A bit of an exercise that illustrates things that I should practice than my composing and producing prowess.
QUESTIONS I NEED TO ANSWER:
Note to self: How do I save Grid presets?
How do I map the device quick controls to a particular Grid parameter?
How do I reverse an audio clip?
I should improve my timing when playing chords, etc.
I sampled some Lyra-8, guitar and bass sounds to make this beat on the Digitakt. Recorded, added some effects and mixed in Ableton Live. Lacked time, motivation and energy this week. Good point was I worked mainly without a computer and had my hands on more instruments.
I found the funk factory preset phrases in the Yamaha QY100.
Intro came out well, not sure about the rest of it - I am not so good at mixing dance music maybe.
High quality on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/202109090909a
I struggled with making a track this week. I had seeds of different tracks, including this one here. There was another one I was working in parallel to it, to see which one could be completed (and totally different, some funk track with dog sounds).
I ended up finalizing this track, but I am not really happy with it. It is uninspired, derivative, has a bass that has been heard 10,000 times (and probably at least used in 30 other of my tracks) and the melodies are meh. The only thing I enjoyed here was finding a very cool drums sample that has a lot of punch.
Hopefully next week will be more inspired.
Another "on the run one". Managed to record some solo post-rock guitar, but my bass has ran out of batteries and I couldn't do Midi work so it's just a drum machine playing along some patterns. I still like it, however :)
Kind of a late edit on this, but it was a busy weekend. This one's drums (Ableton Acoustified Kit 02), two tracks of Epiphone Embassy II bass (one with EQ-8 low-end rolloff, and the other with Auto-Filter high-pass, played higher on the neck), and two tracks of home-built Res-O-Glas guitar--one through Montreal Assembly Count to Five (the backwards-sounding one) and one straight to the Focusrite, though with some low- and high-pass Auto-Filter with drive.
Sends: one echo (with LFO band-pass Auto-Filter in front), one convolution reverb (with high-pass Auto-Filter in front), and Valhalla Supermassive. There's Wide&Warm preset compression on the stereo output.
Title comes from this week's number, counting from last year.
There are other things in real life I'm having to deal with which are slowing my productivity down but I'm still making tracks.
I took a very rash decision and zipped up all my unfinished tracks and put them away. There were so many, some had been there years and not been completed. I wanted to try and see what happens if I had limited tracks, and tried to finish them before starting a new one. Here's the first one.
Went a totally different direction and wrote something entirely orchestral this week. No guitar at all :(
