(lossless version here https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/20210121a)

Even though it says 2021.01.21 I still worked on it this week so it counts, right? :)

This is the intro part from our streaming jam session that takes place every Tuesday evening 8.30PM Central European Time at https://www.twitch.tv/tubularcorporation.

Past episodes can be found on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-zzia1LKspJRLsu0wGFP6w

I was inspired by NASA's sounds captured on Mars and used some samples here. First thunder like sound is actually wind on Mars.
I was also inspired by the post rock genre, with its steady buildup, echoy notes, delayed guitars and strong release of that buildup (about half into the piece).
It was a rushed project to meet the deadline, so I'm not too sure about the mixing process which was... simply not done at all :)) Just winged it.
Enjoy!

Title refers to the ring around a star (which is where the coronavirus got its name from). I didn't really want to refer specifically to COVID-19, everyone's kind of done with "quarantine" themed songs I think.

This is practice with making tense, more film-score like tracks. I kind of want to make one of those epic battle themes one day and in the middle there was a transition that I kind of wanted to make more tense but I didn't quite get it right and was a little too tired to try to really push through it today, so instead of changing the mood I kept it the same and finished.

Song notes:

Bm, a lot of harmonies, tiny amount of melody and not that much counterpoint going on. Mostly work with drums here. Meter is 6/8, which is pretty obvious from listening. I do go from 3-bar phrases to 4-bar phrases after the transition.

It's been a hectic week and I've not been able to lavish much time on my submission.

Starting to think it might be helpful to start naming tracks lol. Story behind this one .. This song isn't entirely new, it's been progressing in stages for a while.

About 6 weeks ago I played a gig and came up with this instrumentation ... the guitars got recorded (sampled into MPC) on the day of the gig, and I think the rest of it got put together the night before, but the synth patches had been kicking around for a while. It was sort of a fun song to break up a dance music set, and the only song with any guitars.

So really all I did today is come up with the vocal part, record/sample it with a Shure 57 straight into the MPC, then try a composition and recorded it completely dawless. Kinda first time in about 10 years I've done any singing on a track, so it was quite the challenge. I've been enjoying singing and playing guitar a bit lately, and would love to 'find my voice' more, so I thought this exercise today was a valid/useful one.

Can't help but feel like I might of accidentally knocked off this vocal melody from somewhere, but not sure if it's just cos i've been humming it for a while. If anyone recognises it please let me know!

As for previous weeks, the song was primarily composed on the Digitone. The bass line and both pad layers remained and I added the drum track in Ableton where the song took a very different turn when I added the first vocals sketches. Since the track seemed to get a mellow vibe, I decided to add matching guitar chords and licks, a totally new process to me.

The whole thing was very tedious and I contemplated ditching the track altogether on several occasions. But a piece with lyrics and vocals already down is not an easy train to jump from and I took it to completion. It lacks movement or tension and release. Might be worth a future revisit.

Soundcloud for better audio: https://soundcloud.com/user-493253580/youll-be-alright

I had a sort of a background structure for this weekly track in the form of repetitive rhythms played on synths and messing them up with delays and loopers as well as a nice bass melody. But i had to drive away to a distant city for two days and I arrived in there straight into rush hour. It was a complete mess of long ques, weird direction turning, missing underground passages and so on...and it took me long enough to get to the meeting I had.

So today at home I felt like a lo-fi distorted guitar with would perfectly resemble what could be going in people's mind at that time, alongside with some slightly aggressive drumming. It's sudden and grasping, that's why I thought it's like a "chorus-first" format.

Just like my earlier tracks, I use FAC Alteza to add the big ambience, a Marshall amp emulation for the guitar, drums are sequenced by the LaunchPad Pro Mk3 and the repetitive textures come from Arturia MicroFreak and Volca Modular, with Gauss and Kosmonaut iOS FX applied.

Myst: just a section of something I made, inspired by Final Fantasy. Trying to make less dense compositions and work on my structure.

Lake: a totally unrelated composition that I made in an hour because something was buzzing around in my head.

This week...there's been a lot to do, so I only spent a few minutes Friday night coming up with an intuitive drum line. On impulse, I went for one of the drum racks I did using Ableton Operator to generate the drum sounds. Saturday, I tracked bass, initially thinking a bit of 70s electric jazz (after reading Ethan Iverson's interview with Keith Jarrett from some years back) the one drum loop I'd written, and then thought to track more bass against it, higher up the neck. Then...rather than writing guitar, I added some ostinatos with Ableton's Analog, and electric piano lines with Ableton Electric. By this point...there wasn't any jazz left in it.

Inline effects: EQ-8 with different amounts of bass rolloff on each of the two bass lines, Max Humanizer on the drums.

Sends: one room-sized convolution reverb on bass, Valhalla Supermassive for keyboards, and Ableton Echo for occasional rhythm on the drums and keys. There's Full-Chain multiband compression on the stereo mix.

The title comes from Aristotle's notion of the number of layers of the universe.

Last week I was watching a very fascinating documentary on Netflix. This is the story of a movie director who had lost his passion and reconnected with his passion and life in general by relocating close to the sea and going freediving everyday. Through this activity, he got in touch with the ecosystem of the kelp forest and developed an unexpected relation with one of its local inhabitants - an octopus. Very cool documentary.

Inspired by this documentary and also interested in the challenge of making music without an heavy bass or strong beat, I went deep and tried to make a track that took one from the shore and slowly deeper into the sea, with its different ecosystems and life.