Brass Caps
By miraclemiles on June 26, 2016 7:36 pm
This one could be two different songs, and may be someday. Started this week from scratch and with Afrobeat in the head, in part because of comment on my last week's track from OneZero about synth sounds reminding him of 70's afro funk. I kept humming a Fela Kuti song I can't remember title of and then sat down late Friday night to finally play a beat to get started with and what came out wasn't exactly Afrobeat, or sounding like Fela at all ... but I had fun humming it. The beat tickled my funky bone enough, so onward I went. Using sounds I had ready to go in Ableton, started adding all the parts that appear in the second half, and even changed the beat a little, and I liked what I was hearing there, it sounded buoyant and positive. I didn't want to totally abandon the Afro beat though, so I came back to that mindset for the first half. I had some funky horns and vocals from the Rubber Tracks sample library (free and clear to use, and some fun stuff too: https://www.conversesamplelibrary.com/).
I chopped up some horns and tapped out parts for the very first part, then just dropped a couple loops in for other horns and vocals. I don't really want to straight up drop sample loops into my stuff too often (even if legal and clear to do so), but I had day and half, so whatever, it sounded good for this version.
Then a super talented musician friend named Chris Barr (guy who's plays with the group I remixed for two past weekly songs Red Dress and Workin), was coming over to jam a bit on Saturday on Acoustic guitar (all that was available) and we started jamming over this track, and his guitar comes in toward the end, very nice sounding. Here's one of his projects (http://westernfamily1.bandcamp.com/). I hope to expand something with that session in the future. We kind of quickly moved off of this and did something mellower that I hope to finish for a future week. Finished up with a few tweaks, snuck in some of my vocoded vocals that didn't really work, and did some more arranging and tweaking of it all and here it is. Title I guess is because there's brass (horns) in the first half, and second half reminded me of floating on a boat, so white caps on the water I suppose, and thought it sounded cool, wasn't thinking of teeth at all 
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
, not sure I always want to go far out all the time. Acoustic guitar indeed, I mention it in the description. The guitar player said something to me this week about my stuff being so weird he just can't figure out how I got there, but he still likes it enough to jam, so that's good!