We made this in 30 minutes
Hey StreakClub Weekly people, nice to see some familiar faces around here.
Every week, I am aiming to find some kind of composition or songwriting technique that I can work on during the week. I might not necessarily get an awesome completed song out of it, but I think what I want more than anything is some more breadth and some way to break out of my current no-thought songwriting habits.
This might mark me doing some remixes or covers of previous songs, as well as creative remixes if they illustrate a composition technique that I want to be able to illustrate. At the end of this series I hope to be able to work on and emphasize interesting songwriting techniques within my genre of electronic dance music/ambient music.
Sunday, Jan 8, 14:00-16:00. I think I started about half an hour ago, but I didn't record my starting time.
This week's composition technique is to use some kind of basic figured bass. I'm not doing an awesome job at it right now, but given a chord progression, it's okay for me to not just repeat the tonic of the chord as the bass note.
For this chord progression, I have the classic:
I V vi IV progression (G Dm Em C).
The bass pattern repeats but it's an 8-bar, 16-step pattern with root notes of:
G D B G G F# E E
The verses are standard tonic bass notes for now.
As usual this is performed live.
I didn't spend a lot of thought into the composition itself, focusing mostly on varying the bass, and as a result this isn't very interesting… may have to try this again to actually make a good result out of it…
Time: 2h
Happy 2017! I hope it's a good one. <3
9783981716504
39,1,2
Whoops, thought submissions were due Sunday!
Anyways, here's something I put together in the past week. I was kind of surprised how quickly this came together - the week deadline really infused the creative process with a no-turning-back mentality. I definitely worked on clarity of ideas, brining up only a few prominent melodic elements at a time. I also tried to weave in some thematic consistency across the piece between the initial drop section, middle haziness, and mish mash at the end.
The piece celebrates benefits of patience and a slow, methodical approach to success. It's about removing ourselves from the instant gratification we love and idolize in our culture and dedicating our focus to the slow burn.
Listening back I kinda feel like this is an "end of the movie credits" kind of song...would be interested to hear what others think!
https://soundcloud.com/user-95673815/patience-streak-club-week-1/s-5NYVl
Tools: Live 9, Massive, Serum, Converse Sample Library (flute and vocals), assorted Splice samples
Whoops, didn't realize at first that our deadline was Saturday night. Here's one I'd been working on this week, out of the desire to hear a Laswell-dubbified Jesus-Lizard kind of thing. Not sure I got there, but it's an interesting direction. Drums: rock kit, some high-pass auto-filter on the kick to boost it, low-pass auto-filter with drive to roll off some overall highs and give it some grit, and I put 24ms of M4L Humanizer on there to give it a bit of breath. (Any more than that felt too slow and sloppy.)
Bass: 80s Epiphone P-J (P only) with flat wounds into the board, some Cabinet plugin to give it air, and a convolution reverb send.
Keys: Clavinet with LFO bandpass auto filter into delay for that hypnotic thing, and Operator (Funky Organ) to give some pad effect.
Guitar: two tracks of Epiphone Moderne through EHX LPB2ube (cranked, two sides cascaded) and Vox Wah for tone shaping.
Sends: two different convolution reverbs (one with a high-pass filter to keep the kick from getting boomy), and three different filter delay combos, some with simple delay, one with band-pass LFO auto-filter for the dubby drum effect.
Also, Full-Chain Master on the 2-mix.
Title is a reference to the Jesus Lizard.
(Edit: brought one of the guitar motives back in toward the middle and end.)
Funk/soul inspired. Listen with headphones.
This is my first complete piece of the year after coming straigh from Weekly Beats 2016. Since I stumbled with this site with a short notice, I took an unfinished project from 2015 and reworked it into some kind of glitchy intro of sorts.
Tools of the trade: Ableton Live 9.7 and Max for Live. Broken beats built using samples from the Teenage Engineering PO12 mini drum machine. Just four tracks and two sends, with lots of automation. Quite simple arrangement with some rhythmic tricks to disguise my really simple melodies.
I don't know if I'd manage to do another year worth of songs, but I'll do my best. So far, I'm impressed with the talent of the people around Streak Club.
Have a great week, wherever you are!
Just throwing out ideas and at the end of 52 weeks, I'll see if anything sticks and is worth going back to develop. Some weeks might be bare tracks, and some weeks might be more fully developed songs. Depending on how lazy I am.
My first completed song for any project on my new computer. I'm still getting use to using Logic, but overall I'm finding it a great DAW. I was using Acid Pro 4 on PC for most of my music career, so it's taking some time to get adjusted to the new operating system as well as the new DAW.
For my first entry I ended up not really following the theme that I threw out there (winter/cold), but rather went with familiar ground, that being gritty beats and saxophone. I haven't played my sax in the past three weeks due to a bad cold/sinus infection, so it felt good to be back playing again (even if it wasn't my best performance).
This song was made using the following:
- DM1 - The Drum Machine
- Various Logic Pro VSTs
- Drone Thing
- Alto Saxophone
Next week I'll incorporate the theme somehow into my beat. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy.
generated with kastle - recorded not edited - effects: chorus, reverb - live version 8.2
Work In Progress
I've never really composed any music before, and I didn't really have any time to work on this until today, but I just threw some ideas together into a clip. Kinda just waiting until next week to work on something new because I'm not too fond of this one lol
I'll probably still finish this one eventually, though
2017 music goals:
That being said I'm pretty happy with how fast I plopped this out.
It's been a cold and frosty start to the new year round these parts
A track I have created using TR-909, piano, soul vocals and strings - everything lofi house needs!
