Earthly Branches
By onezero on March 27, 2016 8:38 pm
This one developed in some interesting ways. I wanted to do something different with drums, and decided to use a gate with a very short release time on most of the percussion--really cut off the decay. After getting the percussion sounds (also involving a lot of plugins for tone-shaping), adding more percussion channels, tweaking those sounds...I found myself accumulating a lot of little pattern clips, and totally not sure where it'd all go. A couple different synth bass voices in Operator suggested some directions, and I added some Electric (piano) clips, as well as organ (in Operator). A Friday evening session on guitar (Moderne) had me coming up with some lines (some sparse, some rhythmic) that had me throwing out the earlier bass parts, most of the Electric piano, and all of the organ, writing new bass and piano lines, and adding vibes as well. I also recorded electric bass guitar, but the lines didn't sit well in this one, when compared to the synth, so the best of them ended up inspiring some synth lines.
I'd been listening to the Resident Advisor Exchange podcasts, especially the ones with Mike Dunn and Kerri Chandler, and found myself wanting to go in a minimal house direction, and while I kept an emphasis on the 2 and 4, I found myself unwilling to cut out enough parts to call it "minimal." But it sounds kind of complete, so here it is.
Instruments:
Drum rack of 808 samples, with inline gate (occasional automated short cut; you'll hear it as distortion), analog clip saturator (9.71 dB drive), low-pass Auto Filter (rolling off above 4K), Redux for bit reduction (down to 12 bits, 2.51 downsampling).
Drum rack of real kit sounds (couple of kicks, couple of snares, toms--unused, crash cymbal, and open and closed hats), which got Humanizer, high-pass Auto Filter (rolling off below 86Hz, with a 51% resonant peak), Redux for bit reduction (10 bits), "Hot Tubes" Saturator (14.3 dB drive, slight output cut).
Impulse with tabla samples, which got "flip side" preset gate, "Hot Tubes" Saturator (13.1 dB drive).
Impulse with samples of a hand drum I have, which got short cut gate, "Hot Tubes" Saturator (8.2 dB drive).
Impulse with handclap samples, which got short cut gate, "Hot Tubes" Saturator (8 dB drive).
Operator for bass ("Basic Sinelike" preset, but tweaked to use a triangle wave and a low-pass filter at 516Hz, with 57% resonance), high-pass Auto Filter (rolloff at 69.2Hz, 19% resonance).
Electric for Rhodes-like piano (MkI 2-crunchy piano preset), which got Frequency Shifter (ring modulator, 2.59 Hz for tremolo with gentle LFO for modulation).
Collision instrument, on the Vibes2 Modulated preset.
All the MIDI instruments got M4L Humanizer, and Auto-Pan for L-R and volume modulation, except for the vibes, which got humanizer, but were already modulated enough.
Two channels of Epiphone Moderne--one with Dynamic Tube ("warm tube" preset), Glue Compressor, Cabinet (1x12, far condenser), Auto-Pan, and another with high-pass Auto Filter (rolloff starting below 329Hz, 36% resonance), Cabinet (1x12, near off-axis condenser), and Auto-Pan.
Send channels: two convolution reverbs (ECRR Warm Cathedral impulse and TVC33 Venue Warm 1 impulse), one Filter Delay (tweaked Complex-5 preset), one Simple Delay on 3 and 5.
Title comes from the Chinese cosmological idea of the 12 Earthly Branches, since this is week 12. (Apparently there's a related idea called Heavenly Stems! So, cool.)
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