Lots going on this week, so this came together quickly Saturday night and Sunday. Started with reverse-gated 606 syncopated line, adding hand claps. I then tracked three different sets of lines with Res-O-Glas guitar (Balls Effects KWB -> Vox Wah -> Ableton Auto-Filter -> Ableton Cabinet), Epiphone P-J bass (EQ-8 to roll off lows). Then I went back to add a line of percussion, which sounded wrong, so I bitcrushed it. This one was very intuitive--just tracking little improvised phrases that seemed to work with each other.

Sends: two different room sizes of convolution reverb, with one channel of echo. Full-chain master on the 2-bus.

Title from the inspiration for radium's name. Kinda obvious, but there we have it.

Kind of a weird arrangement that came together during the week: severely inverse-gated 505 drums, 909 for some heft, Tension clavinet (seriously tweaked to use plectrum, different finger weight...), Electric Mk1 (crunchy), Analog Off-World pad, Epi P-J bass (replacing initial synth bass) and Epi Moderne (through Reuss RF-01 and Vox Wah, into Auto-Filter). Sends: two convolution reverbs and one Echo, with Auto-Filter in front to make it interesting. Kind of weird to mix. It also changed tonal center during the arrangement process. Starting to feel like I'm recycling bass lines...but maybe it works.

Title from the element Xenon, element 54.

(tech notes soon)

An all-in-the-box piece this week, it started sounding to me like my old on-iphone-sequencer yoctonaut project, so I'm considering it a kind of reboot. Having listened to a lot of minimal techno at the end of the other week, I wanted to go for clipped/gated percussion sounds. In some cases I used Ableton's gate plugin, but in others I just shortened the length of the played sample in Simpler. There's a drum rack of a dry trap kit that's gotten a lot of Gate on the short cut preset, as well as high-pass and low-pass auto-filter (and it's side chained to the kick of the next percussion channel). A drum rack of 909 kick and hat got shortened at the point of sampling, and got a lot of high-pass filter on the kick. Two channels of Impulse (hand claps and percussion) got short-cut gate treatment, one with that preset, and one with a tweaked attack to shorten it.

The bassline is in Operator, for which I used three sine voices and some low-pass filter. It's side chained to the 909 kick pretty heavily.

The rest of the voices (a pad and two leads) are in Analog, mostly variants of heavily low-pass filtered sawtooth voices, one with an initial pitch modulation for percussive presence.

Sends: three convolution reverbs (two ambience or dry room, one a much larger hall space), one Simple delay, and one Filter delay. Everything got some auto-pan except the 909 and bass, with the 909 getting randomized volume modulation with auto-pan. No humanizer on this one! And the master got Full-Chain Master, as always.

The title comes from the fact that in (sub)atomic physics, 20 represents an island of stability for numbers of protons and neutrons in heavier isotopes

(production notes coming soon)