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50000 Quaoar

By onezero on May 11, 2014 2:40 pm

During the week I played with some EDM/IDM beats for a repetitive soundtrack to have at work, but by the end of the week, while I was listening to Tristan Louth-Robins's "Goyder's Line And A Shadow Passes," I felt as though I really wanted to hear a slow beat to the drone, and whipped one up.  This lead to one of the beats of the piece, and I threw in some variations and a drone in Operator, thinking it'd end up more electronic. 

I tracked a few more drones with Moog Guitar through the EHX Big Muff (really, the best sound for that instrument), and at the last minute threw in the Earth-like beat you hear throughout the piece.  To keep it from being too samey, I threw that through Beat Repeat starting from the fill-in-spaces preset.  That seemed to lend itself to samples of a real kit, more than a drum machine, and against the real kit and the fuzz guitar, the drum machine samples didn't sound right.  So I swapped in more of the real kit, except for the MK-1 clave sample. It still needed something, so I added a send channel of all-feedback.  Perhaps it all comes together.

That's my process, I guess--aim at electronic dance music and end up at drone metal. All distractions and left turns at Albuquerque.

(Since there's an Earth influence here, I followed suit in naming this after an object orbiting the sun, in this case, Kuiper Belt object 50000 Quaoar.)

Audio works licensed by author under:
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pretty cool idea, mix seems a little off. mainly, the guitars seem really distant and kick drum sounds a little odd. Earth: awesome band! got to see them about a month ago; really great live!

george bowles wrote:

pretty cool idea, mix seems a little off. mainly, the guitars seem really distant and kick drum sounds a little odd. Earth: awesome band! got to see them about a month ago; really great live!


I'll have to re-listen on different speakers.  I bet the kick issue is phasing--it sounded like that to me.  In retrospect, the other drum parts should've been from different samples to avoid the weird comb-filtering. 

Yeah, what I hear is mostly (kick) drums, with a faint wailing in the background. If you were going for spooky, you nailed it.

Jim Wood wrote:

Yeah, what I hear is mostly (kick) drums, with a faint wailing in the background. If you were going for spooky, you nailed it.


Thanks!  Spooky was part of the goal, yeah.  But the levels do kind of bother me.  Thinking about it, I'm betting having normalization on for rendering resulted in an overall reduction in level, since the drum peaks were pretty hot.  The phasing/comb filtering's kind of annoying.  Also, the four layers of fuzz guitar present some difficulties in mixing: they're pretty compressed, and use up a lot of frequencies.  Kind of a crowded mix, so I thought the drums would have more impact if they were louder. 

I'll try another mix or two and post links.

george bowles wrote:

pretty cool idea, mix seems a little off. mainly, the guitars seem really distant and kick drum sounds a little odd. Earth: awesome band! got to see them about a month ago; really great live!

Jim Wood wrote:

Yeah, what I hear is mostly (kick) drums, with a faint wailing in the background. If you were going for spooky, you nailed it.

Another approach at mixing this thing.

Yes, mix is much better. Normalization does weird things.

cool, yeah better! I will keep that in mind about normalization!

I quite like the slightly phased drum sounds! But the remix does really open it up and reveal the details. Kinda heavy in a kind restrained way, I really liked it!

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