A week in which...I didn't have a lot of ideas.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, though--even without ideas, one can work.  A 4/4 beat seemed worth doing, picking up the steady 909 kick from last week.  After I put that down, I threw on some Rhythm Ace samples, which seemed...not so interesting, until I put on bandpass Auto-Filter with frequency modulation. That went into a delay, and had some hypnotic properties.  I also put in a Drum Rack of dry funk drum hits, and an Impulse instrument with handclaps.  After that...I spent some time throwing on synths and electric pianos and then taking them back out again--they didn't lead anywhere. 

Then one evening mid-week, I imagined a bassline, which I played (more slowly) on the Epiphone, and used Live's warping to speed up (with the Complex algorithm--that's the bassline which starts the piece.  Other basslines weren't as difficult to play, so I put them down at real speed. A few more sessions of synths and electric pianos went in and out again, and then finally it started coming together.  I put down some tracks of Moog Guitar as well (grouped and EQ'd to take the spikes off), with a section of hard tremolo with Auto-Pan.  Everything else got Auto-Pan except bass...and I ran out of time before I could put on Humanizer...but the track's kind of housey, so it works.

Sends: two convolution reverbs with different impulses (Berlin Power Station and Swedish nuclear plant), and Filter Delay into Simple Delay.  Different instruments went to each, but the percussion going to the delay got a fair amount of automation. Full-chain master on everything.

The result? Maybe kind of engaging for starting with a mental blank-slate, though as often happens with these, I spent a lot of time shuffling clips around to figure out a structure.

Title comes from the hexagonal close-packed crystal structure of technetium, element 43.

Tags: 117bpm, ableton, autofilter, autopan, bass, moog guitar, technetium, warping algorithms, week 43 2016, View by:onezero