Weeklybeats is a 52 week long music project in which artists compose and publicly release 1 song a week for the entire year.
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Glass Desert

By CrazyBob on July 16, 2016 11:44 pm

At first glance, the Glass Desert might seem calm, even idyllic, but proceed with caution. Deeper within its expanse you might find (or be found by) bandits and other desperate scavengers. The glass which seems so solid can shift like sand, unexpectedly, under your very feet...

Inspired by Sky H1, I made it my goal this week to do a track that had a strong pulse and drive but no drums. Also pads. I think I succeeded.

I used Brackleforth's 2nd scales PDF to pick out something exotic. The piece is in Ab Batti Minor#4

The first pad is Operator: a couple of sines and a square with a low pass, run through phase, autopan, reverb and a saturator

The second pad is also Operator: a couple of sawtooths and a triangle, run through an autofilter and a saturator. Experimenting with the filter, I discovered the wonderful sonic effects possible using the "quantize beat" feature. All the really cool scifi sounds on this one are due to the autofilter with the beats quantized

The bass is also also Operator: two sines and a sawtooth with very quick attack and decay, run through a saturator, chorus, vocoder, dynamic tube and cabinet modeler. Most of the weird metallic effect comes from the combo of the chorus and the vocoder (using the "formant 5" preset)

The sinister organ is also also also Operator: two squares and a sawtooth, low pass filter controlled by an LFO, run through a flange, a saturator, overdriven dynamic tube and cabinet modeler with a "far" microphone

The glassy pads and the exotic Ethiopian scale inspired the title

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

The thing that strikes me most about this track is the very interesting use of spatial positioning to focus but to also disorient the listener. The panning synthesizer is especially dizzying, and even the foreground "thunks" have an ominous quality because they're in the foreground of the piece but since their frequencies are so low, you get a feeling that they're in your head rather than an external sound. Well done!

Love tihs from start to finish.  Yep, ominous is definitely a good work.  Are there John Carpenter influences here?

Arcana wrote:

The thing that strikes me most about this track is the very interesting use of spatial positioning to focus but to also disorient the listener. The panning synthesizer is especially dizzying, and even the foreground "thunks" have an ominous quality because they're in the foreground of the piece but since their frequencies are so low, you get a feeling that they're in your head rather than an external sound. Well done!

Good catch! I hadn't noticed that... pure serendipity, to be honest.


mysterioso wrote:

Love tihs from start to finish.  Yep, ominous is definitely a good work.  Are there John Carpenter influences here?

I dig Carpenter's work (both cinematic and musical) so I'm sure he's an unconscious influence.

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