Reactive Center
By onezero on July 31, 2016 11:44 pm
An organically-developing piece, but one which fought me in mixing. I'd had a few interesting drum patterns early in the week, and tracked some interesting bass lines--some of them seemed to go together, so I thought to have two simultaneous bass lines for a low dialectic. I threw some Rhodes over it, and then late in the week re-tracked bass (for better timing) and baritone guitar. While I tracked some standard guitar, it didn't fit with the low frequency theme.
To keep things interesting, Sunday I added two percussion lines (Air Tube Bass with Collision, and some agogo and tambourine), along with vibes and an organ line. Balancing all this turned out to be a challenge: lots of low frequencies (duh). I put a notch and high-pass filter on the kick to make room for the bass, also put a high-pass on the second bass, overdriving that for the fuzz. Baritone also got some high pass to make room. Both basses got different Cabinet plugins, while the baritone depends on a reverb send to get some air. All the MIDI channels got M4L Humanizer, and some got the MIDI velocity randomizer, though that was easy to overdo, so I kept the range narrow.
Sends: two convolution reverbs (one a studio space, the other a large hall) and Live's Simple Delay. (I may not have changed that off the preset.)
Does it work? Depends on your speakers, I guess. Title comes from the fact that zinc's atomic number is 30, and doing a bit of research, I learned that enzymes with a zinc atom in the reactive center are used by all kinds of life forms--that's why you need enough (but not too much) zinc in your diet.
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