Wrote this as a last-second for Two-Hour Track Sunday: http://compo.thasauce.net/rounds/view/2HTS368

There was a live stream of this: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/992381846

Continuing the post-rock exploration, further refinements based on suggestions from here (thanks!). The distorted guitar has less crunch and a bit more patterns for the drums (although still didn't get enough time to work on them), trying to get more thematic content despite the fully improvised manner. The key is B minor.

This is the final part of our this week's stream, edited and arranged (and barely mixed).

High quality on Soundcoud: https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/20210413a
The jam session in question (including some technical difficulties): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efwTANSdAvg&t=3877s

It's just the Elektron Digitone and vocals in this piece. I had all of the basic Digitone ingredients (sounds and sequences) on wednesday and was expecting to sail smooth seas until today. I was wrong and had a hard time getting to something I even remotely deem worth a listen. Another lesson learned in anticipating possible production obstacles.

Learned a few things in Ableton Live (well, audio production in general, I guess) and I find the result not as muddy as usual. I'm looking at you, drum buss.

Also, I'm apparently still stuck in the eighties.

Lossless on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-493253580/you-are-not-alone

Here's a funny, funky and kinda cheesy track but I had some fun with this one. It started with a jam on the bass that led to the main bass lines. It was then mixed with some funky jungle/drum and bass drums samples from Splice. I added some eletric keyboard, like a EDM version of Ray Manzarek (not as good obviously) and finished with some other synths and brass. I think the brasses that are both from FLEX and Sytrus are the cheesiest part of the track but they do add some dynamic so here they go.

For some reason, the electric keys and the general weird silly vibe of the track reminded me of the blue elephant in Return of the Jedi, in Jabba's palace. I could see this guy jamming this kind of weird stuff with his octopi friends.

Was making a track for something else and began messing with the samples and ended up having a bit of fun with this instead. Serendipity!

Working on this week's track was challenging. Instead of starting with a guitar motif or melodic idea I started with concepts I wanted to try: sequencing real drum samples, using odd time signatures, with a progressive edge. After experimenting on a few patterns it didn't seem do go anywhere, when saving the project, scrolling through the auto-naming suggestions of the Polyend Tracker I got to "oceanic metal" which I liked, then I thought about overlaying some spoken words from a speech over the music which is something I really like to hear. It then completely oriented the track to a new direction and things started to make a bit more sense though there always seemed to be something wrong, and the 8 tracks of the Tracker were a real limitation at first. I think adding distorted guitar tracks could make it go to industrial metal territory, but I left it as is.
Instruments are sampled from my favourite plugins (ezdrummer, zynaddsubfx, my own bass via Line6 Helix). The speech is from the Ocean Conference at UN in 2017, speaker was António Guterres.

All composed and mixed in the Polyend Tracker, with minimal eq and compression on the master export done in Harisson Mixbus. In the end I do like the track, but that was really a different and challenging feeling starting this song with "conceptual goals" rather than improvised from a melodic or chord progression idea.

I'm still practicing, but I played a melody that I liked and ended up trying to play a harmony to go with it. I can't quite play intricate things, but I tried my best!
(The repeat bass was added later, of course it definitely can't be played in tandem with everything else)

Another intuitively-structured one, this one began with a slow drum beat, and got interesting when I added long-persisting delay with filtering to it. I did a few different rhythms with Ableton's 64 Pad Kit Special drum rack, and added some handclaps, along with some Rhodes which I took out again.

Next up was Epiphone P-J bass, using the usual signal chain (EQ-8 for bass rolloff), though I'd also rolled down the tone control. I'd initially thought of rolling off highs...but changed my mind for this one, so the bass is close to typical.

Guitar was home-built Res-O-Glas through the Balls Effects KWB for a bit of overdrive, and Vox Wah for both tone shaping (rhythm track) and effect (lead track).

Sends: bandpass Auto-Filter with LFO frequency center into Ableton's Echo (analog triplet dub preset, tweaked to remove some noise), Valhalla supermassive on a large reverb preset, and high-pass Auto-Filter in front of a room-sized convolution reverb.

Inline: Bass got EQ-8, while drums got Max Humanizer. Guitars got some auto-pan to get them out of each other's way, though lead guitar also got some Glue Compressor. And I used that channel to do some reversed clips from time to time as well.

The editing/arrangement process involved a lot of cutting things out--I played more than I kept in. (This is even down to certain notes; it just sounded better with things left out.)

Title comes from *67 being the call-waiting-blocking code for a lot of telephone systems.