With my OP-XY still out for RMA, I struggled to come up with something this week. I finally sat down with my Syntakt and decided to try to come up with something I liked. I was moderately successful, here. I have a hard time getting the Syntakt to make the sounds that I want it to. In other words, I spend a lot of time just fiddling with knobs and stuff, rather than making the beat better. I tried to include some sounds from the M8, but ended up scrapping that side of the song.
This isn't my best, but it's a submission, and that's more than I had this morning!
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.
