Did this one as part of Corey Baker's Sample Flip challenge, where you have to use a number of samples in your track and explain your production in excruciating detail. Detail which I will supply below:

Endless Blue - Sample Flip 010 - Diamond Dear

Kind of had a gist of where each sample was going to end up, so started with a skeletal kick/snare and fiddled with the jazz bass until I came up with the main verse riff. I beefed up the beat to counterpoint the bass, and pulled the snares a little early to give the beat some anxiety. From there I pulled a horn sound from the Metro sample and dropped that into Simpler. After tuning it it was waaaay to dissonant to be a legit synth sound, so I tuned it down several octaves, threw kHs Ensemble on it, and it became the drone bed throughout the song. From there I jazz bassed out a more "chordy" chorus. Then I grabbed the 'ole baritone and went all alt-country, pretty much laying out the bones of the song.

I wanted a counterpoint to the guitar riffs, so I went looking for something to use. I kept hearing this resonance in the Metro sample, I guess as the train accelerated? I used a technique Rob Freund shared to use a sharp, tight EQ to boost the resonance (it was around 293Hz) to really pull it out. It was this weird janky bell sounding thing, so I dropped it in Simpler, tuned it, pitched it up a bunch, tweaked the EG, then ran it through a rotary speaker and a tape delay. That's the bell sound playing opposite the guitar in the verses.

Instrumentally things were sounding good, but the percussion was still pretty weak. I put a stanky-ass pitched down Fatboy Slim loop on the chorus to thicken it up (pulling the snares a hair early of course). I sliced up the MRI sample into a drum rack, then tapped out some accent rhythms. I used the panning randomizer to throw the samples all over, and used note chance to make them pretty random. I pulled the train air brake sound from the Metro sample as crash cymbal. Finally I took DustyDusty's guitar riff, reversed it, then ran it through lo-fi-af to really grime it up and used it as a driver in the second verse.

That left the organ sample... which gave me fucking fits. Just did not fit the song. I knew I needed a pad of some sort over the chorus, so I eventually fired up the Arturia Vocoder and, after an hour of messing about, found a fun sound that fit the bill. I used the organ sample as the modulator. There's a way to allow the high frequency content through the vocoder, so I was able to let echoes of the high bell tones through unchanged while completely replacing the organ with the vocoder. Pitched the bells to be in the correct key, and bam, had the song.

Tags: sample flip, trip hop, week 36 2024, View by:Endless Blue