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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / laguna's music / No love tonight

No love tonight

By laguna on June 21, 2020 11:46 pm

First of all, thanks to everybody that keeps giving me feedback. I read all your comments but I'm having a hard time managing my time to properly answer them. You guys are fantastic!!!

This one's pretty simple, I guess:

a) I started some kind of vaguely "synthetic latin" drum machine groove using samples of a mboring ostly Kawai drum machine, the K50, inside Renoise.

b) I used the first half bar of the huuuuuuuuuge classic "Don't you want me" by The Human League including kick, snare, hihat and those 3 arpeggiated notes, so when I vary the pitch, it also alters the duration and timing of the succesion of notes (happy accidents happen!).

c) When I had 2 beats and a synth line, I dumped everything in stems and loaded them on Ableton. I'm still learning Renoise after all these years and I started on Sunday morning, so I needed to be as fast as I could.

d) Added reverb, some delay and a vocoder to extract that "low key variation" of the synth line. The fake latin beat amplitude modulates the Human League hihat filter and the basic kick-snare modulates the bassline amplitude and the delay output. Basic cross modulation to add some movement.

e) I finally added the bassline. The main "Don't you want me" synthline modulates the bassline filter. Not sure about the LFO ranges but I was running out of time.

I missed some arps or some nineties "choir" pads, but this was all I could do. I'm no Gab Manette 80's genious so I really don't know how to get much groove from such beat boxes like the Kawai, apart from cranking the EQ up. It's pretty basic and simplistic, so please forget that it's basically 4 bars worth of an idea.

Now I really should be in bed (wooooork day tomorrow!). Lots of love to all of you WB family.

Peace from Spain. Take care and be safe, all around this beautiful planet

Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial (BY-NC)

It might be four bars of an idea, but all the modulation that you applied makes it super interesting. Nice work, and awesome write up!

It works good to me. I didn't find it boring at all even if only 4 bars... You did layer stuff so it continues to be interesting. Well done.

Mission Crossing wrote:

It might be four bars of an idea, but all the modulation that you applied makes it super interesting. Nice work, and awesome write up!

Thanks a lot, Mission Crossing!!! I wasn't sure if people would be interested in the details. I could be very nerdy about the production process smile

Those cross modulation tricks work quite well over simple loops. I tend to use (and abuse) that a lot smile


djippy wrote:

It works good to me. I didn't find it boring at all even if only 4 bars... You did layer stuff so it continues to be interesting. Well done.

Thanks a lot, Djippy smile I developed a series of (cheap) tricks to get away with some simple ideas due to lack of time. Always wishing I have more time to add little details

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