Believe it or not this started with me trying to emulate the texture at the beginning of A Warm Place from The Downward Spiral, then turned into something totally different.
More synthwave goodies, gonna try some more organic stuff next week – most of my music involves recording some live instruments into the Dirtywave M8 and building from that.  I have spent a ton of time with M8 learning new things to recently, trying to dig deep into tables/aux tables, and push as much as I can out of the different onboard synths.  Also playing around with getting a lot of crunchy saturation and sonic traffic in the midrange with the digital effects and still keep it sounding warm.
Melody is the focus here, that’s why big, bold, chonky square leads – they took up a ton of room but I don’t want to change them.  I like melody.

Inspired by:
A Warm Place – NIN, then Crystal Japan, then Sunglasses at Night.
Every 80’s live action tv theme song.   
The chromatic walkup in the chorus – 4/5/flat6dim/6 – was inspired by the bridge in most anime theme songs.

Tech stuff:
Everything was sequenced in, and 99% mixed in the M8, recorded direct into Reaper with the new firmware’s usb C split to 24 tracks. 
Tried to get warmer overdrive tones out of the M8 in Macrosynth using Morph, pushing Post AD up and chilling it out with a low pass – then I would bring in the degrade between 01-06  on certain moments to get it to break up and sound kind of natural.
The only post pro I did in Reaper was a light Ozone template for a ‘master’ just to chill out the dynamics, tighten up the bottom a bit and bring out the highs.  Additionally the crunchy lead ‘keytar’ solo didn’t pop enough so I used a tiny amount of NI Driver to smooth out transients and Replika to add a short delay and make it sit up top a little more.
Loving listening to everyone’s stuff last week, can’t wait to hear what you all do for week 2.
Cheers and thanks for stopping by. 😊
-    Chris

Tags: anime, bass, dirtywave m8, drums, keytar, synth lead, synthpop, synthwave, week 2 2026, weeklybeats, View by:HoolieBrown