Didn't have a lot of time this weekend, because most of it was spent working on a U2 cover for a different music project I'm involved in (every month someone picks an artist and we all do covers, then at the end of the month everyone votes on their favorite and the winner gets to pick next month's artist). I covered "The Refugee," mixing live instruments with made-from scratch synth tones.

For the curious:

Here's the project.

Here's my submission.

Well, since I already had a bunch of synth tones and my recording setup, uh, set up, I figured I'd reuse them for the Weekly Beats... especially since I only had 4 hours to spare.

So I took the Refugee Ableton file, changed the kick-drum pattern, muted the bass line and guitar parts, and used that as a template. "The Refugee" actually has an odd structure, where it starts with an 8-bar intro, then a 12-bar verse, then a 10-bar guitar solo, into a 12-bar chorus, 12 bar verse, 16-bar breakdown... repeat, more or less, except with a 12-bar guitar solo the second time... just weird

I took that structure, recorded a generic mixolydian bass-line, doubled it with an acidy bass synth part, then gave several recording passes playing noodly guitar with the various Edge-ish effects I'd come up with (harmonic percolator clone dimed, heavily gated fuzz pedal, tremolo), then went through and made loops out of various of the guitar bits I liked... doubled those with synth sounds. Re-incorporated some of the ambient sounds and vocal yelps I'd recorded for the U2 song, re-incorporated the chugging guitar slide riff...

I tried using Ableton's "map melody to MIDI" function for this, which probably cost me more time than just inputting it manually would have. It doesn't work well with heavily-tremolo'd guitar!

I like this one pretty good for it being so tossed off! Probably better than a lot of the stuff I put much more effort into...

Title from the fact that it's week 13 and also from the song it's a half-remix of.

Tags: 150bpm, acid bass, cowbell, electric guitar, funk, funky, live bass, week 13 2016, View by:CrazyBob