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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / onezero's music / Intermediate State

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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Sounds like a really tight funk ensemble playing live. Great mix.

Jim Wood wrote:

Sounds like a really tight funk ensemble playing live. Great mix.

Thanks, Jim!  Glad you like it!  (I think the return of the Sennheiser open-backed phones makes a difference on the mix.)

f yeah purdie shuffle.  learning how to play that on drums is on my bucket list

also, interesting note about the track title.  never heard of that before.  great track and nice production notes.  that's my favorite part of the WB family.

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