Here’s a free track written within a week, for the 30th week in a row.
Aims this week
I didn’t specifically aim for much different from what I usually do as Jet Jaguar this week. Maybe the choice of track title? 😅
Reckons
I found this mix incredibly murky and annoying to listen to this week, which may always just be a mood thing. I mean, aesthetically, the few elements are mostly murky, either filtered down or washed out or both. But I found it hard swinging between what should take focus and what kind of a track I was even writing. Listening to just the rhythm section on its own, turned up, I could imagine that being what it was all about, but in the end turning that down relative to the pads was the thing that got me willing to finish the track.
Also, I’m happier with the results than the above suggests.
Process
This track actually started with a little bit of play with a sample, with no fixed idea in mind, on top of another piece of music I was writing. My DAW of choice Bitwig has some new features in its built-in sampler and I was playing with those, using a totally legal sample source that definitely isn’t breaching WeeklyBeats’ “no samples that breach copyright” rule. I dragged out the 8-bar loop I made into a new project file, ditched the rest of what I was working on, and started this week’s track from there. A couple of strummed bass notes that opened someone’s track turned into the higher-pitched woogly sound that ends my track. I ran the sample through a dynamic EQ (Minimal Audio’s Morph EQ) that is making all the frequencies sweep and gurgle. I will forever be a sucker for this kind of stuff on a crackly sample source. Let the surface noise reign.
Next I worked on the drums, and I ended up doing a lot given how quiet and squashed the final result is. There are two kicks and three rim shots layered up. There’s some randomness on the timing of two out of three rim shots, a flam every time. A highpass filter with an LFO modulating its cutoff on the more toppy kick, so basically more or less of it enters the mix. Everything is grouped up, fed into amp emulation, then a compressor, then a dynamic EQ like I applied to the first sample (another instance of Morph EQ). I set the dynamic EQ to morph to a different state every 7 minims, sampling and holding a value from an LFO. I also modulated the mix amount, so there’s always at least half dry/half wet signal in the mix. This made the resulting sweeps less extreme, the beat more constant-sounding.
Next I added the synth pad, playing chords that follow the notes of the sample and treating those as the root of the two chords. The synth is just Bitwig’s built-in Polymer, my fallback really, with big envelope sweeps on a Moog-like lowpass filter and modulation of the attack and decay of those envelopes so each note plays a bit differently. I put the results through a (super)massive reverb. That kind of keening sweep always makes me think of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, but bent notes with heaps of detuned reverb is also very Modern Film Score too, to my ears. I challenged myself to stick with it; my instinct was to make it less dramatic.
There is a change in the chords but I think it’s pretty subtle – we’re going from C7 (dominant) to A minor, by bending the top B flat down a semitone to A. I also had a C in the bass which I bend down to A. So you get C, E, G, B flat moving to C, E, G, A. C7 to Am7, but the voicing makes it possibly easy to miss.
I added a simple bassline to the rhythm section, some bass preset on some Bitwig device, just following the C and A of the initial sample and the chords, with a little triplet figure in there.
At this point I structured the track, moving from loops to an arrangement. To open, I thinned out the chord notes, adding one note with each new chord. I also automated the overall cutoff on this sound, so it starts much duller in the mix and opens out over the first 16 bars or so. I also added some modulation of the sync amount on the chord sound, which makes the sound brighter and a little more spiky (adds overtones).
Nerd alert (redundant? too late?): it was nice to take advantage of an automation editing feature in Bitwig where you can select e.g. 16 bars of automation and then drag the values up or down at start or end, to create a ramp shape. If you look at the shapes in this screenshot, I used this feature twice on the pad synth’s sync level. First I turned saw-shaped jumps in the amount of automation over 8 bars into those hedgehog shapes. Second, after I duplicated that 8-bar automation pattern 4 times, I dragged down the automation amount so the hedgehogs go from nothing to maximum spikiness over 32 bars.
I thought the track needed another element, so added a shimmery piano-ish sound up higher in the register. This is a piano plugin fed into another big reverb (another copy of Super Massive) with 100% wet mix. I auto-panned the dry signal before the reverb to add some interest. I just twiddled clusters of three high notes very close to each other, then on screen I copied and pasted some of these around, dragging them up and down the piano roll to create movement. I repeated this a few times, checking it was all in key. I made two variations with slightly different pitches, which I mostly alternate between in the final track.
A couple of days later I came back to the track and decided to change the chords the last time they play. Similar to above, I copied and pasted the existing chords, then dragged them up a fairly arbitrary amount, checked for fit to scale, had a listen and decided it was good enough! You can see this in the above screenshot.
Typing this stuff out makes me realise how often my decisions about harmony are not much about forethought or even about intervals and their relationships, and more just “find some notes in the existing key, if it sounds OK then it is OK”.