This week I finally went full-on industrial metal. Everything but the bass and guitars were done on the Polyend Tracker. Bass is recorded direct and amped with Duality Bass Studio from Audio Assault. Guitars are recorded direct and amped with Reamp Studio from Audio Assault. Not my usual gear but that's all I had today. Mixed in Harrison Mixbus. It's been a real challenge to play bass and guitar at 200bpm with quite a few months with no practice. Amidst the noise and chaos the mistakes may be ok. Making this track was both exhilarating and drained me of all this week's remaining energy.

Working on this week's track was challenging. Instead of starting with a guitar motif or melodic idea I started with concepts I wanted to try: sequencing real drum samples, using odd time signatures, with a progressive edge. After experimenting on a few patterns it didn't seem do go anywhere, when saving the project, scrolling through the auto-naming suggestions of the Polyend Tracker I got to "oceanic metal" which I liked, then I thought about overlaying some spoken words from a speech over the music which is something I really like to hear. It then completely oriented the track to a new direction and things started to make a bit more sense though there always seemed to be something wrong, and the 8 tracks of the Tracker were a real limitation at first. I think adding distorted guitar tracks could make it go to industrial metal territory, but I left it as is.
Instruments are sampled from my favourite plugins (ezdrummer, zynaddsubfx, my own bass via Line6 Helix). The speech is from the Ocean Conference at UN in 2017, speaker was António Guterres.

All composed and mixed in the Polyend Tracker, with minimal eq and compression on the master export done in Harisson Mixbus. In the end I do like the track, but that was really a different and challenging feeling starting this song with "conceptual goals" rather than improvised from a melodic or chord progression idea.