Here’s my 37th weekly free track for 2026.
Aims
My simple aims for doing something different this week were:
- Pick a field recording and do nothing to it
- Let the length of the field recording set the length of the music.
Reckons
A pretty simple, pretty “me” thing, which I could probably keep working on and get to something I really like. It was fun to layer up two very different recordings.
I kept the “musical” stuff pretty quiet in the mix and am a bit ambivalent about that. Maybe it would be a better track overall if the other things were turned up and the field recordings turned down. To go even further, a stone soup version that removed the field recordings completely might also be interesting. No reason not to try something else later, I guess.
Process
First, I chose a recording I made recently of a trip between two stations near the outer end of London’s Metropolitan line. I put this in my DAW, untouched, and figured out a tempo that would mean the track would play a kind of typical number of bars of even length.
Next, I made a kind of bassline from a sample of a conga hit. I came up with an 8-bar pattern that picks out the notes of min7 chord and then moves up a tone and repeats. Welcome to the Dorian mode, ladies and gentlemen. I’m playing the conga sample pitched right down.
I made a faster progression using the same set of notes as above, played this on a staccato synth sound, and bounced that audio.
I added a convolution reverb to the bassline and dragged the above audio into it. This basically means each time a note of the bassline plays it is fed through the entire faster progression. I modulated the start point of the impulse response (if this makes no sense, maybe look up Viiri Audio’s Aava plugin for some idea of what I’m getting up to). This created a nice slurry granular-sounding reverb that changes each time a bass note is played.
I went back to the original synth progression and edited this into a jaunty rhythm, then included that in the mix. I switched the sound to the simplest sine wave and added a stereo ping-pong delay.
I decided at this point to incorporate a different, fairly recent (June) field recording I made of a very busy pedestrian crossing in Hong Kong. The intersection in question had loud, quite aggressive crossing signal noises. I added a volume ramp to this recording, so it fades in over 4 bars then abruptly cuts back to silence, and repeats like that until the very end of the track. I trimmed the end of this recording so it stops at exactly the point where the train doors open in the main recording. I used a low cut filter to remove low-end frequencies that weren’t doing anything to serve the track.
I sequenced out the track at this point, playing a bit of a fan dance with when I included the conga bassline, the bippy sine melody, neither of them, or both.
I added another higher synth melody, which I made by just playing the root note of the mode we’re in on a simple triangle wave, and then adding in an arpeggiator that cuts on and off at unpredictable rates. The arpeggios themselves also happen at different rates. Everything is going into a low pass cutoff filter and then a large reverb (100% wet). This sound comes and go, courtesy of the low pass cutoff’s EQ, sweeping up over about 8 bars until things are pretty obviously in the mix at about 2 minutes or so.
I felt like everything I was doing from here was making it worse, so although I tried various efforts to pick up on bits of the field recordings, I finally just left it as is.