First track of the new streak! Welcome, everyone!

This one continues the one-guitar approach from last year: this past week and weekend have been rather busy, and a one-guitar approach helps me finish a track. For this one, I tried a faster click tempo, and on initial recordings used a pick. I used to play with a pick exclusively, but I've come to dislike the tone of them with my recordings, so much of this is fingerpicked. (Though the pick is audible on some sections.) The guitar is my very comfortable PureSalem Mendiola in standard tuning, with a track for the bridge pickup only, one for both pickups, and one the neck pickup only.

There are no inline effects on the guitar lines, but I've used a convolution reverb as a send, and multiband compression (via Ableton's audio effect racks) on the stereo mix.

The title comes from the venerable 741 op amp.

Here's a piece I started late in the week, with no plan in mind. I started with a beat that wasn't particularly clear or strong, relocated the 1, and then worked up some variations. The kit: Ableton's 64 Pads Dub Techno Kit, with 90% randomization on a lot of beats, and a touch of Max Humanizer, as well as echo send on the 2 and 4.

Bass: 80s Epiphone Embassy II, direct to the Focusrite A/D--there are two tracks of bass here, one higher on the neck (panned slightly left) and one lower (center). The higher one got Auto-Filter high-pass, while the lower one got EQ-8 with the low end rolled off 6dB, rather than cut entirely.

Guitar: home-built Res-O-Glas with Lace Alumitones, straight into the Focusrite. There's AudioThing Wires on this, 50% blend.

Sends: Ableton Echo, one convolution reverb, and Valhalla Supermassive on the guitar.

Title comes from M81, a Grand Design spiral galaxy.

(Production notes soon)

To shake things up a bit, I decided to see what I could do with TR-606 samples this week, as opposed to the usual 909 hits. I used an effects chain with two parallel chains on the kick sample, with two high-pass filters, each with a medium-high resonant peak. One was for general kick body resonance, and the other was for the beater, to punch through. I ended up filtering the snare and hats as well.

There's a drum rack of percussion and one of handclaps, a track or Rhodes-ish Electric (with some auto-filter to punch it up), and Tension through an LFO-controlled bandpass auto-filter for a wah effect. And there's some Analog through a pulsing mono auto-pan. There's also some x-factor noise from the new Kastle modular synth, a totally fun little thing. (The patches I've made so far are pretty broad-spectrum, so I hit them with high-pass and kept the level low. A work in progress.)

Everything got auto-pan, and all the percussion (plus some of the keys) got some send automation (delay and reverb). Full-chain master on the 2-bus.

Title comes from the eight vertices of a cube.