Fermion Funk
By Disposable Planet on February 28, 2026 3:29 pm
We're getting funky this week! Continuing my elementary particle themed album I made the companion song to Boson Bop this past week. It's called Fermion Funk and it definitely lays down the funk. As mentioned before, there are two main categories of elementary particle in the standard model - bosons and fermions. Bosons govern forces or energy (like the photon and Higgs particle) and Fermions make up matter (like the electron, the quark, and neutrinos). This week's tune is not about any one specific particle but is dedicated to fermions. The upcoming album will be split into two parts with 4 songs capturing the vibe of specific bosons and 1 extra song about bosons in general, and 4 more tracks for specific fermions and 1 extra song about fermions in general. I'm debating if I should mix up the tracks or have them in separate sections - we'll see what works best when I'm done.
A little bass driven intro and we're already into the funk this week. This track has two major sections - a part in E minor that it starts out with and returns to later in the track, and a part in G mixolydian in the middle. I use minor scales and mixolydian scales appropriately and venture into some pentatonics and blues scales for effect. The melody parts are noodley and adventurous and I have a nice solo over the minor part with some triplets later on after it returns to the main theme. There are some bass solos achieved by hand drawing an electric bass sounding waveform in the WAV channel and then modifying it slightly for bite two times. So during the bass solos I'm switching between three bass instruments in phrase, using the ones with more treble presence for the higher notes and the ones with more bass presence for the lower notes to create that funky slap bass sound. There are some walking bass accents in the bass work as well to lend to the funkiness. The lead melodies use a patch that uses a stepwise table to switch duty cycles on retriggers for the lead instrument, giving it some variety. And the arps are four note tables. The staccato funk guitar parts are hard panned in a stepwise table and are pseudo delayed at parts by 2 or 3 steps when duplicated, to create a Shaft-like effect.
7 songs down, 3 to go. Next week will be either the muon, the quark, or the gluon.
Also I'm playing two shows this coming week - A show with Nullsleep, The Way Up, Donutshoes, Void Ripper, and Problems in New Haven on March 4th and then I'm playing the Saturday Night Bitrave in Boston at Boston Bitdown with Siberia Zero, Bubblegum Octopus, and FLOOR BABA. If you're attending please give me a holler. Should be a blast!
As always, thanks for listening!
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