On Schedule
By license on January 14, 2024 10:22 pm
2 down! May as well put a proper description on this one - sometimes it's nice to have an accompanying journal entry.
Track
This started out a lot slower and more like Radiohead's "Backdrifts" or Massive Attack's "Protection". As I worked, decided the tempo needed cranking. Then it veered into psy-trance, but I lack the background to properly flesh that out. Instead, I thought of 1NC1N's "Nocturnal Humanoid" and moved in that more comfortable techno/electro direction. I'm all for branching out this year, but not this last week.
Observations / Lessons Learned
Ugh, mixing. I tried sidechaining the bass to the drums, which is a bit new to me outside of faking it with LFOs on e.g. Elektrons. That solved some of the problem here, but I think it mangled the bass a fair amount, both in terms of transients and the upper harmonics. Something weird happened to the drums too.
The bass and one of the pads started as the same patch, but I split them out pretty early on. Doing that again to split the sub component would've enabled be mixing and even sequencing separately. That sounds excessive, but I've heard that in other electro tracks, and it can be effective.
The drums could have used more work. They're old drum machine samples, which is my go-to with samplers. I started with a pattern at the original, slower tempo. I kept that one as it still worked faster for the techno-y section at the beginning, but as I made more patterns, I also added more sounds to the kit for them. That affected both mixing and cohesion. Having some reliable samples I can just drop into a kit, or better yet a whole kit ready to go, would be a lot more efficient.
Process Changes and 2024 Aspirations
I picked up Live 11 license during a Cyber Monday sale. So far I like it quite a bit - it's almost replacing my hardware usage. I assumed I'd want to start creating M4L devices right away and just get weird/algorithmic. Instead, with the sequencing and synths built in, it feels a lot like the fast Elektron workflow, but easier to edit. It provides much more quantity and quality of tools of all sorts, and with a better high-level perspective.
This eliminates a lot of excuses I've fallen back on over the years, though 
A big one is mixing. It turns out that properly mixing is hard, and I have a lot to learn. I want to improve that this year, particularly on low-end, which requires more time focused on it each week. I may need to split the composition/arrangement and mixing phases a bit more or at least develop more of an intuition about how to approach problems could be solved with either. I'm eager to get smarter and better!
Internal/External Obstacles
I was away from my gear the first 2 weeks of the year. I ended up enjoying taking a break from music and catching up on book reading a bit! Aside from finishing a 2023 sketch for week 1's submission, the only music I made was M8 sketching on mass transit. Toward the end of the trip this last week, I got a gross cold that had me in bed for a whole day. The whole next day was traveling home, and the day after that my cold was back in full force along with jet lag. So only ended up with a couple days to wrap up this sketch.
I'm working slow until I find a groove again, so I need more time overall. Hopefully there are fewer hiccups this next week.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial (BY-NC)
