The K.O. II got a big OS upgrade this week, and this is the beat I came up with to test the new song mode. It's pretty simple but I'm happy with the result. I was going to record punch-in FX too but never got a take where I liked what I'd done, so we get the beat as-is. :shrug emoji:
Picking back up after being sick last week, I kept things pretty simple. I started witha simple melody and added some drums to accompany it. I then filled out the rest. Finally I added the ZOIA to the mix and really liked the way that Loop Forest helped give the whole thing some texture. I saved it for the second half of the song to help it feel like it evolves a little bit.
Major props to the Rhodes preset that came out for the OP-XY last week, too.
I started this beat last week, but decided to let it cook another week, and am glad I gave myself more time with it. I was able to expand the melody a bit, and add some more depth to the drums. I'm really pleased with the result, and feel like I'm finding my groove with the OP-XY again, despite the bugs that have crept into the firmware.
I received my new OP-XY on Monday, and laid down this beat almost immediately. I then spent the rest of the week trying to write something over the top of it, and failed. I had some decent bass lines but ended up pulling them from this submission, because it made the piece feel incomplete.
Hopefully I can revisit this down the road, because I really like the beat.
Another week without my OP-XY, so I once again re-visited a song that I started last year. I really like the sonic space of this song. I tried to apply all my newly acquired EQ abilities to bring out the things I really like in the song using the M8's newish ability to EQ individual instruments. I hope I didn't over-do it.
Hopefully I will be back to making brand-new music next week, as my replacement OP-XY should be here by Tuesday!
I wasn't able to come up with anything really new this week, so I took an old song and remastered it. The M8 now has instrument based EQ, so I went through each instrument and tweaked things to my liking. I then recorded it into Bitwig, where I added a bit of compression and a small amount of EQ to the entire song.
This is one of the best songs I've ever made on the M8, and was the result of lots of lunch-time editing last year. The success of this song prompted me to devote more time to music and ultimately to take part in this streak.
This is more of a technical challenge this week than a musical one, although I'm happy with the result. I wanted to try to get the OP-XY to make Pigments soft synth and my M8 make sounds via MIDI, and I accomplished that goal. I also built the drums in the Syntakt and used it's song mode this time to give some variance to the drum beat throughout the song. The OP-XY is outputting MIDI into Pigments via USB-C and via the MIDI out to the M8. What's fun there is that I can effectively 'double up' the channels, meaning one sequence in the OP-XY can play both instruments.
I started with the 'bent strings' preset in Pigments, just playing around with melody until I found something cool. Then I added the drums and bass. Finally I added the M8 to the mix to have more sonic diversity. I was going to add some guitar via the ZOIA to the mix on this one, but couldn't get a recording I was satisfied with.
I purchased a new audio interface this week, which allowed me to add multiple instruments to my recordings. Because of this, I started the drums on the Syntakt, then routed sync into the OP-XY for the synth sounds.
The song came together pretty quickly after I had the drums laid out. I added some of the background sound layers and then worked on the melody. Once I found the first riff the rest of the melody came into being relatively easily as well.
