Had it in mind to write something poppy this week. Started out with a sparser drum pattern than usual, which didn't feel quite right until I stumbled on 106BPM, at which speed it felt like hip hop. Rather than programming hi-hats, I found a sample on Ableton and cut it up, added some flange and beat repeat.

I spent a lot of time futzing with the drums, on the theory that if I made a drum part that would stand on its own I was halfway home. Spent maybe too much time fidgeting the beat, and had little time to think about anything else. So I picked out some prefab sounds and tweaked them.

After the last two weeks of messing around with weird chord progressions, I decided to go simple this week with an 8-bar truncated blues. As the parts started shaping up, the whole thing veered much more RAWK!!! than I'd had in mind. Then veered again into melodies and sounds out of a documentary about the new world of personal computing... only dirtier and more sinister, like an Apple II taking up smoking.

Maybe once machines start learning for themselves, rather than what we teach them, the unexpected results will not be SkyNet or the Matrix. Maybe the AIs will buy used motorcycles and get cheap tattoos...

Tags: 106bpm, blues progression, cheesy, hip hop beat, sinister, week 38 2016, View by:CrazyBob