This week's track is another intentionally shorter piece, trying to make use of some silences and space. Initially I'd tracked a lot of different phrases in a different key Tuesday evening, a more aggressive approach that I'd liked...but it didn't lead to satisfying development. Finally, a more sparse combination of phrases in a different key seemed to lead somewhere, so I followed those, abandoning the first set. (I did keep them, though they're not used at all here.)

Three tracks of PureSalem Mendiola, with the end of one phrase bumped over to an additional channel, to allow for a note to decay across the beginning of the next phrase. Straight into the UA Volt-1, bit of convolution reverb on the channels and compression/eq on the stereo out. There's a bit of a vibe to this one.

The title comes from a village along England's A517.

To switch things up a bit, this week's track uses the Danelectro Baritone. Three tracks (neck, bridge, both in series) straight into the UA Volt, no pedals. There's the usual convolution reverb and finalizing effects rack. I tracked in a couple quick late-night sessions Friday and Saturday; four clips didn't get used, but I ended up using everything else.

The title comes from the Indian astronomer Aryabhata, who developed many mathematical equations, including one describing the Earth's rotation, in (apparently) 511 CE.

This past week I had two live, in-person performances, and spent some time with tracks from earlier this year--it's the first time I've officially released any of the weeklies. Laodica is a collection of 10 guitar tracks from this year.

So...that all leaves not a lot of time for a new track, but I managed to fit in a three-track guitar thing. The usual signal chain, and PureSalem Mendiola.

The title comes from Ontario's Parry Sound, which has highway 510 running nearby.

Still mining that guitar-only thing with the recent resonator network, though this time I was using the PureSalem Mendiola. Through the resonator, it sounded a lot more like a banjo and less like a rubab, so I leaned into it. This one's very banjo-friendly front-porch picking music. I'm kind of digging the vibe here.

Rhythm guitar got a bit of low-end rolloff with EQ-8, and the mix got the Wide & Warm audio effect rack.

The title comes from two towns in VA and WV near RT 102, which kind of echoed the country-ish flavor here.

This one took a few turns after I'd started working on it. I'd started with a few syncopated drum parts (Ableton's 64 Pad Kit Jazz), and thought there'd be a moody atmospheric thing happening. Then I picked up the Danelectro baritone, and a bassline came out that had some attitude to it. I put a few chords to it, and then the next basslines came out with a lot of swagger. So...out with the plan. I did several more passes with the baritone, mostly straight into the board, but then cut a few leads through the Balls Effects KWB and Vox Wah, finally adding a few more through the Reuss RF-01 (and Vox Wah), which come at the end.

Inline effects: Max Humanizer and Drum Buss on the drums. Some Glue Compressor on the baritone, with some Auto-Filter with drive on the cleaner chordal baritone parts.

Sends: Delay on drums, with two different convolution reverbs (one with high-pass auto-filter to prevent boominess) on the baritone.

Title comes from their being 75 uniform polyhedra, if you omit the infinite ones.

This week...there's been a lot to do, so I only spent a few minutes Friday night coming up with an intuitive drum line. On impulse, I went for one of the drum racks I did using Ableton Operator to generate the drum sounds. Saturday, I tracked bass, initially thinking a bit of 70s electric jazz (after reading Ethan Iverson's interview with Keith Jarrett from some years back) the one drum loop I'd written, and then thought to track more bass against it, higher up the neck. Then...rather than writing guitar, I added some ostinatos with Ableton's Analog, and electric piano lines with Ableton Electric. By this point...there wasn't any jazz left in it.

Inline effects: EQ-8 with different amounts of bass rolloff on each of the two bass lines, Max Humanizer on the drums.

Sends: one room-sized convolution reverb on bass, Valhalla Supermassive for keyboards, and Ableton Echo for occasional rhythm on the drums and keys. There's Full-Chain multiband compression on the stereo mix.

The title comes from Aristotle's notion of the number of layers of the universe.

While busy weeks are common now, this one was notably busy. But here's a track anyway. I had kind of a dub idea in mind, thinking of space and interplay...which I kind of got away from, but perhaps not unlistenably.

Drums: Ableton's Borella kit, with Drum Buss, little tiny synth noises from the Ableton DrumSynth kit, and hand claps with Impulse. Epi P-J bass, and Epi Moderne guitar (through Vox Wah). Operator for the organ part. I tracked some fretless guitar that I didn't end up using...but the fretless will probably reappear soon.

Sends: two convolution reverbs, one Delay, and one Echo.

Title from the etymology of this week's element, actinium.

A return to guitar (Res-O-Glas) and bass (Epi), here's a drifty kind of track, named in part after the 44th department of France.

I started with a Drumulator part, much faster, and slowed it waaaay down, I added hand drum and hand claps, some Operator bass (which I took out) and organ lines, along with grand piano in Simpler...and based on a dream I had, I went back and split the two drum lines, adding a vocoder chain to each one--Analog on the Drumulator and Operator on the hand drum. Grand piano sounded too...grand-piano-y, so I used auto-filter to reduce bandwidth and sent it to sends only. Guitar got some auto-filter, as did the Drumulator kick (to bring out the peak).

Sends are two convolution reverbs and one LFO auto-filter into Simpler. Full-chain master on the 2-bus.