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.

Week 40 of the year, here's a return to real bass and multi-track arrangement. Drum rack of Ableton Analog instruments for synth drums, tabla single-hits, another hand drum single-hit Impulse instrument, one for hand claps, two different instances of the Ableton Electric instrument, Ableton's Operator on the Plastic Vibraphone preset, and real bass. Sends are two convolution reverbs and a delay; there's some inline auto-filter here and there, along with EQ8 and Cabinet on the bass. Varying degrees of sends, some of which are automated. Full-chain master on the two-bus.

Title comes from the heat-resistant properties of zirconium (atomic number 40).