Another rather busy week and weekend, so this one came together in a few quick sessions: one to come up with some drum beats, one with Danelectro baritone guitar for all guitar parts (three tracks--bass, rhythm, lead), and one to arrange/mix.

Drums: Ableton Drum Rack, using the Towel Kit preset rack--there was a slightly dead thump to these that I liked. There's some Max Humanizer on the drums as well (30ms).

All guitars are Danelectro baritone. The bass got a little EQ-8 to roll off extreme lows, and the lead got some Glue Compressor to control dynamics.

Sends: one Echo, one convolution reverb, and one Valhalla Supermassive.

The title comes from there being several religious sites and traditions mentioning 72 temples. There's kind of a road-trip vibe to this one, I think.

Another all-in-the-box week. Drum machines: 606 (reverse-gated), 808 Aristocrat, 808 Startup, Impulse hand claps. Strings are from Ableton's African sampling project--Zeze, two tracks of Adungu, and finally a Puremagnetik Mellotron cello.

Title from this week's element radon's tendency to seep into buildings from below.

A couple times during the week I played with some different drum patterns, playing them off against each other, finally coming up with the drum theme heard throughout this piece. I also added a few simple passes of percussion, and then embellished a few with more beats.

I'd thought maybe I'd do just two basses against each other, and recorded a lot of clips in E and G that I ended up throwing out. Saturday night I re-tracked bass in A, and then did another pass of fuzz bass through the Balls Effects KWB. I put a few Rhodes lines, and then a pass of clean Epi Moderne that I'd thought of as glue, but ended up using a lot of it.

Sends: one room-sized convolution reverb, and one lightly modulated echo.

Inlines: some auto-pan on percussion and keys. EQ-8 on bass to roll off some lows, and some Cabinet for air. Auto-filter with drive and cabinet on guitar. Drum Buss on drums. Full-chain master on the stereo mix.

Title from the use of this week's element dysprosium in dosimeters.

This week's piece grew organically from a few drum patterns I put down (one of 808 single-hit samples, one from 909 single-hits). I had an initial synth bass I took out, but did some Ableton Analog synth over them, before replacing the synth bass with Epiphone P-J (through EQ-8 for sub-100Hz rolloff), and tracking clean (through bandpass Auto-Filter with drive and Cabinet) and distorted (Reuss RF-01 and Vox Wah) Epiphone Moderne.

Sends: one convolution reverb (to a medium-sized tracking room space) and one Echo (Dub Syndicate, with timing tweaked). Auto-pan on almost everything. I used automation to send the 808 to the Echo channel. Full-chain Master on the 2-buss.

Title is from one of the applications of this week's element, Cerium, which can increase the stability of pigments exposed to light.

Early in the week I decided on an odd constraint: the track should have only one chord. (In this case, a Gsus4. So it's a holy chord, maybe.) I played with a couple drum rack patterns--one rock kit, one fingers-on-snare--and thew a buffer manipulation M4L plugin on the fingers-on-snare one for variety.

Saturday evening, I tracked all the guitar--four tracks of Epi Moderne, some straight into the board, some through Vox Wah, some through EHX LPB2ube, and some through Reuss RF-01. There's a lot of the one chord, but also responses to it. Epi P-J bass went on last.

This was a bit tricky to mix, given the one-chord tonality and the buildup of harmonics (themselves accentuated with fuzz), but high-pass Auto-Filter to cut out lows helped a lot. Drum Buss on the percussion helped retain impact, as did some reverb on most parts, and echo for the drums (automated) and percussion.

Title from an early use of cesium, element 55, used for the getters of vacuum tubes.

Dry funk kit, hand drum kit, claps, marimba, bass, organ, synth. Tracked guitar, but it was a bit sloppy, and I cut it. (Hey, been sick this weekend.) The goal was to do something like a lost instrumental b-side of a Grace Jones session with Sly and Robbie, with Bill Laswell remixing.