After trying for two or three days to produce a nice dnb track
\nusing the mixit40 samples, I noticed I didn’t really get anywhere. I
\nhad some nice breaks, but somehow I couldn’t manage to produce some
\nnice nasty bass and rhythmic background. I got more and more
\nfrustrated, and one day before breakfast decided to build a simple
\nelectro track in order to get good karma again. I took most of the
\ndrumkits for Impulse (the Live drum machine) I had built for the dnb
\ntrack, and punched in a few simple four on the floor beats. I decided
\nthat was too dumb, and played around with weird time signatures,
\ngetting 3 different beat loops, one 4\/4 (basic electro rhythm), one
\n7\/8 jazzy drumloop, and a 6\/4 noise rhythm loop.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I also wanted to play around with some effects in Live I didn’t
\nknow, for example the resonator. I just used the preset, and dumped
\nthem onto the 4\/4 drum track. The resonator adds a tonal character to
\nthe input source. In this case, the input source is pretty rhythmic,
\nthe output turns out to be some kind of nice rythmic accord track. But
\nswitching the mode of the resonator, a different pitch results. I used
\nthis as a basic harmonic structure of the song. One thing which I
\ndon’t really like about the resonated drum track is that sounds kind
\nof silly in the long run. Maybe deconstructing the rhytmic structure
\nwould be interesting, the only thing I did was to separate the hihats
\nof the drum structure and run them through the resonator separately. I
\nrecorded the audio output of the resonated drum track into separate
\nwav clips, and added an audio track to the song. I wanted to add some
\nglitch to the track, but in the end I only modified the resonated drum
\ntrack a bit. I used dblue’s glitch plugin, which is really nice. It
\nhas an integrated sequencer, which you can use to add a bit more
\nstructure to your glitches, and not just have random effects applied
\nto your audio. I added a stutter effect, and a reverse effect,
\nrecorded the audio output onto a separate wave clip, and used this for
\nthe second half of the song.<\/p>\n
I reused the clean synth sound I had extracted from the mixit
\nsamples for my first track, tweaked around a bit with the LFO and
\nfilter settings, and used this as a bass sound. The bass only plays
\ntwo notes. With a bit more effort I would modulate the bass line a
\nbit, maybe make it funkier, but I didn’t want to lose too much time on
\nthe track \ud83d\ude42 The basic 4\/4 drum clip is actually 4 bars long, and
\nvariates a bit. However, I don’t modify it further than
\nthat. Sometimes, i use the second half of the last bar as an “intro”
\nto a drop, to add some dynamism. With a bit more time I would work a
\nbit more on the pattern, maybe make it groovier, maybe add some
\n“custom” fills. The second drum clip is a 6\/4 clip, using a very
\nsaturated drum kit I had built for my dnb clip. The clip is pretty
\nsimple, and shifts every 3 bars on top of the 4\/4 clip. I added some
\nautopanning and phaser on top of it so it doesn’t sound too dull. The
\n4\/4 clip also has some autopan thrown on top of it. The third drum
\nclip is a bit more complicated. It has a 7\/8 time signature, so it
\ntakes a long time to resync itself on top of the 4\/4 track. I used
\nsome dnb drums with erosion on top of it, which make the drumkit sound
\na bit like a drummer with brushes. The clip is hi-hat heavy because I,
\nwell, love hihats :).<\/p>\n
Finally, I added some kind of lead, also derived from the clean
\nsynth sound of the first mixit track. It is three bars long, and so
\nalso shifts continuously on top the 4 bars 4\/4 drum loop. I played a
\nbit with the knobs on my synthesizer to add a very basic filter sweep
\non top the lead. Actually, I overdid it a bit, and it sounds quite
\nthin sometimes, but I like it that way.<\/p>\n
So, what were my objectives doing this track, and what did I learn
\nfrom it. Well the first objective was just to have fun. This sounds
\npretty evident, but actually for me it is not. Most of the time, when
\nI try to learn something new, I’ll put all my energy into building
\nsomething “perfect” from the beginning. However, this quickly leads to
\nexhaustion and frustration when something doesn’t work right from the
\nstart. I think this comes from the high expectancy I have because of
\nmy programming knowledge. Most of the time, when I program something,
\nit tends to work in a matter of hours (this could also be a
\nside-effect of me choosing “small projects” to hack on). Drum and bass
\nis a music style I’m not really familiar with, and also a music style
\nwhich requires a lot more work than “simple” loop-based electro like
\nacryl and schluerf. I think that I’ll keep out churning basic simple
\nelectro tracks for a while now, and between those tracks work on
\nbuilding dnb skills, spending a lot of time working on bass sounds, on
\nbreakbeats, on fills, on the overall structure of a song. The second
\nthing schluerf has brought me is to focus more on “rhythmic” sound
\nelements, rather than melodic structure. Most electro tracks I like
\nhave a very simple melodic structure, most of the time nothing more
\nthan a few notes repeated over and over. I first began to write
\nextensive melodies, with the result of having tracks sounding like
\n80ies synth pop. Blerk… I also noticed that even inside the same
\ndrum loop, the different sounds (snare, hh, bass kick) are more a kind
\nof “separate voice”, than actually belonging to the loop. A much used
\neffect is to remove the snare, remove the hh, then turn on the hh
\nagain, then the snare, and I actually perceive them as separate
\n“lines” in the track. This is a direction I’ll try to explore in
\nupcoming songs. Also, adding effects to modulate the different lines
\nis actually a lot more work than just throwing some weird plugins on
\ntop of them. I didn’t use much effects in acryl and schluerf, but I
\nwould really like to build a song like Otto von Schirach does, with a
\nlot of effect work, lots and lots of different sounds, but integrated
\ninto the same structure.<\/p>\n
You can download the schluerf mp3 here<\/a>, After trying for two or three days to produce a nice dnb track using the mixit40 samples, I noticed I didn’t really get anywhere. I had some nice breaks, but somehow I couldn’t manage to produce some nice nasty bass … Continue reading
\nand the ableton live set here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"