OOOPS I spaced out and continued working past the week's deadline. I started this one and streamed it and then wanted to try to work on it some more before upload and went over by about five minutes.

Sorry, I've been rather lazy about listening and offering feedback to other tracks this week. I'll try to catch up this week.

Another rock one -- I kinda rushed it because I was apartment hunting for most of the week, so I only really worked on it for 3 evenings rather than the 4 or 5 I would normally do.

With more and more work this week I had only time for a little jam without a chance for later additions. However I managed to improve how I am able to switch on and off different layers of the loop, even if more development would have been needed in some parts. There is a chord layer from the iPad supplemented by the MicroFreak playing arpeggios, bass guitar, electric guitar and voice plus a drum machine.

another "twofer". the first one seemed too much like a sonic rut i'm stuck in so i tried something consciously different

I couldn't get to start working on this week's track before saturday afternoon, so I decided to skip the sound design step and go straight to noodling. I recycled an existing Digitone sound set (from week 23) and added some Wavparty modular drums samples to create this track in an unusual way: I didn't do the sequencing on the Digitone but in Ableton, which made adding some MIDI automation easier. Despite the shorter time spent making music this week, I still learned some stuff!

Soundcloud for better quality: https://soundcloud.com/user-493253580/departure

I was away this weekend so I made a track only using Reaper and it's built in synths and effects (mostly just the Delay effect).

High quality on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/20210624a

I was not super inspired this week. This track was less the result of playing with melodies, but more playing with the synths and samples I had on my system. I experimented with playing live on the keyboard instead of programming it - which gave rise to the weird layers from 1:10 onwards. I also discovered Harmor could digest samples and torture them in creative ways! I put some saxophones playing lines through it and this resulted in the weird high leads, a bit like R2D2 on LSD from 1:45 onwards. And as I was reading an article about Robin Finck (who among other thing is the main live guitar player for NIN), so I had to dust out my fuzz factory and add some apocalyptic noise guitar.

It's not a very inspiring track, but it's sometimes good to just enjoy the process and try new things.

I wanted to try something different this week, still only using the Polyend Tracker, and some samples from the Philarmonia sample pack. I picked a mandolin, guitar, double bass and cello (and a few percussions) to make a track for this sort of quartet. I patched a few ideas to build the track, not really satisfied with composition or sound quality, but I guess some ideas could be reworked. Straight export from Tracker.

Very rough but eh.

I'd had a thought of doing something a bit sparser this week, and while this one's more dense than I was thinking, some of the initial inspiration remains. The rhythms are mostly very syncopated, and are done with the usual 64 Pad Kit Jazz with an automated delay send and Max Humanizer.

For guitar, I used my home-built Res-O-Glas, and started with the little single-note line, and then responded to it with the chordal tremolo guitar (using a pedal from Mike Carey in Milwaukee), with a send to Valhalla Supermassive. I went back and forth between trem and non-trem channels, to do leads in response to rhythm, and rhythm in response to leads. The clean lead channel had a send to a large convolution reverb--spacious, but not quite as harmonic as the Valhalla.

For bass, I did the usual 80s Epiphone Embassy II, on the P-pickup. It got some low-end rolloff with EQ-8, and a send to a smaller convolution reverb (as did the drums).

The title comes from the use of the number 77 as a password at the Swedish border during WWII.