I wanted to do something a bit different this week, so went toward the abstract.  The "primes" of the title is from my use of a lot of prime-number-derived time signatures: lots of 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, a bit of 3, and some 2. I tried to balance the abstraction and give a sense of alien machine groove.

Rather than use drum or drum machine samples, I synthesized percussion hits with filtered noise in Live's Analog instrument (kind of like my piece for week 40)--there are five tracks of those.  I added two melody instruments in Analog--one filtered square wave oscillator through the Corpus (membrane) and Erosion plugins (it's the more vocal one) and another filtered sawtooth that does the chords and mid-section ostinato.  I added two Operator instruments, one for mostly pedal tone pings, and one for a drone bass.  That second one started out like a string pad, but wasn't interesting until I put it through bit reduction.  I'd been reading a Hank Shocklee interview in which he talked about how the early Bomb Squad productions used a 4-bit sampler, and despite its limitations, they liked the sound of it a lot.  I'll agree that the 4-bit dirtied up the Operator pad nicely, but it also resulted in a bunch of high end fuzz which I rolled off with EQ3, and then it went into its own inline reverb, with a diffuse 2-second decay.

Send channels get interesting. I used two different reverbs (based on Large Factory and Large Hall.  Some of the percussion tracks also got Beat Repeat, some got Frequency Shifter (down 141Hz) into Filter delay on (of course) 3, 2, and 5. 

The "vocal" sound comes from a send channel with two chained formant filters (-5 and +5 set to pitch tracking); this also got sent in turn to the Beat Repeat and Large Hall channels.  The one melody Analog synth went through Corpus and into this, as did the pingy Operator instrument.  There's a lot of send automation on both to vary the blend.  I ended up putting some mild compression on the 2-mix to keep things together.

Tags: ableton, analog, formant filters, in the box, operator, prime numbers, week 46 2014, View by:onezero