I had a thought to do all-in-the-box this week, partly thinking of Daft Punk retiring their collaboration, but then departing from that initial idea. There's still 808 as the drum machine (via Ableton's 808 Startup Kit), 4-bit Redux on the handclaps, and Ableton's Analog for bass and two synths. I also went for WaveTable (Juno Organ Wave, with the filter cutoffs brought way down).

Inline processing: I made use of Live 11's clip randomization with a narrow range of velocity variation in the drums here and there, as well as some in the bass. It might not be very audible. There's also a touch of Max Humanizer on the drums, which kind of defeats the purpose of using drum machine voicing...but maybe not.

Sends: Hybrid Reverb (the jury's still out on how useful I'll find this; I think I just prefer convolution reverb alone, rather than blended with an algorithm, and I'm not all that sold on the impulse I used here), Delay, Echo with LFO Auto-Filter in front, and Spectral Resonator, which is responsible for that little sparkly mechanical flourish every so many bars.

There's also the usual multi-band compression on the output.

Title comes from 61's status as the smallest proper prime

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)_/¯

I built this one up out of little snippets of rhythms across four tracks, and ended up with an all-in-the-box piece. Drums and percussion all got reverse gating for a severely clipped envelope--three drum racks (Cassette 606, 808 Depth Charge, percussion) and one Impulse instrument of hand claps. There are two channels of Operator, one for bass, and one for swells, and one track of distorted Puremagnetik Rhodes. Sends: two convolution reverbs (ambience and a weird space) and Echo. Full-chain master on the master channel.

Title from the instability of astatine, this week's element.

This week's track came together in little sessions during the week (new job and travel), so it was easier to do an in-the-box thing--I had the drum patterns (a synth drum kit I came up with, a 909 kit, and Ableton's AstroPlay) and an abstract ring-modulated keyboard line (Ableton's Electric piano). It seemed to need a layer of noise, so I added Ableton's Analog's Coptor (sic) preset, and then did a quick improvisation with my randomizable pitch shifting network in Max/MSP (which begins the piece and continues throughout.)

Effects/sends: Drum Buss on the synth drum and 909, and Frequency Shifter (in Ring Mod mode) on the AstroPlay. One Echo send, and one convolution reverb. Full-chain master on the stereo mix.

Title from a property of praseodymium (element 59): silicate crystals that are doped with it have been experimentally used to slow light.

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

A very busy week, so here's a track without a lot of automation...but has a kind of groove. All in the box, with Ableton drum racks (lots of auto-filter carving on the 909 samples), impulse (bitcrusher for grit and abstraction), Analog, and Operator. I put in two convolution reverb sends (one of which was the Dan Harpole cistern), but only used one...so I wasted CPU cycles. Also a send of Filter delay into delay. Lots of auto-pan, but no humanizer: most of these tracks sounded better with a mechanical consistency, but the not-on-the-grid instruments sounded better left alone (not quantized/humanized).

Title comes from the fact that it's week 7, and heptagons are the first regular polygon (counting from 3) that can't be produced with a compass and straightedge method.