I'd had no ideas for this week's track until late Saturday evening, when I thought of a couple rhythms, and the idea of having bitcrushed and natural drum samples together. I put down some patterns in Ableton's 64 Pad Kit Jazz, and bitcrushed some complementary patterns from Ableton's 808 Core Kit with Redux (4 bits), avoiding the long tails with Gate.

Bass is just low notes on Ableton's default settings for Electric, though I also rolled off a bit of low end with EQ-8. Other keys: another channel of Electric, Operator's Organ2 Clicky preset (reverb send only), and Spitfire Labs Soft Piano.

Sends: Ableton Echo, a convolution reverb, and Valhalla Supermassive. Max Humanizer on the drums, and full-chain multiband compression on the stereo mix.

Title comes from the Ring Nebula, M57.

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