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.
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