it turns out that i can only submit one file per month - that's a bit of a bummer, since now my submissions are shifted by a month and I lost the streak because of it. Nonetheless, I think I'm still on track for my "one tune per month" goal. Hear for yourself! :) this is a bright sounding jam, recorded straight from my DN+DT.

It's been quite a busy month, and now it's finally over, time to coast out the year

• Ebrit

I went back to recording jams, since that's much easier to do for me and doesn't take as much time as mixing the full track in Bitwig. Of course, it now comes with a bunch of fat-fingered oopsies but maybe that makes it more entertaining for you, eh?

This is an extended version of a song made for the OST jam that happened this month. Read all about it there. It's about a summer night, this is based on One, the sexy one. The sexy has been toned down and made more presentable, and now it could be a decent theme song for a game.
It's using some unused ideas that didn't quite fit in the loop, but works well enough in here.

• Spider

This one's been a bit of a work with no real clear direction. It's kind of wandering. It's on a journey.
Come join this journey.

A song in two acts, each of which did have some direction, but neither really could stand on their own. This is inspired by Lord of the Dance (specifically the song Breakout by Ronan Hardiman) but it kinda went its own way pretty early. I love that song, it's really nice. I like this song too, it's doing some interesting things, syncopation in the first part, fluid melody the second.

• Raioh

This month, I really didn't have time for making music at all.. Still, I had an idea and here I am trying to capture it, even though I could only spend 2-3 hours sketching it in Bitwig.

This one was just kinda made out of default LMMS samples and plugins shaped sticks and our bird preset shaped strings and will definitely be added upon in the future
In the meantime, it's functional
if this were a game theme, I'd play it

• Ebrit

I've hit the parameter lock limit on this one :D hope you enjoy it. Once again, everything was created and arranged on my Digitakt and Digitone and mixed in Bitwig.

So, Spider and Dev made this, basically, and it was for a game jam game, that you can play right:
https://deslrv.itch.io/bad-draw
here

It's the theme song, made entirely in LMMS, but extended from a loop to a more complete song

• Ebrit

Another month, another tune. This time, I tried to experiment with different drum breaks and effects. I was lucky that the Digitakt 1.15 update came out during this month and slicing got so much easier! I like the tune, but what I'm uploading here is more like a jam that was forced to become a track because I didn't have much time to record and structure it all. The actual jam is usually much longer and gives everything more time to unfold. But nonetheless, please let me know what you think!

This beat brought you by Windex for ultimate streak free performance. Life was really hectic for a moment, sorry about the sporadic release schedule from me.

Drums are Addictive Drums 2 heavily tweaked and processed, synths are Korg M1 and bx_oberhausen. Guitars are Orange Tree Samples.

We love the sound of a howling wolf in music, and this is an approach to that in Korg Gadget
Could've put an actual howling wolf in there in post, but this is all Gadget and didn't want to go beyond that

• Ebrit

I've always liked that this challenge makes me reflect a bit on the past month, in addition to forcing me push the render button. After submitting the last challenge, there was the next: This time, it's about getting inspiration from gospel songs. Throughout the entire month, I was searching for inspiration, listening to new songs and thinking about it wherever I went.

This time, I found it super hard to find the right song and I created drafts with two other songs before finding the one that I actually liked. This song is a gospel classic and it's called "It all belongs to you" and the most widely known version is by Deitrick Haddon.

I still have a few things to do before submitting this so I'm uploading a draft here to make it just in time (May 31st) and then I'll add another link to the final version once it's done.

Please feel free to leave some feedback, it's all appreciated.

UPDATE: i realized i can replace the file when editing. The version from yesterday really doesn't do it justice, so I replaced it with the version that i submitted. I hope you enjoy it! For sure, I had a lot of fun doing this.

As usual, all sounds you hear in this track come from the sample or from the Digitakt and Digitone. Mixing was done in Bitwig, I'm actually starting to enjoy that part.

A song that was made by Raioh for our episode of the Chasing the Beats podcast as a little extra treat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O4zb7VfIIw

• Spider

For this month, I'm submitting a track that I made for the Elektronauts DnB Battle challenge, where it ranked 2nd place. This time, I barely had two weeks to make a track and submit it. After submitting it to the other challenge, I made a few tiny changes before posting it here, but in a very limited fashion since I'm traveling and I only have a laptop with me.

