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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / orangedrink's music / Rev. Alt. History

Rev. Alt. History

By orangedrink on February 7, 2016 10:42 pm

I took my old song, Revisionist History, and sped/chopped it up.  https://soundcloud.com/orangedrink/revisionist-history

This was a tricky one because it has a lot of sub bass, which disappears on most systems & headphones.  Inspired by the Footwork/Juke scene, I kept this at 160 bpm and tried to incorporate a lot of dotted rhythms and triplets.  I squashed some of the dynamics as a sacrifice for loudness, but my theory was that this was meant to be blasted in a club setting.  It was fun to do and I'm excited about exploring this genre of fast dance music.  My previous work in the dance genre has been 120 - 130 bpm, so this felt like turbo mode!

What I learned:
- Looping things in triplets can be tricky, keep track of each element's individual timing
- Keep it simple!  It can be more fun to dance to if it's less complicated.

Things to do next time:
- Maybe supplement the sub bass with a medium bass so different systems can still catch the musical element
- Maybe don't compress the drums as a unit...
- FIGURE OUT MIDINES WHY DOES IT NOT WORK OH THE AGONY!

Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)

The voice sample manipulation works well. High end can get a little piercing in places, and I'd strengthen the third beat - an echoed clap doesn't have that "umph" for dancing imo. I enjoyed listening tho, good potential here

Brackleforth wrote:

The voice sample manipulation works well. High end can get a little piercing in places, and I'd strengthen the third beat - an echoed clap doesn't have that "umph" for dancing imo. I enjoyed listening tho, good potential here

Great notes, I'll have to incorporate them on a future track this year.  Thanks! smile

I love this idea. Awesome execution. Maybe a good exercise for my Octatrack.

haha it's funny you sped up your song this week, mine was slower than in the 90s... a creative remix, and bold mangling of your own voice!

Good track and so good for drink a beer with a girl all night!

Btw I downloaded your album, it's so good!

Cool how you revised Revisionist.History.

Oooooh this is nice. I can thankfully hear that sub bass on my speakers.  Problems with Midines? Why not have a go with Famitracker? Or are you wanting the live element?

I dig the time signature and I love that you list the different concepts you took away from the week's work. (and oh the horror, why midines, why??)

I'm a fan of triplets! Digging the feel on this! Nice work!

Cool chorus. I think this would really benefit with some mid bass acting "as glue". Very personal take on the footwork/juke genre

mechlo wrote:

I love this idea. Awesome execution. Maybe a good exercise for my Octatrack.

Thanks!

colorful grey wrote:

haha it's funny you sped up your song this week, mine was slower than in the 90s... a creative remix, and bold mangling of your own voice!

Yeah, speeding up or slowing down is always a great change of pace!  I love how you can make slow exciting!

Naikymusic wrote:

Btw I downloaded your album, it's so good!

Wow!  Thanks so much.  Hope you enjoy it in your daily life

Edmund Snyder wrote:

Cool how you revised Revisionist.History.

isn't it ironic?  ;-)

Ipaghost wrote:

w00t

Diagamblic wrote:

Oooooh this is nice. I can thankfully hear that sub bass on my speakers.  Problems with Midines? Why not have a go with Famitracker? Or are you wanting the live element?

thanks for the note about the bass.  i am a mac user and to my knowledge i can't use famitracker, but ALSO the top down composing kind of messes with my head.  I do have LSDJ and need to pull that out of the closet one of these weeks.

donnyjankowski wrote:

I dig the time signature and I love that you list the different concepts you took away from the week's work. (and oh the horror, why midines, why??)

smile thanks man!

Tone Matrix wrote:

I'm a fan of triplets! Digging the feel on this! Nice work!

word up tone matrix!

laguna wrote:

Cool chorus. I think this would really benefit with some mid bass acting "as glue". Very personal take on the footwork/juke genre

thanks.  that's a great idea.  i want to revisit this style more this year, because there are so many nuances to this genre that i want to experience to get better, and like you said, make it more of my own.  i went to a footwork show and the energy was so infectious!!  i want to be a part of it!

orangedrink wrote:


i am a mac user and to my knowledge i can't use famitracker, but ALSO the top down composing kind of messes with my head.  I do have LSDJ and need to pull that out of the closet one of these weeks.

I happily run Famitracker under the commercial CrossOver solution, which is just a wrapper for open source Wine plus some real commodities for us OSX users. It runs really nice and you just have to touch the buffer/latency value in order to make it work from a fresh install.

Drop me a line if you need some advice smile

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