Mission Control
By onezero on January 17, 2016 10:57 pm
This week's piece was an exercise in changing plans and goals in response to what I was writing. Initially the plan was to do something tight and primarily synthetic. I heard a little rhythm in my mind and put it down at 120bpm (and later 130), where it seemed to work best at 5/4. I added a bunch of parts in 5/4, but the piece didn't feel like 5/4--I kept counting it at 4/4, so figured I should adjust the bpm to make it 4/4, and 104bpm felt right.
Drums are Impulse with 808 samples, Impulse with K3M samples. There's a channel of Impulse with hand claps, and two channels of Impulse percussion (cowbells, clave, shaker, etc.). I chose Impulse for these because I could get rhythms down quickly, and just stayed with it. Initially I had a bass part in Operator and two Analog instruments, but ended up scratching all of those parts after tracking bass (80s Epiphone P-J on P into the A/D) and guitar (home-built Res-O-Glas into L/R-cascaded EHX LPB2ube). I tried putting the Res-O through the Vox Wah, but for this piece, liked the non-wah sound better, so the wah stayed off.
Bass parts worked well, particularly the hammer-on/pull-off ostinato I used throughout. I wasn't as sure about the guitar parts, but some worked well enough to keep. Against both guitar and bass, though, the original Operator bass wasn't needed, and the Analog voices didn't add to the piece anymore, so they went, also. A couple holes needed something, so I added an Electric instrument for Rhodes-iness, and Operator on the Funky Organ preset.
By this point, I'd abandoned the goal of having something synthetic and tight, though the drum line was still pretty tight. Instead, the piece seemed to want to be a bit more groovy/atmospheric, which I emphasized a bit with some delays and reverbs in return channels: simple delay (on the 3 and 5, just a touch on the guitars), filtered delay (3, 2, and 5, used on percussion), and two reverbs (medium-sized room and filtered echo, which I pushed up on the guitars in the coda). Speaking of the coda, after uploading it, it seemed too long, so this version shaves 42 seconds off the end. Maybe if I'd played a solo over the fadeout or something, it could have been longer, but it wasn't changing enough.
I had other titles in mind, but the piece as it ended up feeling different. The kids suggested various things to do with space travel, which was interesting, since the theme of the week has been "space." The tightness of the drums suggested "control," so I went with this. Not bad for week 2.
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