After owning my Nord Rack 2X for months I finally started to actually create some patches instead of lazily using presets, and I quickly realised that the envelopes are very slow at their longest, ideal for ambient pads.

This is a bit of one of them with the Medusa joining in towards the end using a home made MS70-CDR version of the Zvex Lo-Fi Junky, which I really want to buy but can't justify £170 on right now. Fairly pleased with it.

WEEK 30!?!?!?!? Last chiptune song for a bit, and now I move on to maybe doing full on rock music? I'll let you know how it goes.

A live House-style jam with a few loops. It's about 7 minutes long. Mixing isn't perfect, there were a few loud parts that I didn't get to fix. A bit of compression post-recording to boost levels.

Done with 5 loops on the Octatrack, a bunch of drum parts on TR-8s, and some sequences on the Eurorack. I made the loops earlier this week for One Hour Compo, but that performance wasn't that good so I did it again.

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.

Test atmos' dub...not sure how the kick sounds.?
In my phones' it sounds sweet but speakers may distort. Simple track really. Sub/Kick drum loop with some Serum And Faux Juno 106 stabs - heavy delays and verb. Then that weird vocal loop which is some sample i stretched and cut to fit ties the whole track if you focus on that. I put it through an effect to faff around with its timing via delays. Then another sample pad thing (stretched again) but roughly in tune with the vocal. I can't mention the horn stab source as its erm.... borrowed. Probably could have been longer but i felt the idea had run its course.

week 30! woooo

this week started out swinging pretty hard away from the previous week stylistically, mainly because i was already playing with a new drum tool (MT Power Drumkit, highly recommend for anyone doing more conventional music- it lets you build from common groove / fill / etc patterns that sound natural without hours of detailed sequencing but then produces a MIDI clip you can overdub or edit. and it's free!) so i ended up with probably the most conventional and most rock-like track i've ever done (i thought it sounded kinda like the black keys, if they had just learned to play).

then i needed a lyrical theme, and my wife suggested the goofy area 51 raid thing that's going on currently.

i liked it pretty well, but it didn't seem to all fit together and the music style didn't really mesh with the topical content, so! a few days later a light bulb went on, and i scurried down to my basement workshop lair and made some changes (pretty much all reductions; "walk softly and carry a big eraser"!) that produced a completely different sound.

i got rid of the guitar tracks completely, cut/gated the real bass with the beat as sidechain to get that choppy hooky sound, left the organ and synthbass as they were, added heavy autotune and bit reduction to the vocals for that robot sound, and probably most importantly, copied the PowerDrum midi track to a new MIDI kit set up to get that sweet 80s drum machine sound and mixed the original almost all the way down (i left a little of the acoustic drums to soften the hard drum machine sound just a tiny bit).

Everything in Ableton this week.
Synth bass and organ both Symptohm PE
Guitar tone in the original mix from Guitar Rig 5
Drums arranged in MT PowerDrumKit

if your curious what my take on second rate "Black Keys" sounds like the original track is here:

(instrumental, better)
https://soundcloud.com/cailen-fisher/2019-30a

(original completed mix with vocals)
https://soundcloud.com/cailen-fisher/2019-30-party-in-nevada

Not super happy with this, but I was in a rush. I wish I had more time to fix arrangement and mix.

Literally and figuratively.

Anyway, something went wrong with this technically whilst I was working on it so I've put this one down to experience.

Acid didgeridoo jams .. trying to get something deep and rambling.