Here's one that grew kind of organically out of some syncopated drums. I'd started with Ableton's 64 Pad Kit Rock, and something in the high-hat suggested a funky approach. For some extra flavor, there's 64 Pad Finger Snare LBB, and a track of handclaps.

I initially tracked a few Rhodes lines with PureMagnetik Mark Two Berlin, but ended up removing them, along with PureMagnetik Mellotron. Instead, I tracked a lot of Epiphone bass (though initial loops weren't quite funky enough, so out they went), and then two passes with PureSalem Mendiola through Vox Wah (one bridge pickup and one neck pickup.)

Inlines: Max Humanizer on the drums and percussion, Bass got the usual EQ-8 rolloff.

Sends: Ableton Delay, Valhalla Supermassive, and room-sized convolution reverb. Full-Chain multi band compression on the stereo out.

The title comes from the root of the Rhône river, which runs through the 69th department of France.

I had a thought to do all-in-the-box this week, partly thinking of Daft Punk retiring their collaboration, but then departing from that initial idea. There's still 808 as the drum machine (via Ableton's 808 Startup Kit), 4-bit Redux on the handclaps, and Ableton's Analog for bass and two synths. I also went for WaveTable (Juno Organ Wave, with the filter cutoffs brought way down).

Inline processing: I made use of Live 11's clip randomization with a narrow range of velocity variation in the drums here and there, as well as some in the bass. It might not be very audible. There's also a touch of Max Humanizer on the drums, which kind of defeats the purpose of using drum machine voicing...but maybe not.

Sends: Hybrid Reverb (the jury's still out on how useful I'll find this; I think I just prefer convolution reverb alone, rather than blended with an algorithm, and I'm not all that sold on the impulse I used here), Delay, Echo with LFO Auto-Filter in front, and Spectral Resonator, which is responsible for that little sparkly mechanical flourish every so many bars.

There's also the usual multi-band compression on the output.

Title comes from 61's status as the smallest proper prime

I wanted to go in a different direction this week, and picked up the bağlama-tuned Heit Deluxe (like this one, but not as clean and in a red-burst), and came up with the main riff. I recorded that to the shaker, and ended up with about three minutes. During the week, I added percussion (tambourines, hand drums), hand-claps (MIDI), and a trap-set kick drum in an effects rack with two parallel high-pass filters--one to accentuate the beater, and one to accentuate the resonance of the shell. I also recorded a number of other guitar lines to respond to the initial one, and to extend its length a bit, editing them into a structure.

Tuning: GgDDAa, played with fingers. Each guitar channel got different degrees of Auto-Filter, one of them bandpass, two high-pass, with different degrees of drive. I also used a bit of filtering/drive on the hand claps and hand drums. Rather than auto-panning most things, I left most things statically panned, and just auto-panned hand claps and some percussion in time with the track, to set up a call-and-response effect. I did add a bit of delay on the claps, but most atmosphere is from two convolution reverbs (one small space, one larger)--my idea was to keep it as much like a field recording as I could.

The master channel got Full-Chain Master for compression/limiting.

Title comes from the history of the bağlama--since it comes from the saz used by the Azerbaijani Ashiqs, whose name is related to the Avestan root iš-, which means "to seek" or "to search."