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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / onezero's music / Bases of Power

Bases of Power

By onezero on January 26, 2020 6:11 pm

An all-in-the-box, with Ableton's Operator as the only instrument. Late in the week, I thought I'd fiddle with a rhythm I was hearing in my mind, and built it up from there.  The piece really took direction with that whole-note ascending bass bit, which led to a bunch of counterpoint from the other voices. There's a drum rack (of four Operator instances) that I used before, but tweaked and on impulse decided to bitcrush.  There's a sparsely-used non-bitcrushed drum rack of four other percussive Operator instances, the bass, and three other Operator lines for accents, lead, and pad. No presets; I kind of wanted to see what minimal departures from the default could do. (Lots of tweaks with the oscillator and filter; percussive voices got different envelopes.)


Overall structure...could have been more complicated, but that one recurring theme seemed like a good thing to hang out for a while, and too much variation seemed like it just got in the way.  In some places it sounds like there's clipping on the bitcrushed drums; I couldn't quite eliminate that entirely. 


Sends: one large-space convolution reverb and one Echo.  Full-Chain Master on the output.


Title from the Four Bases of Power of Buddhism.

Audio works licensed by author under:
Copyright All rights reserved

Digging the tones on this and the panning. Headphones were a wise choice!

Sounds really cool. Super nice faux rhodes piano style and stereo delay effects.  I'm missing your live bass (stick with four strings) playing this week.  You should cover this same song at a future week with bass guitar and other instruments. Would be a cool variation!

Always enjoy your tracks, this is another fine example.

Nice crunch!

Impressive and cool idea to do all in Operator. Some nice sounds. Love me some Echo! The crushed drums are interesting contrast with the rounder tones.

Love the bass!

Love me some good bitcrushing

A friend told me once that Operator was a powerhouse but didn't really sell it with his description. Now I understand what he meant, this is great!!

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