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.

I wasn't sure where this one was going, but started with a trap set drum rack in which I replaced the kick with a 909. I thought I'd follow the general rhythm and not worry too much about tonality, and it started getting interesting when I added percussion with Ableton's Behr pack and some handclaps. Initially I had some Operator bass, then some Analog bass...and took them out when I tracked some Epiphone bass. A bit of Electric piano (Old School Roads preset) and sparse guitar (Res-O-Glas, straight into the board) pulled it into a thing. There's also some second bass guitar, and some Operator percussion. Notable: high-pass filter on bass that rolls off under 40; sidechaining against the kick with the Glue compressor instead of the regular compressor. And a high-pass and low-pass auto-filter on the guitar, instead of a band-pass as usual. Convolution reverb and Simple Delay-> Filter Delay for sends, and full-chain master. Auto-pan on most things, but no Humanizer this time.

Title from the 128bpm, which is a power of 2.

This was a strange piece--initially I started it as a house kind of thing--with a shuffle--but it didn't seem to lead anywhere, even after putting on electric piano, synth, and percussion. I ended up nearly doubling the bpm to 151, and then it was...too jittery. So I cut the 909 tempo by half, and it seemed to make sense, in kind of a mello jamz™ kind of way. (Admittedly, a lot of my attention this week was on the Max/MSP patch for a show I'm doing next weekend.)

Instruments: Drum rack of 909 (bunch of filtering on this to tame the highs and accentuate the kick), drum rack of hand drum (low-pass and high-pass auto-filter), Impulse instrument of hand claps (high-pass auto-filter). Two tracks of Electric, one with band-pass auto-filter and one with high-pass, both with LFO and different kinds of drive. I had a couple different synth voices that I ended up taking out--they didn't match where this was going.

Bass: 80s Epi Embassy II (P-pickup) into the board, with some Cabinet plugin.

Guitar: two different tracks of Epiphone Moderne (neck pickup) through EHX LPB2ube, into the board. One channel got high-pass Auto-Filter and Cabinet plugin, while the other got band-pass Auto-filter for that small-amp sound.

All MIDI instruments got a touch of M4L Humanizer (24ms), and everything except bass and 909 got auto-pan.

Sends: Convolution reverb and a chain of Filter delay into Simple delay. Master got the usual Full-Chain Master.

Title comes from the sixfold symmetry of snow, and the fact that it's week 6.