Gravity Train
By onezero on October 23, 2016 8:16 pm
A fairly busy week and weekend left me with not a whole lot of time to work on this one, but I did manage. I felt like doing a house track again and based on some (non-WB) comments on "Boomerang," I wanted to give a bit more attention to the kick drum. To that end, after doing some simple four-on-the-floor beats with my K3M rack, I swapped it out for a rack of just TR-909 kicks, and picked a couple that really seemed to work, giving that channel some high-pass auto-filter with a resonance peak of 60Hz. Since it's house, no Humanizer on this rack.
I also added Impulse instruments for some hand drums of mine, and hand claps. No Humanizer on the hand drums (it sounded too laggy), but I did put some on the hand claps. Likewise, I added some more Humanizer on a drum rack of dry funk drum hits, along with some auto-filter (high-pass with drive followed by low-pass...though there's a lot of beater sound on that funk kick now). I added a channel of Electric (Rhodes, some high-pass with drive) and Tension (Clavinet with LFO band-pass, for wah).
Saturday night I tracked Epiphone bass, adding some interlocking parts on the J pickup to rest alongside the fundamental P parts. The main P-only bass tracks got high-pass filter (50Hz) and soft-knee compression (side-chained from that 909 kick). I experimented with an effect rack that would have used crossover filters and drive on the high frequencies, but that ended up sounding too rockist, so I took that out. (I previewed the mix on the frequently-used Sennheiser in-ears, but also on a little Boombotix Rex speaker, which is way more subby. It was enlightening!)
To set it apart a bit, I gave the second bass part a high-pass with a 213Hz cutoff, a bit of drive, and the Cabinet plugin for some air.
Sends: two convolution reverbs (one ambient chamber, one echoey dub space) with slow modulation, and a Simple Delay into Filter Delay. I automated the sends to the dub and delay channels for all the percussion, while the keyboards got varying degrees of the delay send. I used the other convolution as ambience, as needed on different instruments. Everything but the 909 and main bass got auto-pan.
The title comes from the curious fact that if you drilled a hole through the Earth, removed the air, and used gravity for propulsion, the trip to the other side would take 42 minutes, whether or not you went through the center of the Earth. (Leaving aside temperature concerns, of course.) This is known as a Gravity Train.
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