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By Earp Lug on February 28, 2026 5:12 am
(This was supposed to be released on Week 8 but I had some scheduling issues last week that made this quite difficult)
What's more simple than a four on the floor 8 bar drum loop when it comes to electronic music?
For a long time, I've been ideating on how to make the most basic drum machine loop into the extreme when it comes to using the number 8, and this is my best attempt at it.
I created 4 recorded tracks individually, each one at a BPM that's a muliple of 8 (64, 128, 256, and one that I think is probably one of them, but it was recorded on a glitched out music machine that didn't have a set BPM, so instead I changed the note every 8 beats). BPM is kind of hard to quantify, but if we count it as 64 it is 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 or 8 x 8.
The first layer is with my Volca Drum, and it uses synthesized drum sounds that I programmed back when NapkinEater was an Acidhouse project. Simple sounds emulating classic drum samples as best as I could program, changing every 8 bars at 128 BPM. I actually had a really hard time counting, so I twisted some knobs on my TD-3 to help me count the notes, as that's what I always did when I was making terrible Acidhouse. It has one continuous kick throughout the song, as well as other drum loops coming in and out (We'll call it two voices)
The second layer was created with my Stylophone CPM DS-2, and while the BPM wasn't synced, there was one drone LFO triggering twice as fast as the other, and I stretched the rate so they would sync with the previous track. (Definitely two voices) I believe it's technically either 128 or 64 BPM, depending on the voice you're counting.
The third layer was my Ellitone Multisynth, and it alternated between hard glitch and a single note. As I mentioned earlier, I changed the note every 8 notes, and performed a longform melody that repeats once throughout the song. The melody is 32 notes long but repeats once to make it musical or something, making 64 notes. I also performed it backward, because I reversed the recording to make it align with the drum kicks a little better. It also has two voices, glitch and singular notes. I think it's at 64 BPM.
The fourth layer is my Roland TR-8, again with kicks at 64 BPM but other notes that come in at 256 BPM (nobody counts them but I thought it was cool to be able to claim it's (8x8)+(8x8)+(8x8)+(8x8). Also I'm gonna stretch and say two voices, making the grand total 8 voices for the song.
Each track was recorded independently, but I was thinking about where I wanted the intensity of the song to come in and out, so I was able to sync the totally different BPMs in post so long as I kept my math straight. As the song was an excercise in extreme simplicity, it was actually pretty easy to make the different tracks interact with eachother without stepping on eachother too much, aside from the Multisynth which I manually brought in and out in post to keep it dynamic.
For the video, I wanted to take 256 photos for the 256 drum kicks that hit throughout the two minutes of 128 BPM music, so I busted out my newish FreedomEnterprise custom glitch camera. I bought it almost a year ago but never had a free MicroSD card, but my homie Aaron gave me one and I finally got to try it out.
It worked great for the first almost 200 shots or so, and I got some cool video walking through the back kitchen of La Mexicana, a restaurant that the movie I'm working on is shooting at, but after a few days of heavy use it totally froze up. I can't tell you how disappointed I was when the camera I've been wanting to mess around with for months totally quit on me after only a few days of heavy shooting, but I'm hoping that because it's still under warranty, I can get it fixed. Total bummer, and I didn't even get enough photos for the music video!
Fortunately, I was able to pull over 50 still images from that one video I shot, and the video has the correct number of frames. If you're wondering why there's so many shots of the back of someone's head, it's because I was walking behind the camera operator on our scout and his head happend to be in the shot for like 8 of the 12 seconds I shot. Nice guy, great back of his head, too!
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)
