› BIG LONG WALL OF PRODUCTION TEXT AND SECRETS

‹ BIG LONG WALL OF PRODUCTION TEXT AND SECRETS

There are many wisdoms to be gleaned from Weekly Beats, and this week featured two of them:

1. Just like improv, if someone throws something at you, roll with it ***
2. At every opportunity, make something weird, then make it weirder. ***

*** for a good example, check out Paisley Frog's entry last week

This week I was on a sorta dark-electronica kick, which for me sits somewhere between industrial and NIN and something more cyber-EDM, and that had me fucking around with my Pulsar-23 and the modular rig with some grandmother for a whee bit of something almost melodic. This was kind of more proof-of-concept workflow stuff and it was fun and while I didn't quite get the beats right on point for the genre, I recorded like 9 minutes of a good take that would work for a track.

Dropped that into Ableton, fucked around to make stuff sound good, started chopping it all into an arrangement. Realized pretty quickly that while the drums sounded good, they were very textural, and needed some discrete percussion elements and structure to really pull this into something with a solid backbone.

So - more drums! another kick! ONE MORE KICK THAT SOUNDS LIKE A BASS! Loud super dry hats! Clangy electronic buzzy sounding something I don't know what! Toms on a counter rhythm to all those kicks!

And hey, more texture while we're at it! Weird pumping echoing screams and chanting! Fuck around with those drums and make more textures! Make it weird people!

At which point I felt like I had enough to do a solid arrangement, which is when I sent a little short clip to the illustrious JWH, who within short time completely surprised me and recorded a short bit of vocals - six tracks with harmonies ?! - and sent it along as wavs, along with apologies if it wasn't a good fit and promising me I didn't have to work with them, etc... but let's remember wisdom #1 above:

If someone throws something at you, roll with it!

They were already weird vocals, weird lyrics - I loved them - and hardly a fit for the genre but I didn't care, cuz this was wisdom #2: an opportunity to make something already weird even more weird. Also an opportunity to fuck with vocals that weren't my own and do something amazing.

Also, a direction - with one vocal element decided for me, the remaining vocal decisions were essentially already made and I saved a fuck ton of time.

So Josh entered the fray and I took his beautiful clean vocals and made them weirder. And then I added my own with his lyrics and made those weirder. And then those vocals became more elements and made the whole song weirder.

And here we are. I think the result is great, I learned a whole ton of stuff, solved some problems, made some plans, and made something awesome and weird while I was at it.

This is why I love Weekly Beats! Freedom to explore, serendipity, and good friends who love to play in the endless music sandbox, thank you Josh