An all-in-the-box yoctonaut track this week. Two drum racks: one percussion (Plena kit), and one 808 (Kit-808 Classic), an impulse kit of hand claps, and three tracks of Operator--one with just one oscillator, and two with two. I had two return channels, but just used one of them, the Echo. There's some Drum Buss on the 808, and some Auto-Pan on some tracks. Full-Chain Master on the stereo master.

Title from the anecdote that Seaborg revealed the existence of this week's element (Curium) on the radio show Quiz Kids. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

This week's track was an in-the-box kind of thing. I'd been thinking of doing something house-influenced, so put together 606 samples, percussion samples, hand-claps, Ableton Analog synths (bass, lead, pad), and then threw some Simpler grand piano through a low-pass and high-pass Auto-Filter with drive for a tiny-speaker feel. Sends: one convolution reverb and one Echo (tweaked to be less noisy and wobbly, and with a longer delay period.) Master channel got some pseudo-mastering assistance from Izotope Ozone 8 (free at the moment) on the more-depth preset.

Title from the crystalline shape of one isotope of this week's element, protactinium.

This week's piece came together kind of organically, from wanting to hear something rhythmic. I put up four percussive voices: Ableton's Acoustified 11 drum rack, a 909 drum rack, an Impulse instrument of hand claps, and a drum rack of Ableton's Ethno Kit. Saturday night I tracked bass (Epi P-J with EQ-8 roll-off below 100Hz) and some old standby MkI2 Crunch Electric (with Around The Head preset Auto-Pan).

Sends: Convolution reverb set to a studio space impulse, and two instances of Echo. Lots of automation in the sends, and full-chain master on the 2-buss.

Title from the fact that my main headphones (AIAIAI-configured) use neodymium (element 60) magnets in the speaker elements.

This one's a simple in-the-box housey piece. Inspiration was reading about one insufferable wealthy blowhard or other who put out a promo video in which he pronounced "discotheque" with four syllables. This kind of gave me the idea of doing a sample-fest of it, but apparently he didn't pronounce it exactly the way I'd thought, so I instead went with a simple synth line that had the kind of cadence I'd envisioned, over a disco-y kind of house rhythm. It fell together rather quickly, which is good, because this has been a busy week.

909 drum rack, hand claps, four tracks of Ableton's Analog. Convo reverb and delay. Not a lot of fancy stuff. Title comes from PA's Route 51, which wasn't far from where I grew up.

Merry Christmas/happy holidays/happy solstice/happy Eggnog Riot anniversary, or whatever you're celebrating!

A piece that went through a number of iterations before I found the vibe of a kind of house track. There's a lot of percussion: single-hits on 909, hand drum, tabla, hand claps, some Ableton Collision instruments (marimba and metal plate), Operator for bass, and the sampled Behr stringed instrument from Uganda. Not a lot of inline processing but lots of automation to different sends--two convolution reverbs, a simple delay, and a filter delay. It's long...but that was the vibe.

Title from the fact that quantum dots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot) are sometimes made with selenium, which has the atomic number 34.

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.

(production notes coming 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.

Here's a track I worked on little by little during the week, and it was ok, but not terribly engaging...until I went all disco-house on the drums. That got it going again.

Production notes: one drum rack of single hits of dry trap kit (auto-filter to roll off lows and highs, add some distortion, and accentuate the resonant peak of the kick, and also parallel processing with band-pass + simple delay and band-pass + grain delay), one track of 909 (auto-filter high-pass with resonant peak to pop the kick, and a low-pass to tame the highs), Impulse instrument of hand claps, and drum rack of hand percussion (auto-filtered for tone shaping).

Keys: two Electric instruments (MKI2 crunchy preset into different auto-filters: one high-pass, and one LFO band-pass). Bass: 80s Epi P-J into the board, side chained to the 909. Guitar: self-built Res-O-Glas Belmont with Alumitones into a band-pass auto-filter with drive, for the small-amp sound.

Sends: one convolution reverb (a church), and one chain of simple delay into filter delay.

Unusually for me, I used the Warm & Wide Drums mastering preset on the master channel, instead of the Full-Chain Master I usually do; this time this one sounded a bit better. Everything except bass and the trap kit got auto-pan, and all MIDI instruments got 24ms of Humanizer.

Title from some free-association from the idea of 5 (for week 5), in that we conventionally have five material senses.