Smile for the bassman
By laguna on February 22, 2026 11:58 pm
I must admit : This is a low effort one.
I've spent the whole week 3d printing some needed stuff for my home, yet just making "MIDI over network" tests with Linux. I even learn the bare basics of Max4Live in order to transmit CC messages to one of my worst placed synths in the studio... but not much ideas.
Extra props and respect to Emily: I sampled the first 5 percussive hits (2 kicks, 2 snares and 1 kick+hihat) of her song "She's gonna be a doctor" because they were clean and handy. Hope she's fine with it 
Ironically, this songs does not have a proper bass line. I used the last 7 minutes of the deadline to resample the whole synth tracks into one and filtered the crap out of that extra track modulating the cutoff frequency by the beat. So I think the title turned to be quite misleading.
I was fooling around on Saturday with Ableton's Looper and "External Instrument", so I could build chords out the monophonic and almost-boring Waldorf Rocket. I even threw the chords onto the vocoder, modulated by a quite lame TR606 beat.
Of all of that, I just kept the "vocoded" 2 bar phrase, chopped it in Renoise and build a sparse beat with Emily's sample, trying to hit some minimalist funk style like Dabrye.
The synth phrases are extra monotone, because they're the only ones recorded at the time and I hoped to improve them AFTER I finished the beat, but as always, I run out of time. So I tried my best not to suck too much doing party tricks with 4 bars of melody.
Maybe the beat is the most interesting thing here because in order to give it some swing I ended making some convoluted choices: Emily's boom bap beat is sidechaining amplitude and cut off frequency of the previous 606 beat. The beatbox rhythm is split by frequencies, passing the low end through Ableton's extra boring Cabinets (does anybody remember those "Guitar Amps" in version 8? Where are they now?) and the high end through more filtering, modulated by the main boom bap kicks.
All that to achieve something of a fading 606 Drumatix doing 16th notes here and there... maybe I created one of the silliest production techniques of the year
I'd love to add some interesting synths instead of going around in circles with the same idea, yet this is the Weekly Challenge... hope it turns better next time.
I'm a little behind my WB Playlist this week. Hope to catch up soon
Lots of love to you, WB family. Have a great week !!!
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)