Tackling this one early this week because I'm going on vacation over the weekend... I'll be seeing onezero in person!

I was riding my bike home the other day, thinking how I needed to come up with something, and managed to start singing a weird little melody to myself. My experience with such things is that I forget them as soon as a stop repeating them to myself, so I kept humming it over and over. It eventually occurred to me that maybe if I set some lyrics to it, they'd serve as a mnemonic. I happened to be cycling towards a gauntlet of Mexican places, and so the words became "I want a fucking taco plate and do I want it now." It got the gist of what I wanted... when I sat down to record it, it warped into a minor key, but the rhythm was what I wanted anyway. Turns out it was 7/4.

An idea I had for this was to start with a percussion version of the melody. Putting it into 808, the track suddenly revealed itself to be footwork! So I created a bunch of fills, random halftime triplets... I hope the ghost of DJ Rashad doesn't come back and smack me upside the head.

The other idea I had was to keep the melody going as an ostinato and keep reharmonizing it by shifting the bass. Then move the ostinato up and use the same bass parts again. I also came up with a more staccato bass part, that I then duplicated in a Major IV for extra weird modulation...

As if that weren't enough moving parts already, I decided that a footwork track needs a sample. So I went back to the idea of "a fucking taco plate" and went looking. After little luck, I remembered IpaGhost suggesting the joy of recording one's own samples. So the voice demanding its Mexican food is my own.

The vocal sample either makes the track or sinks it, and I'm way too close to tell right now...

Tags: 160bpm, electronic, footwork, mexican food, rush job, square waves aplenty, tacos, vocal sample, week 7 2016, View by:CrazyBob