Early in the week, I had a funky drum beat in my mind, and threw it together with Ableton's 64-pad rock kit. I didn't have a chance to put guitar on it right away, so I temporarily filled the track in with a looped field recording from my back yard. Gradually, keys went on (filtered Analog), and I added bass. Finally, late Sunday, I had a few minutes to put guitar (Res-O-Glas, Vox Wah) on, and then I cut down the field recordings significantly, as well as slowing speed and dropping pitch.
In-the-box processing:
Drums: Drum Buss, vinyl distortion. (I'd got it into my mind that this would add character.)
Bass: EQ-8, with bass rolloff.
Guitar: Auto-Filter high/low pass with drive.
Field recordings: Auto-Filter high/low pass, auto-pan
Sends: convolution reverb, Echo ("A Bit Tipsy" with time changed and noise/wobble reduced). Full-chain master on the 2-bus.
Title from Fermi's name for element 94 (plutonium) when he'd thought he'd discovered it--"hesperium." (He didn't.)
This week's track was about playing with some syncopated rhythms, which then coalesced into something funky. Drums: one Drum Rack with the Crossroads Kit preset, one 808 Status Quo, one with some tabla samples, and one set of handclaps. Operator on the Funky Organ preset. One track of Epiphone P-J bass, and two of Res-O-Glas guitar (one clean with Vox Wah, and one with Reuss RF-01). A bit of Drum Buss and M4L Humanizer on the Crossroads kit, and EQ-8 on the bass.
Sends: one convolution reverb, one Delay, and one Echo. Full-Chain Master on the mixdown.
Title from the way that thorium-treated lenses will darken over time.
This week's track started with the two drum patterns (Electro Dub kit and 64-pad rock kit) that together had a slow, off-kilter groove with each other. I didn't get around to tracking until Friday evening (one whole set of Fahey-tuned guitar that I didn't use, fake Mellotron that I didn't use, either). Saturday I did bass and Epiphone Moderne (Reuss RF-01 and Vox Wah, and also a track of non-distorted Moderne with wah). I extracted a track of unintentional sounds from the fuzz channel, and arranged them throughout for some texture; I'd toyed with the thought of building the piece around them, but opted to go for something less outside this time.
Sends: two convolution reverbs (room ambience, weirder room ambience on the fuzz guitar) and one echo (automated send on the one drum). There's a lot of EQ-8 to roll off low frequencies on the bass and on the electro-dub kit. And some M4L Humanizer on the drums. Full-chain master on everything.
Title from one of the earliest uses (fishing sinkers) for this week's element, lead.
A funk track emerged this week. I started playing with beats (single-hits from a dry funk kit), added percussion (tabla, claps, conga/bongo), Wurlitzer and Rhodes...some piano and organ that I removed, put on bass, and two tracks (distorted and not distorted) of Epiphone Moderne through the Vox Wah. Notable production items...included M4L humanizer, subtle use of a couple different convolution reverbs (room and plate), simple delay cascading into filter delay, and not any automation--it just seemed to work better as a static thing.
Title comes from association from the Pythagorean distaste for the number 17, coming as it does as the interval between the numbers 16 and 18. Also, I've used a lot of major seconds in this. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17_(number)#cite_note-14, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_second#Epogdoon)
Also, mad respect to anyone hanging in there!
Not feeling particularly well most of the week, so the fundamentals of the track didn't emerge until late in the week, with some simple drum parts, and bass. Initially I went for a sparse post-rock thing, but threw that all out when I reduced the drums to the simplest patterns, and re-built them as something I could reasonably play dubby bass against. (Two tracks of bass--one with cabinet plugin, and one with auto-filter and distortion, both side-chained against the kick) Having been listening to some Laswell projects, I put tables on there as well, and Ableton's Behr stringed instrument. As a last-minute addition, I tracked a bunch of guitar (Res-O through Vox Wah, into band-pass auto-filter), and played a lot with automating sends (one to a convolution reverb, one to LFO band-pass auto-filter into filter delay). M4L Humanizer on the drums and tabla, and full-chain master on the 2-mix.
Title from the wikipedia entry on the number 14:
Take a set of real numbers and apply the closure and complement operations to it in any possible sequence. At most 14 distinct sets can be generated in this way. This holds even if the reals are replaced by a more general topological space. See Kuratowski's closure-complement problem.
This week I wanted to hear something dubby and bass-heavy, with two bass lines going, and this is the result. Tracks: Drum Rack of a trap set played with brushes, with Auto-Filter for tone-shaping. Also a Drum Rack of hand drum hits, Impulse instrument of hand claps, and a 909 kick, all of them going through Auto-Filter to varying degrees as well.
Keys: Electric piano (MKI2 Crunchy) through LFO Auto-Filter for a wah effect, and Operator (Funky Organ).
Bass: two channels of 80s Epiphone P-J (P-pickup only) straight into the board. One channel got 50% of a Cabinet plugin, and the other got Auto-Filter (high-pass with drive) and compression to tame some variance.
Sends: convolution reverb, and a channel of LFO band-pass Auto-Filter into Simple Delay into Filter Delay. The percussion got automation to go to the delay channel at different times, while that was nearly constant for the electric piano. All MIDI instruments got M4L Humanizer, and everything except the trap set and primary bass got Auto-Pan. The master channel got Full-Chain Master for compression/limiting.
Title from the dub feel and ride cymbal.
