Week 5, the Weeklybeat that almost didn't happen. I starting to come to terms with the mammoth that is 52 weekly entries. As I'm not prolific, and I learn just how much time it takes me to finish things, building in some mental health breaks seems wise. Giving up mid-week doesn't feel as good as a planned break.

Facing a time crunch due to travel, I found myself a little stressed, and chose to abandon a more ambitious effort for something simplified.

I used some reference material again - Clark's Herr Bar. The programming of live drums is amazing and the 12/8 feel (or triplet 4/4?) is really wonderful. My main objective became to explore a similar feel on drums using the M8. As I'm not Clark, and I had a few hours to get this done, I went for a minimally viable output over anything else. Outside of the few bars of drum programming, everything was a struggle against time. In the end, I nearly gave up, but decided to submit, even if it's not something I'm extremely happy with.

I used a kick/snare from a break and a ride sample from freesound, as I did not have time to record myself. I created a 12/8 groove by making 4 bars of 3 using a chain of 4 phrases for a measure. I learned this is usually done with a 08/08/08/00 groove, but the skipping every 4th note on the grid messes with me. So instead I fill the groove and leave four 00's at the end to place skips there. I wanted some more room to surgically nudge around notes so I bumped up the PPQN to 192. This also allowed for ~55% swing. All of this is a trade off of for higher BPM at 278, and more complexity in managing a measure across phrases.

Title by M8's random generator.

From DW01 Synthdrums pack:
"hat_cl_class" with slight modulation on the decay in a table to humanize the feel.

From the presets included with the M8:
Barely audible stab: "Strum" for Macrosyn (unattributed) as a starting point, through a bandpass and effects.
Bass: "Sine-Base" from nullsleep as a starting point, with some additional filtering and amp modulation.
Bells across 4 tracks: "Bobble FM" from Avrilcadabra as a starting point with some additional filtering and randomizing the note offset with RNL50 in a table.

Freesound:
Ride: 06_Ride_Silent_Cymbals_&_Snares.wav] by Theriavirra -- License: Attribution 4.0

Tags: m8 tracker, m8tracker, week 5 2026, View by:carcus