Aims for this week

My one aim for this week was to make music without thinking about tempo, time signatures and without any kind of snapping or quantising to a grid.

Like most folks using a DAW, I'm used to making music that (mostly) fits on to a grid, rhythmically. A track normally has one master tempo and time signature, at least at any given point in time and often if you are playing or programming any rhythmic material your software tidies things up by snapping events to, for example, 16th-notes. So I tried to do none of that and to not even look at the supposed tempo my DAW Bitwig forces me to set.

The Process

1. I hid the grid markers and disabled snapping in a project in Bitwig.

2. I experimented with playing notes on a vibraphone sample into a fancy delay preset, AmbientSpace's emulation of the Intellijel Sealegs module, without running the clock in Bitwig. I recorded a couple of passes of this, playing different notes and tweaking the long, long delay tails so they don't have a steady tempo and glitchy distortion shows up.

3. I trimmed bits of the above recordings that I liked, then loaded up a vocoder, and used these vibraphone echoes as the carrier. I dragged in a gentle field recording I made on the Japanese island of Teshima in 2019 and used this as the modulation source for the vocoder. I sent the vocoder into a convolution reverb, where the impulse response was a long recording of echoes inside a disused German radar dome (thanks Antony / Mugwood!). I bounced the results and layered them at two different octaves. Some EQ to try and deaden some high-pitched ringing. The final track opens with a version down an octave, and the second one comes in later. I flipped the stereo channels on one of them for interest's sake.

4. I lined up another pass playing vibraphone into the Sealegs emulation, which became the second sound you hear in the track. This is basically untouched.

5. I pitched that same vibraphone take up an octave, chopped out sections I liked, and made a montage with some parts playing in reverse, which comes in later in the track. I made this mono and then panned the results using an LFO (not synced to clock and with its speed cross-modulated by another LFO just to make it really not-on-the-grid).

6. Going back to step 2, I replaced the vibraphone sample with a basic subtractive synth (Bitwig's Polymer) and played a sustained bass note into the Sealegs emulation. I recorded multiple passes of this with more live changes to the delay settings, and edited out the moments where I actually play the note, so what we're left with is more like a collage of only the echoes. I placed this around the time the higher vibraphone loops come in.

7. I placed the raw Teshima recording from step 3 at the end of the track as a way to go out and trimmed it to the bit that I liked most.

The end. 😀

Tags: ambient, experimental, week 3 2026, View by:jetjaguar