Weeklybeats is a 52 week long music project in which artists compose and publicly release 1 song a week for the entire year.
Starting January 1st 2024 GMT each participant will have one week to upload one finished composition. Any style of music or selection of instruments are welcomed and encouraged. Sign up or Login to get started or check our FAQ for any help or questions you may have.

WeeklyBeats.com / Music / license's music / swimming upstream

swimming upstream

By license on January 24, 2016 2:46 am

I had a disappointing week, both in terms of music and other aspects of life, hence the title. The muse was not giving it up today but I just wanted to get it over with today (Saturday) and have a fresh start to the new week in the morning.

As usual, starts out boring and gets kind of weird. This one is mostly Monomachine, but unlike the last two I brought in a couple friends. I started the sketch in the Octatrack, where it began as a sort of industrial dance thing. I tried some things out and thought I might just do a bunch of jams and assemble them in Reaper but it started to feel really tedious and wrong, nothing really felt or sounded right. One of those had some nice textures so I kept it for the ambient end section (when in doubt, drench everything in reverb). Anyway, I did end up doing a ~7 minute Monomachine jam and trimming it down, sloppily I might add.

I plan to work harder to make my own luck for next week. Thanks for reading and listening.

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

I love the ambient ending section smile best wishes for the new week!

Great sounds as usual, love the bass and atmospherics. Interesting to hear about the process too. Yep, drench it reverb!

i dig the moodiness of this. nice work

Great sound and composition to the beat--it could work in a lot of different contexts. And that descending, reverbed voice at the end is badass. 

Is it the melodic part of the middle section that's giving you trouble?

Nothing wrong with the result though...even if you had a rough week and getting the track going, it ended up well; it took a bit to get to the end but the ending made it worth it. Enjoyed.

like the result man, it's catchy, nice beat, enough variation to my taste... keep up

nikola wrote:

I love the ambient ending section smile best wishes for the new week!

miraclemiles wrote:

Great sounds as usual, love the bass and atmospherics. Interesting to hear about the process too. Yep, drench it reverb!

cfurrow wrote:

i dig the moodiness of this. nice work

onezero wrote:

Great sound and composition to the beat--it could work in a lot of different contexts. And that descending, reverbed voice at the end is badass. 

Is it the melodic part of the middle section that's giving you trouble?

tsrono wrote:

Nothing wrong with the result though...even if you had a rough week and getting the track going, it ended up well; it took a bit to get to the end but the ending made it worth it. Enjoyed.

chiefthomson wrote:

like the result man, it's catchy, nice beat, enough variation to my taste... keep up


Thanks for the kind words  smile

onezero - Thank you! The struggle was more the general process. For my WB submissions so far I've woken up on a Saturday, had a general plan of what I wanted to do, and kept going until I came up with what I liked. For the last couple it's been tough to find sounds that really excite me, so I just find something "good enough", play around with it for a bit, and make it work. I think the main problem is that I'm not spending time on it every day like I should, so it takes a long time to get my brain to the spot where I'm doing stuff I really like. I always get there eventually, it just takes longer.

TL;DR I need to simmer my brain in the sounds instead of flash-boiling or deep-frying in them - soak up those flavors and marinate, let my brain map them and see them from a variety of angles.

I also want to find strategies for reusing components from old work, something pselodux suggested in the WATMM WB thread. I listened back to some old jams yesterday and it was pretty inspiring. I would like to revisit some of the approaches I took in those.

dude! FM's where it's at! More of these! haha wink also the ending is extra good

You need to login to leave a comment.
Login Sign-up