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.
