Let last week get away from me so now I'm playing catch up. I may have dropped the BPM to meet the time requirement. Oh well!

A critical junction could be a road where you have to make a decision, a point of no return, or, quite literally, the place on the circuit board where you need to keep intact for the device to keep functioning so everyone makes it out alive.

Liner notes are:

• I wanted to learn a little bit about how to make that epic film score feeling. I realized a big part of it was doing "epic drums" and that involved me having to look for a bunch of samples and instruments that I wasn't really using. I acquired a bunch of trailer hits, got together some samples with reverb and long tails, and so forth and came up with this. It's not particularly mixed awesomely or anything but the intent was to get the basics of the sound. Next time I might make up a template or something.
• The composition leaves a little to be desired, it could be a little more interesting and could use a bit more movement (though that implies that it needs a bit more length and development as well). But I kind of got tired, I was doing other music for most of the day (working on the previous Kittens in a Rocket) and figured that I could upload this because I did it a little earlier in the week.

Feelin' the experimentation vibes of the beginning of the year. This began as a jam with a mate playing guitar, started kind of stoner rocky then started sounding like disco, then he had to head off before we recorded .. and it ended up as a beatsy synthwave sort of tune with a phasing (cross) sine wave lead. Recorded straight off hardware .. might try multitrack something out with a daw soon if I get time. Trying to up effects game, ran the lead and arp parts coming from the korg ms2k through Electronharmonix Cathedral pedal just to spice it up a bit.

I started with the Digitone and came up with this grainy and lingering metallic sound which I used to build the ostinato. The lyrics somehow came easily after that and defined the overall mood of this song. I kept on designing and adding elements from the Digitone (hats and heartbeat kick, brassy sound on the chorus) to complete the spooky atmosphere. I added drama with a Spitfire Audio LABS instrument aptly named "Scary Strings" and painfully added the vocals, which give away my poor singing skills. Maybe some of the notes are too low for me.

Hate the mix but just can't get motivated to learn by those hour-long "mixing for beginners" video tutorials. If any of you knows of a good ressource for actual beginners, I'm all ears.

it's a song this week

I am continuing with experimenting with the generative device I built in Ableton Live (see my previous submission for more info). This time it is the drums (Yamaha DTX Multi 12 with the new custom kits from Yamaha) doing random things as the other instruments are played more or less manually.

I did not spend a lot of time on this track, because I did not want to ruin it by overworking, but now I am quite happy with how it turned out. Also my main laptop is in repairs so I took out my 10y old backup which somehow managed to run Ableton Live 10 with all the bells and (not so many) whistles I like to have.

Find it in full lossless glory on my Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/20210114a

On this week inspiration for this song was a Volca Modular patch with its Stochastic Sequencer making constant variations on a pentatonic pattern. I added generous chorus and reverb (FAC Alteza) and Eventide Crystals delay with gentle pitch shifting. This created a less gritty sound than the Modular usually does. Over this I added a rhythmic E pedal tone on my acoustic guitar, with some occasional other notes.

The main melody was played on the GeoShred app on the iPad, using the GeoViolin sounds. After this I added a simple drum accompaniment and two short acoustic and wooden flute part.

While the violin does tend to give it a very cinematic feel, I made the rest of the sonic texture (especially by reverb modulation) intentionally oversized so it feels like there's tension between the two.

Woot, another chiptuner just for fun. (revised)

Abstract dubby winter groove.

I have had low inspiration for the past weeks so I'm going for a fast food version of music. As it features koto samples, I guess Instant Ramen is the right choice for this.

I put together a bass structure, got some cool koto samples and drums samples from Splice, collaged them together and here you go. That will do for this week. I hope inspiration strikes back soon!

Turn of the Wheel

The first idea I had this week was to concentrate on bass and drums, emphasizing toms and avoiding the snare. Initially I wasn't sure if I'd include guitar at all. I'd come up with some syncopated rhythms in Ableton's 64 Pad Kit Jazz drum rack, and put a long-decaying Echo send on it. (At the end, I gave the drums a bit of Max Humanizer.)

I put down some bass lines with my usual Epiphone P-J bass (with EQ-8 roll-off below 120 Hz), and then realized I wanted another track of bass, higher on the neck, to respond to the first track. (That second track of bass got EQ-8 bass rolloff with a higher shelf.)

Then I'd thought I should have something else in there for sonic variety, but wanted to change things up a bit from recent tracks. So I grabbed the Heit Deluxe I keep in Turkish baglama tuning (Gg DD Aa), and put down two tracks of improvisations against the bass lines. (It's going through an EHX LPB2ube with the left and right channels cascaded into one output.) One channel got some high-pass Auto-Filter with drive, and the other didn't have any additional in-Ableton processing. Both got sent to a room-sized convolution reverb (along with the drums and bass).

In arranging, I thought to do some reversing of some of the Heit chords, and sent that track to a return channel with Valhalla Supermassive. And the stereo mix got multiband compression with Ableton's Full Chain effect rack.

Title comes from the number of years in three Saros cycles of solar and lunar eclipses; this is apparently called a Triple Saros or exeligmos--the turn of the wheel.

Featuring "Empress Cicada" from George Vlad's field recording @ 0:27: youtu.be/nOIRrEfnDEM?t=27