I received my new OP-XY on Monday, and laid down this beat almost immediately. I then spent the rest of the week trying to write something over the top of it, and failed. I had some decent bass lines but ended up pulling them from this submission, because it made the piece feel incomplete.
Hopefully I can revisit this down the road, because I really like the beat.
Another week without my OP-XY, so I once again re-visited a song that I started last year. I really like the sonic space of this song. I tried to apply all my newly acquired EQ abilities to bring out the things I really like in the song using the M8's newish ability to EQ individual instruments. I hope I didn't over-do it.
Hopefully I will be back to making brand-new music next week, as my replacement OP-XY should be here by Tuesday!
I wasn't able to come up with anything really new this week, so I took an old song and remastered it. The M8 now has instrument based EQ, so I went through each instrument and tweaked things to my liking. I then recorded it into Bitwig, where I added a bit of compression and a small amount of EQ to the entire song.
This is one of the best songs I've ever made on the M8, and was the result of lots of lunch-time editing last year. The success of this song prompted me to devote more time to music and ultimately to take part in this streak.
With my OP-XY still out for RMA, I struggled to come up with something this week. I finally sat down with my Syntakt and decided to try to come up with something I liked. I was moderately successful, here. I have a hard time getting the Syntakt to make the sounds that I want it to. In other words, I spend a lot of time just fiddling with knobs and stuff, rather than making the beat better. I tried to include some sounds from the M8, but ended up scrapping that side of the song.
This isn't my best, but it's a submission, and that's more than I had this morning!
The OP-XY has become the backbone of my method, and my favorite toy is currently en route to teenage.engineering for an RMA. One of the buttons was finicky and I couldn't stand it anymore, but that means I'm without it for the week.
I started this song awhile ago on the OP-1, before I had the OP-XY. I finished it today for my weekly upload, because I had mostly run out of time. I like this song, but still struggle with the OP-1 workflow.
This is more of a technical challenge this week than a musical one, although I'm happy with the result. I wanted to try to get the OP-XY to make Pigments soft synth and my M8 make sounds via MIDI, and I accomplished that goal. I also built the drums in the Syntakt and used it's song mode this time to give some variance to the drum beat throughout the song. The OP-XY is outputting MIDI into Pigments via USB-C and via the MIDI out to the M8. What's fun there is that I can effectively 'double up' the channels, meaning one sequence in the OP-XY can play both instruments.
I started with the 'bent strings' preset in Pigments, just playing around with melody until I found something cool. Then I added the drums and bass. Finally I added the M8 to the mix to have more sonic diversity. I was going to add some guitar via the ZOIA to the mix on this one, but couldn't get a recording I was satisfied with.
I purchased a new audio interface this week, which allowed me to add multiple instruments to my recordings. Because of this, I started the drums on the Syntakt, then routed sync into the OP-XY for the synth sounds.
The song came together pretty quickly after I had the drums laid out. I added some of the background sound layers and then worked on the melody. Once I found the first riff the rest of the melody came into being relatively easily as well.
Started this song shortly after getting the OP-XY. Picked it back up this week to have something to submit for this week, fleshing it out as a song and adding some reverb and delay to some parts using the ZOIA.
I'm happy with the way this song has turned out, but wish I'd given more time to the overall mix and master. I got a new guitar this week and that sort of ...diverted my free time.
I named it w a l k because to me it feels like a loping jaunt down a beachside sidewalk.
This song started as an attempt to see what I could do with the bass from the OP-XY and the Overdrive preset on the ZOIA. I really liked the sound, and came up with the bass loop pretty quickly.
I then spent the week messing around with melody, and laid down a few of my favorite little riffs. The arrangement came together pretty quickly after that, and then I spent the last few days tweaking the mix and trying to get the best sound out of this song as possible.
Overall I'm super happy with the result, and feel like this might be the clearest 'track' that I've put together so far.
I made this one evening as the snow was falling outside of my window. The song started as just chord exploration, but expanded to some sound design. I found a delay preset on the ZOIA called Snowfall, and I started trying to make twinkly snowflake sounds. I arrived at this.
I added some slow drums and continued tweaking the sounds, eventually linking 3 separate sounds together, all being run through the ZOIA's delay and the OP-XY's reverb.
As far as 'songs' go, this one isn't my best, but I'm happy with the feeling it elicites, and I am happy to upload it as my first song for this streak.
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I dig that beat. Is the brushing sound an inverted snare?