careful don't slip (ice in the streets)
By Earp Lug on January 22, 2026 3:16 am
This song was a bear to make.
I started by using the scatter function on my Roland TR-8 to create a weird glitched out drum beat, and then I synchronised a sequencer to it at 110 BPM. I took the gate output and used it as the filter trigger on my Neutron. I synchronised the tempo of my Crave with the sequencer/drum machine, and turned on the Arpeggio function. I took the output of the Crave and put it into the Neutron. When the sequencer triggered the filter, it allowed the Neutron's notes to play through. I then took the MIDI output from my MicroKorg and put it into the Crave, so when I held down a note, it would both play from the MicroKorg and also into the arpeggio in the Crave with the filter that was triggered by the gates of the sequencer. As it was a 16-step sequencer, if I held down three notes, the melody would shift with each 16 note bar. If I just held down one note, the Crave would just repeat the same note over and over to the beat of the sequencer gates. Finally, I connected my Volca Drum to the tempo chain, and added in a bass kick and crash.
Recording took me a LOT of tries to refine the melody progression. I played keys on the MicroKorg, bringing the drums in throughout the beginning few bars of the song. Once I finally got a version that wasn't too full of itself and had a reasonable progression through the melodies I created, I started editing. My recorder can record each input as its own track, so I was able to bring the drums in and take them out at different times so the song would be more dynamic. I even edited the glitched TR-8 beat and individually took out different parts of the beat so the recording would sound like it had different drum patterns coming in and out (I was too focused on playing the keys to do that in real time. Wish I had that skillset, but I had a hard enough time playing the simple MicroKorg melody that then got translated into the other melodies.)
In the edit, I created a second version of the Crave track, and compressed it and added some reverb and stuff because my wife said it sounded like a preset on a keyboard. I combined it with the clean track to give them a little more texture, and they start to sound a little like strings.
The song sounded a little too sparse, so I fired up my Stylophone CPM DS-2 and created a long drone that would play through 8x 16 note bars (128 notes) by combining two sequencers, one firing a gate every 8 steps at 110 BPM into the the sync of the second sequencer that fired a gate every 16 steps. That second gate went into the reset of the CPM DS-2, and I just made sure the LFO would trigger slightly after that.
The song was meant to change every 8x 16 note bars, but once I synced the drone synth track, I found out that there was actually one part in the recording where I meant to play 8 bars but accidentally played 10. It was easy enough to cut it out, and it didn't detract from the rest of the song's melody movement.
The song still felt like it was missing something, so when I returned to the edit I decided to add some lyrics. I came up with some lyrics about a magical street hockey tournament played on icy streets or something, idk.
I am insecure about my singing voice so I recorded them into the vocoder of my MicroKorg that then went through my M-Vave multi pedal with an amplifier preset and a small amount of delay added.
I didn't want the lyrics to distract from the rest of the mix, so I turned them down and added a lowpass filter that took off the higher frequencies. I added a little EQ and vocal enhancer to try to make the words a bit less muddy, and called it good enough.
Finally I took an export of the mix and manually animated the volume so that everything would come in between -12 and -3 below peaking.
For the video, I created a feedback loop in my video mixer setup (more info about it in my other video tests channel, https://www.youtube.com/@sc0o0tt ). I have a tiny security camera and a tiny car backup camera monitor that's taped to my desk, so I held the camera in my hand and swung it around and danced it to the music I'd recorded. I think my backup camera monitor is going out, because half of the screen randomly inverted when I turned it on. I couldn't let this opportunity go to waste, so I inverted a few passes and played with the textures created by the image being partially inverted in combination with having a horizontal/vertical mirror effect and some afterimage effects. For two passes I filmed my mouth as I sang along to the lyrics.
I then went through all the recordings, selected my favorite pieces, and figured out how to combine them all into one cohesive piece.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thy7lXEbtog
Lyrics:
careful don't slip
ice in the streets
they can be hit
they can be beat
who will take back
our powers
i am done with
sniffing flowers
will you take it
will you break it
its that feeling
i cant shake it
no more slogans
without action
lets build our own
peoples faction
cast your bullet
shoot your ballot
we are nothing
to their mallet
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)