Lost between adjacent seconds
By Leo on February 5, 2026 9:25 pm
From the readouts we know the heartbeat of the prototype started failing at some point, and in the state he was in the Professor must've been aware - on some level, at least. When the machine finally gave out under the immense pressure and the portal collapsed, we could only guess what had kept him from coming back out - what it was that he had seen when he stepped into the infinitely expanded space between the seconds.
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Well, no vocals this week! Instead, I happened on this pulsating bass pattern that intrigued me that I wanted to expand upon. While working on it, a scene from a story formed in my mind, so that's my creative writing exercise for today!
› Technical and philosophical Stuff
‹ Technical and philosophical Stuff
In terms of sound design, the most exciting stuff is probably the chord sound that comes in at around 0:27. It's the criminally underused (by me) Macrosynth model "Wav Paraphonic" which let's you dial in a number of preset harmonies with the COLOR parameter and change waveforms with TIMBRE. One of my favourite features of Macrosynth on the M8 is the REDUX parameter, which is bitcrushing - It makes complex waveform crunchy and noisy and it goes so. well! with that bass patch. Using the ERR command in the Table gives the perfect feeling of instability here.
In other news, Adam Neely uploaded this banger of a video about GenAI in music. I liked this video a lot, but there's a quote in it that kinda stuck with me: "Craft is the predictability of outcomes." This made me think - on one hand, this is exactly the reason I'm not interested in tools like GenAI, that spit out something vaguely fitting a prompt, but which is ultimately out of my control and only so malleable. On the other hand, my process is very much focussed on play these days. Finding inspiration in happy accidents and experiments. How much of it is actually me realizing ideas that I have formed in my head vs. just curating whatever a machine I work with is capable of producing? How much of a craftsman am I, really, when making electronic music?
The good part about this, is that I went ahead and tried to be a little more intentional about a couple things here and I managed to pretty much achieve all of them. There's a downlifter that comes in with the climax of the track that I needed to have a specific sound, in order for the part to have the impact I wanted, and I got it to sound exactly like I imagined it, and it even was the solution to the problem I was facing. And if you zoom out, I was very intentional with the overall arrangement and the idea of hard-cutting between "settings" and everything ended up having exactly the impact that I wanted it to have. So all is not lost!
I took this even further by doing something that I usually don't - I tried my hand at mastering. And this time I don't mean just cranking it up as far as possible without the result sounding unreasonable, but controlling some of the noisiness especially in the high end without things becomming dull, and making sure the bass is crunchy, but present. I suppose it mostly worked out, there are things about the result that I like and some that I feel indifferent about - it's always like that for me when I don't really see a problem to solve, but I have a vague notion of wanting to polish things a little. Things will sound different in subtle ways, but better? I don't know. If you have feedback or ideas, let me hear'em!
If you have feedback or ideas, let me hear'em!
