RADIANTWAKE
By neon liminal on May 3, 2026 5:45 pm
Short and sweet this month (the song, not this giant wall of text that follows...) - I help out with the monthly challenges on the Red Means Recording discord and this past month was Acid April, a notable favourite of mine. The challenge was to create a song (around 3 minutes) using the acid "sound" (bonus if you deep dived into one of the many acid-genres), most notably characterized by the sound and unique sequencing of the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer. All that might read as gibberish to you, but I guarantee when you hear the acid-synth sound, you will recognize what it is.
I had lofty ambitions of creating several acid tracks for April but was neck-deep in the Titan City Nights series, so I only made a couple. This track, Radiant Wake, was the one I submitted for the challenge. You can watch the stream below, it was really fantastic - so many talented musicians doing all kinds of different things with this sound.
My track was arranged on the Dirtywave M8, one of my fave devices for making techno, using Mikey303's TB-303 preset. I discovered that if I changed the filter to the LZF-lowpass and cranked the resonance, I could essentially "ping" the harmonic series by boosting the cutoff at regular intervals, creating a secondary hypnotic melody over top of the fundamental created by the 303 - which is to say it sounded cool and I ran with it.
As much as acid techno is a bit of a touchstone for me now, I always want to push my limits and explore new things, so I brought this track to Jeremy for our monthly lesson, and while listening we had a conversation about how he realized we'd both been drawing a lot from trance music over the years without entirely realizing it. Which made sense, cuz I basically grew up on trance (thank you Jam & Spoon), and the hypnotic qualities and pads of a lot of my techno/house was definitely drawing on that background. So we spent some time strategizing how I could push this track firmly into the acid-trance arena, and I spent the rest of that week doing the work and polish and here we are!
(most notably on the trance-side, some subtle repeating atmospheric elements, various vocal pings, and some trance-gated mysterious vocal chanting nonsense)
I'm gonna be running with the trance music for a few weeks now, so expect more, and also more weird.
I have been learning music production and composition from Jeremy at Red Means Recording for over five years now, and I'd encourage anyone looking to seriously expand their music practice to reach out to him, regardless of your skill level - I definitely started with him as an absolute beginner. If you've ever had me master something for you, or give your track a critical listen, or wondered how I've done something in my music - chances are I learned it from Jeremy.
Anyway, the RMR discord is a great place with very chill people, tons of queers and furries and old people like me, and it's available at the lowest tier of his Patreon. yes, it's a pay-wall, a very inexpensive one that comes with tons of other patreon bonuses, but honestly, that really helps maintain the community, and people feel invested. And you can participate in the monthly challenges! This coming May will be Found Sound Ambient, so expect some ambient horror from yours truly end of the month.
Red Means Recording Discord Monthly Challenge stream for Acid April
Audio works licensed by author under:
Copyright All rights reserved
