Here’s my 38th free track in as many weeks in 2026.
Aims
My one aim this week was to make a kinda boogie tune with a bass note that goes bom bom bom on the first 3 beats of a bar, then a clap on the 4. It’s a thing, I swear.
Reckons
Well, I did it! Why I went phrygian mode is another question, I’m not sure the whole thing hangs together. I dunno. I also find it just much too loopy, like it would be stronger if there were more unique moments.
The dotted rhythms of the arpeggio melody don’t always hit right either… if I had more time and inclination I’d record the note data from the arpeggiator and edit the pattern. Perhaps bursts of notes and lots of reverb between them, like I did in last week’s track, would have been fun too.
The housey pad chords also soften things up, reduce any energy the rhythm section brings, when a more fun alternative might be do the opposite.
I’m travelling and still slightly amazed I’m finding chances to get this done – this was mostly written on ferries between Greek islands.
Process
Not much detail to expand out on any given part here, so I’m going to just go bullet points:
- Bass and drum loops first – literally started the bassline on its own, which felt like a weird starting point, but with further edits as I added percussion and then introduced chords. Drums are all just sounds off my hard disk.
- Chords – added the pad sound. I played with tightly clustered voicings of the same chords as transition points, as in tried to cram all notes within one octave to add a bit more crunchiness. Then I went further, played with the idea that you can do a slightly spicy, non-diatonic move of leading into the next chord by playing the same thing up a minor third.
- Rhodes notes – added a few notes now I had an established key centre and scale to play with.
- Muted guitar
- Wandering arpeggio – I wanted a melody and the cheapest / easiest way was to take the main chords (minus those little transition ones) and arpeggiate them. Two copies, panned left and right, have different modulation of the arp speed so it alternates between 16th notes and dotted 8ths. To add more flavour, I copied and pasted the chord progression and then transposed the lowest notes of each chord up an octave. I repeated this process up and up for 16 bars then reversed it for 16 bars, so you get this rising and falling of different inversions of the same chords.
- Laid out the basic structure – as usual I start with loops and then start arranging them when I have enough bits to play around with.
- Detuned radio intro and outro effect – an instance of Unfiltered Audio’s LO-FI-AF plugin on the master, also mixed with a quiet recording of scanning through a shortwave radio. I automated fading between wet and dry mix of the plugin, plus fading the shortwave radio at the same time.