Dub Surf
By onezero on November 27, 2016 11:58 pm
Whoops: right after uploading, I realized some timing was off, and I pasted an envelope into the wrong param for one voice (one drum got volume automation, not send automation). A much improved version is here on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/onezero/dub-surf
This week had a holiday, family time, and a lot of recording in it, as I'm getting music ready for a friend's upcoming dance performance. (That meant getting rough tracks together as early as I could, so that the dancers could, y'know, actually rehearse with the actual music.) So this track...was me throwing some percussion grooves together, throwing down some bass, and figuring that I could slap it all together quickly. That was mostly true--had I had an extra 40 minutes, I could have gotten this version correct. But maybe a comparison will be constructive.
I tracked a lot of bass--way more than I could use, and I thought this was headed toward being a kind of dub track, but then when I tracked guitar, I laid down a bunch of fuzz guitar (which...might have worked), followed by some cleaner surf-like guitar, which I liked a bit better. OK, dub-surf.
Sends: two convolution reverbs (one a chamber, one a spring reverb, once I realized I was doing surf), and one filter-delay into simple delay. M4L on the MIDI channels, auto-filter here and there, side chain from the drum kit on the bass, and auto-pan all over the place.
The arrangement process was my usual collage process, but I didn't have enough time to second-guess a lot of decisions, so I slapped it down and tried to find a way for it all to work. Since a lot of clips started on off-beats, I had a few of them overlapping in ways that didn't flow well, or they were nudged a bit from where they should have been. Also, drums were too low in the mix. So check out the SoundCloud one and compare. (Though on listening back Monday morning, I'm pretty sure I could have used an extra hour to strip out some guitar clips and add in the tape echo on what remained. That would have been an improvement.)
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