I was uninspired, nothing really worked. The only way was therefore to go back to the basics with Funky bass and Dog samples!

Still waiting for the inspiration!

I worked on a few different ideas this week but, for some reason, they did not seem to find their place. I ended up starting from scratch and going for a speedtrash. It's a short silly track with real bass and guitar for a change, and a lot of samples from Splice. I hesitated adding a sheep sample as well and it finally did not make it into the track. I keep it for the time I'll do a scottish disco track with bagpipe and sheeps.

Alright, I'll try harder next week.

I spent some time this week at polishing and finalizing a compilation of tracks I made for Weekly Beats last year and releasing them as an album on Bandcamp. You can check it there (it's free! :) )

https://kedbreak136.bandcamp.com/album/the-year-of-the-confined-rat

So I did not get much time for a new track and went for a speed trash. This started with cool break beat samples and I added a few bass lines, arpeggios, and some Japanese percussions on top of it. Named after a PC game I used to play in the 80s., one of the first real 3d game. It was really impressive!

Have you ever been stuck at an airport in the middle of the night? Either you have a night flight at 2am or you just arrived at 4am and waiting for a correspondence that goes 5 years later. This is the dead zone of airports, you meet other zombie voyagers stuck there, people mopping up the floor. If you're lucky, you can find somewhere in the concrete maze a small open café. There is the smell of smoke lingering in the air, the ceilings have a yellow tinge and there are a few insects dead in the corner. You get a coffee that has a slight taste of bleach and feel like you're in the purgatory, drifting between worlds.

That's a bit of the atmosphere I wanted to capture in this track. Drifting between worlds. I had this melancholic and simple guitar chord progression. Recorded a one take solo - not super clean, a bit off here and there, but I felt that if I tried to capture the soap bubble it might pop.

The guitar is an Epiphone explorer. Done in FL Studio with Sakura synth for the stand-up bass, FLEX for the piano and some cool jazz drums samples and other atmospheric and jukebox samples acquired on Splice.

For some reason I had been thinking about aborigines and the dreamtime. Dreamtime is a mythological time at the creation of the universe - a time for gods and where the reality was not the same as it is now today.

This inspired this didgeridoo and jaw harp filled track. Add some Native American flutes and Tibetan tuvan singing, some Japanese percussions and you got an international mix of trance music.

Done in FL studio, using a wide range of samples from Splice.

A western inspired horror soundtrack!

The song started as this dark melody about exploring a cave and going into the lair of a giant spider. But it kinda pivoted in this western inspired horror like trailer soundtrack. I guess playing red dead redemption too much lately has had an impact.

A stormy night, the sound of hooves in the distance, figures slowly emerging, weird shapes, the number growing and the tension increasing. This is the image i had in my mind.

Some experiments for this track - I used quite a lot of inverted keyboards here. Some are for risers but one of the section has an inverted harpsichord where I wrote the melody, then inverted the melody and then inverted the resulting audio to go back to the original melody but with this inverted effect on it. There are also dissonant violins in the high range to create that weird tension towards the end. And of course samples of gallops and horses, courtesy of Splice.

Here's a funny, funky and kinda cheesy track but I had some fun with this one. It started with a jam on the bass that led to the main bass lines. It was then mixed with some funky jungle/drum and bass drums samples from Splice. I added some eletric keyboard, like a EDM version of Ray Manzarek (not as good obviously) and finished with some other synths and brass. I think the brasses that are both from FLEX and Sytrus are the cheesiest part of the track but they do add some dynamic so here they go.

For some reason, the electric keys and the general weird silly vibe of the track reminded me of the blue elephant in Return of the Jedi, in Jabba's palace. I could see this guy jamming this kind of weird stuff with his octopi friends.

This is yet another uninspired track.

It started with a simple bass line (which I suspect I probably have used in tens of other tracks in the past) that I was playing around the other day. I was not very inspired so went for simple and efficient, if a bit sad - arps and rubber leads. This always kinda works, like doing pasta in water and instant tomato sauce.

Most of the synths and bass come from FLEX in FL Studio. I had fun with one aspect, which was syncing the bass with the drum kick and leaving pauses. That was inspired by watching a Nik West video where she was explaining her approach to bass. The drums are mostly drum samples from Splice.

Overall I am pretty unhappy with the track. It does not sound bad in itself but it's easy, unoriginal, not trying out something new - it's a bit of a cop out. I feel like a sell out, though I have never really sold anything. I'll need to get more inspiration for something more adventurous. A friend of mine said that weekly beats is like "a celebration of the act of creation". This is what I really want to do every time, hence my disappointment at doing something uninspired. But a lame track is better than no track, so here we go.

Ok here is a track I believe in more than what I have done in a few weeks. I did struggle quite a bit to get it started but after putting a lot of polishing touches, piano melodies and experimenting with structures, I feel I made a track I feel good about.

This is inspired by synthwave and a cyberpunk vibe, something between blade runner and akira, cowbow bebop and gunnm.

This week has been very stressful and I could not focus properly. Here is a synthwave like track, with some Japanese percussions on top. Not my favorite track but at least I got to experiment with different sounds and textures. If I spent more time on it, there are a few lines I would modify as there is some dissonance in this track but this is as far as I'll go this week on this one. Time to focus on next one.

This week I went for a mash up of Animal Planet and Zombie movies. The concept started with "What if David Attenborough narrated a documentary about zombies?". I listened to quite a lot of zombie games soundtracks (Undead Redemption) and western music.

For the voice of David Attenborough, I used vo.codes, which uses an AI to deepfake celebrities reading a script. There are quite a lot of samples also in this track, wind, crows, zombies. They all come from Splice.

This is a silly track but I had a lot of fun making it!

This track is more the seed of what might become an interesting track. I lacked the time or to be honest the motivation to work properly on the track this week but I kinda like the main melody. There is this on-the-edge-of-cheesy synthwave melody that could be reused in something epic - this will be kept in the fridge until a better idea comes! Until that time, this is a speedtrash but a track is a track!

I used FLEX and Sytrus on this one, along with quite a few different Splice samples for the flute and the drums.

Last week I was watching a very fascinating documentary on Netflix. This is the story of a movie director who had lost his passion and reconnected with his passion and life in general by relocating close to the sea and going freediving everyday. Through this activity, he got in touch with the ecosystem of the kelp forest and developed an unexpected relation with one of its local inhabitants - an octopus. Very cool documentary.

Inspired by this documentary and also interested in the challenge of making music without an heavy bass or strong beat, I went deep and tried to make a track that took one from the shore and slowly deeper into the sea, with its different ecosystems and life.

What does a jazz club sound like in the 24th century? A double bass and synthwave?

This track is a bit more inspired than the tracks from the previous couple of weeks but we are not there yet. It's one of these tracks that started very differently, with a main melody that generated a few other lines. In the end I binned the main melody and ended up with that. It still kinda feels like it's two different tracks, which is not totally bad in itself but some polishing could help. Also the synthwave version would benefit from some lead on top. I was experimenting with saxophone solos but my libraries just sound too bad. I'll need to invest!