Here’s my 36th weekly free track for 2026.
Aims
This week, the things that are not typical of me that I tried were:
- Use the half-diminished scale
- Use some diminished chords.
Reckons
This ended up pretty typically me and the diminished scale wasn’t confronting in the way I thought it might be. I know intellectually diminished chords are used in pop songs to fill out the harmony and are definitely not scary, but I flash back to mucking about on the white keys on a piano, going to that B chord and it being a bit yikesy.
Process
I started with writing a piano part that fades in later in the bit. I arbitarily picked E as my root for this half-diminished scale and just drew a bunch of notes with a lot of trial and error, until I had an 8-bar loop in 5/4. I used the Felt Instruments Lekko plugin as my instrument. I added a bunch of what my DAW Bitwig calls “spread” to the note velocities, so the loudness of the piano notes changes a bit each time.
Next I chopped up and deeply mangled a breakbeat from an old soul record. The slices are pitched down, I applied a spectral tuning trick that tries to fit every moment of the sample to one pitch (E, for me). In the final track this slowly fades in as well.
I reinforced the piano chord with sustained sine tones. Per-note pitch bends to move from chord to chord for added fun. A big reverb on top. I kept this sitting pretty quiet in the mix. Another sound that in the final track fades in over time.
I cloned the above sine part and duplicated the root notes down an octave, then filtered out a bunch of top end, to make a bass pedal. I removed the reverb that’s on the sine pad and instead added allpass filters to create stereo width. This one does show up at the start.
Next up I made electronic percussion parts, which are the ones that also open the final track. These are a mix of built-in synth drums from my DAW and sampled drum sounds sitting on my laptop.
I grouped the drum sounds, including the break I chopped up, and added a convolution reverb.
I decided the track needed some kind of more atmospheric, dubbed out element. I dragged in a field recording from my laptop, initially of a ferry trip in Croatia, and create a volume envelope that just has a burst of the sound come through every 2 bars. I fed this into multiple delays operating in parallel. I put a phaser in the feedback path of one of the delays. The recording is long and not synced to a fixed number of bars, so each time the envelope opens up the result is a slightly different sound.
I also duplicated the main piano chords on a staccato synth sound, and put a delay on that as well. When I say “main chords” I took out the notes in between the chords. This part comes in before the piano in the final arrangement, about 30 seconds in. The piano chords fade in over the top of the synth.
Only at this point did I arrange the track into a composition. Apart from some fades, I added a lowpass filter to all of the drum parts and automated the cutoff frequency so all of the percussion is filtered down to close to nothing near the end.
I decided the dubby, noisy field recording wasn’t working and tried various other field recordings. I wanted it to be fairly consistent but also to have some variation to it. The original recording I chose was so noisy it just sounded like white noise in the finished track. In the end I replaced the field recording with a recording of cicacas in my back garden in New Zealand, and then pitched this all right down so the insects’ individual stridulations are distinctly audible.