The end of this week involved travel to and from Troy NY for an event at the Center for Deep Listening at RPI, so I had to plan around a couple days of driving in addition to the event itself.  So this week ended up all in-the-box.

Before I started, I thought I'd do something ambient or something more like a rock tune...but just playing around with some MPC sampled drums (kick, three different snares, open and closed hat) had me thinking to base the track on those.  It sounded especially nice with M4L LFO adjusting the sends to a channel of simple delay and a channel of filter delay.  Then it got more interesting when I used other LFOs to adjust the rates of the send LFOs.  LFO ALL THE THINGS.

At first I thought I'd go all-in on a super-dense samplefest, but that'll have to be another time--this seemed to want to be a bit slower.  I added some Rhodes-like bass in Electric, and another track of Electric for higher chords/melodies.  For a counterpoint, I added snippets in a track of Operator's Funky Organ preset. 

While it wasn't going to be convenient to track guitar on this, I still wanted strings, so I added a track of Clavinet (using the Tension instrument with Clav3 Clean).  I didn't really want that to be too clean, so I put it through Auto-Filter on the Follow Me preset, and then into the Dynamic Tube effect on Hot Driven Tape.  Then I thought to use more LFOs to adjust the delay sends, but also adjust the Morph amount on the Auto-Filter. That got funky.   One snippet of Clavinet worked really well in the low register as an ostinato, so I cloned the channel and adjusted the LFO rates for a similar but separate Clav voice.

Finally I wanted some more strings, so I dug out the Ableton Instrument of East African strings recorded by Emile Hoogenhout a few years ago--in this case, the Zeze worked really nicely. 

I added M4L convolution reverb send channels as well: one with a large wooden chamber (with the size dialed down a bit) and one with the impulse from Arundel Nave. And everything got Auto-Pan, M4L Humanizer, and the 2-bus got the Full Chain Master.

Title comes from the fact that 18 is a semiperfect number.

Tags: 82bpm, ableton live, convolution reverb, funk, lfo, max for live, triphop, week 18 2016, View by:onezero