Intermediate State
By onezero on December 11, 2016 11:52 pm
Still working on music for a dance piece on Friday, so this one didn't have quite the same number of hours in it...but it's still kind of efficient. I started this one shortly after the week 48 deadline, since I was hearing a bassline I wanted to get down (that first bass riff sounds like it's inheriting from Sleep's "Dragonaut"). I did throw together a rough beat, one of which survives in the piece, as do most of the bass lines I tracked.
At various points during the week, I was able to respond to those bass lines with more drums, percussion, and two different electric pianos. (I had a few melodica lines in there that didn't contribute, so they came out.) Late in the week, I tracked guitar (Epi Moderne through Reuss RF-01 and Vox Wah, and another pass of just wah.) During that session, I saw that I didn't have much in the way of drum variety, and worked up some variations, finally working in a kind of a Purdie shuffle, which was kind of gratifying.
I thought to do something like my piece for week 45 with the drums (LFO driving a channel of radical bandpass auto-filter into filter delay), but it sounded a little too similar that way...and only sounded like its own thing when I moved that over into a return channel and sent a bunch of things to it. (Drums, one of the keys, the non-distorted guitar.)
As I've been doing lately, I didn't record myself triggering samples in session view (I used to do that a lot for the final structure), and instead dragged everything into arrangement view, placing the drums, bass, percussion, and keys visually, without listening first. Then I made an edit pass to adjust those, and placed the guitar quickly. A few final mixing passes, and we were done. New for this week: I've gotten a replacement cable for my old Sennheiser HD525s, and was able to use those for monitoring/mixing. (The foam's decaying, but they're good cans.)
Instruments: drum rack of dry funk drums, which got resonant high-pass auto-filter on the kick, and overall low-pass filter with drive to make it more vinyl-like. I used two M4L LFOs with different periods, one to send to the convolution reverb, and one to send to the channel of LFO bandpass auto-filter and filter delay. I also duplicated this channel at the end and removed every instrument except the kick to drive a side chain on the bass. Also a drum rack of percussion (I might change this--the instrument layout isn't ergonomic) and an impulse instrument of tabla samples. The percussion channel got automation to send to a filter delay -> simple delay chain occasionally, while the tabla got automation to send to that auto-filter -> filter delay channel.
The electric pianos are two instances of Ableton's Electric: one with the crunchy MKI2, and one with the Wurli 1. The MKI got high-pass auto-filter with drive, and the Wurli got low-pass auto-filter with drive. I occasionally sent the Rhodes to the filter delay -> simple delay channel, and the Wurli went throughout to the auto-filter -> filter delay channel. I didn't quantize all of these clips, so when I put on M4L humanizer, some of them got way loose. But it sounds ok.
Bass was the usual Epi P-J with the P pickup on, direct into the Focusrite. For some air, I added cabinet, and side chained it from the kick-only channel.
Distorted guitar (on which I let myself do some more rock show-off things than I usually do) got Cabinet, and the wah-only guitar went throughout to the auto-filter -> filter delay channel.
Every MIDI instrument got M4L humanizer, and everything except the main drums and the bass got auto-pan. The mix, as usual, got the full-chain master effect rack.
Title comes from the Buddhist 49 days of intermediate state (bardo).
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