frequencies at about 1.3k to emphasise the effect.
I took the original chord part and pitched it to the new key, and then tweaked the settings so now it’s a sound that fades up into the mix every 2 bars. I added a ping-pong echo after this.
I created a short arrangement of the repeating loop, the original drums layered in, and that new sweeping chord fading into the mix. I like the effect of having the original (not pitched down) drums layered over the pitched down loop.
I added a quiet 2-bar piano melody, which comes in about 8 bars in. I used the default settings of Felt Instruments’ Ciemno, no effects.
I dragged in a field recording of some large (low pitch) wind chimes I had made a couple of weeks back. I got one-bar of this looping and pitched it so I liked the sound of it, and arranged it so this fades in and then remains looping after the rest of the track fades away. I really like all the wind sound and noise in it!
I found a tambourine loop among my files, sliced that to tempo, and got that looping. It fitted pretty instantly, so I just fade that in towards the end of the arrangement and that’s it. In this case I did the fade by slowly sweeping a lowpass filter, rather than by changing the volume.