Weeklybeats is a 52 week long music project in which artists compose and publicly release 1 song a week for the entire year.
Starting January 1st 2024 GMT each participant will have one week to upload one finished composition. Any style of music or selection of instruments are welcomed and encouraged. Sign up or Login to get started or check our FAQ for any help or questions you may have.

Steady State

By onezero on January 31, 2016 6:56 pm

Having done some funk rock for the last couple of weeks, I wanted to do something else, and opted first to do a drum rack full of Analog instruments, for synthesizing every drum voice.  Late in the week, I decided to duplicate some of the drum parts and slow the copies down by half. In the end, I went with two channels of drums, along with a bunch of other voices in Analog: melodies, pads, bass, tremolo.  At first, I had a channel of Max For Live's Feedback Network, which added a nice x-factor to the track, but...Live kept crashing, hard.  So out that went, and things returned to the usual reliability, but the track needed something.  So I put in another voice of Analog on sawtooth, with no filtering: just a long amplifier envelope, playing Ds in several octaves, each over the previous note's fade. 

Processing: the two drum channels and the bass got Humanizer (40ms, 30ms, 30ms, respectively), and everything got two Auto-pans: one for L-R panning, and one for slight volume fluctuations, all set to different non-synchronized periods. I used three send channels: M4L Convolution Reverb, using the Bigger Spaces: Very Large Cathedral impulse, with the highs damped a bit, and a slightly lengthened decay (one drum channel, melody synths, one trem/LFO synth).  Also a channel of Erosion into a Filter Delay (drums, one melody channel, and another tremolo synth), and Beat Repeat tweaked from the Fill In The Blanks preset (drums, one of the trems).  Everything went through the Full Chain Master.

End result? Well, they can't all be super-strong tracks.  Kind of steady-state ambient-with-beat kind of a thing.  I sort of found myself trancing out a bit.  Enjoy.

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I like how there is a bit of underlying tension that had such a slooooow burn. Nice and relaxing.

I like it.  The opener is really strong.  Lots of lovely tones to play with.

Instafav this one

Love the effects and melodies!

Cool track!

Solid work here. Has an "overview" sort of feel to it, like watching from far away. I like it!

This is nice. Drums are sweet. Very good.

Glad to hear one of your "analog" landscapes again. Love the bleeping action in the mix. It's very mesmerizing with lot of bubbling and yet calm and... steady smile

As a technical tip, I found that it's sometimes useful to keep both 5 and 6 Max runtime enviroments installed in order to avoid crashes. I'm running 9.5 and still didn't upgrade to the 7th runtime. Also, ever since the 9.3 upgrade some stuff got stable in the 64 bit version while unstable under the 32 bit one, and viceversa. As it seems, that even broke commercial products like some Max4Cats modular stuff. Hope it gives you some hint about where's the problem

Works really well with the floaty overlay.

I really like your funk tracks but this is a great change in direction, great sounds and the sliding skittering beats

simply beautiful

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