The challenge was about flipping samples from soap operas or cheap TV shows. I spent quite some time looking for a suitable soap, until I found a very nice show called "Saath Nibhaana Saathiya". This show is a goldmine for sampling! There's tons of nice music and dialogue to choose from, even some singing. While I didn't have time to incorporate all the samples that I originally planned on using, I still think I managed to create some nice sounds using samples from the show. Almost all melodic voices were made from samples from the series. The vocal stabs were discovered by accident, I forgot to reset a trigger key and it gave me a very interesting vibe, so I decided to use it.

Looking back, I'm a bit surprised because the series does not take itself very seriously and I think it's a rather happy and positive series. While I initially tried to capture that, the track came out more moody and mysterious than I anticipated. Another thing I noticed is that I'm getting much faster and that motivates me a lot. Let's see what I can do for next month!

As usual, this was all performed on my Digitone and Digitakt 2. I'll appreciate any feedback, thanks for dropping by.

This is a weird, upbeat tune that's a throwback to a ubiquitous sci-fi sound. It kind of reminds me of an Earthbound battle theme, hence the title. I didn't start out with any such notion, the focus was on Theremin silliness.

This is not the usual stuff as it was in 2024, but it's kinda similar. A façade of what it pretends to be.

Been playing around with the M8 this month! This track is just me getting used to getting around and how the thing works, nothing too special. I started it on the FrogTop, and then did a bit more work on it on an actual rev1 M8 that Mrdrcat loaned me. But yeah, the sickness has been established - I'm already seeing the ways in which it can be incorporated into my usual workflow, and also how the M8 can be the brain for my hardware synths. Yeah, I'll probably be ordering one next year...

My first track with Ableton Live. I have been a FL User for years and I am finally making the transition.
I am happy with the drop but I feel like, that the build up could be a bit longer. I might do a longer version of this track.
Grateful for feedback !
Best regards
Thomas

Here's my tune for Month #3 - I was told it sounds a bit like riding your bike into the sunset. And I agree - maybe it was a hot day and a bunch of raindrops are starting to come down, so you have to rush and make it home before the rain gets too strong lol

As usual, all synths come from the Digitone and everything else was sampled and arranged on the Digitakt. Only a few mix adjustments were done in a DAW. This month was all about bringing my guitar into this setup and finding a workflow with it, I hope you like it!

Again another month where the creative energy was flowing towards something else than MonthlyBeats.

I mostly made music for a paid commission that dragged for much longer than usual for no real good reason. This focused my attention somewhere else and I didn't have much left for myself.

Thankfully, I participate to a synth table every month where we jam together with (new) friends. From that jam, I kept most of the phrases I created, and I made this month's track with them. It definitely has that sound I have when I jam (cf. that Floating Spell single I released on Bandcamp 6 years ago).

I'm still hopeful that I'll get back in a better habit soon. Maybe I should try a weekly routine, just to get more disciplined at music practice.

Anyway, I hope you still get to enjoy it (or at least some part of it). It feels very naive but at the same time, it's very honest. It's very much me.

See you in April.

Some banging Tech-Trance this month

Since I plan on finding a label for this, I am not gonna upload it here this time, but link to it on Soundcloud instead:

https://soundcloud.com/nik-novo/nik-novo-crisis-in-amsterdam

I have been working on it for the most part of March and I think production wise this is the best track I have ever done. I genuinely like how it sounds and how all the details I added make the track feel. As for now, I am done with this track and have no plans on making further changes.

The name "Crisis in Amsterdam" is a reference to the track starting on C major and later on incorporating A# minor.

"..my mind... to your mind..."

Late to the party. Made this energetic track with an emphasis on sound design in a couple days aiming to make something polished and commercial sounding. I'm quite pleased with the result!

I dropped out of Weeklybeats suddenly even though I was going strong. But I am back at it. I hope to get a streak going and not lose it this time.

Thanks for listening!

Made this on the bus ride to a research center to investigate various neurodivergencies.

That's not important, what's important is that this was made in Gadget, for the first time in a long time. Maybe not an amazing song, but it's still pleasant.

• Valx

After getting the Artnoise re.corder, it was only logical that I do something with it for this month! My initial experiments very much sounded like a pipe band, so I decided to lean into that for St Patrick's day. I tossed some crowd ambience onto it and had the band fade out at the end like they're marching away. Because it's the old joke - why do pipe bands march? To get away from the noise!

My work today was playing around with the breath response curves and seeing how to best get it to respond. I can choose the channel it sends breath on, so I mapped that to expression and let Logic take care of relative volume. Overall, not bad! There's a bunch of other expressions that can be sent relative to position and roll - makes me think that a recorder-based Theremin is reasonable :)