chain mortiser
By wangus on August 21, 2022 11:59 pm
if all goes well, next week i'll break my streak of not starting WB till sunday due date.
but here we are again...
i truly feel like i am VIBING with LSDJ now. managed to get some sounds I've never heard anyone make on LSDJ before (if you have pls send me link i wanna listen!)
this track started with the wav bass drum. the resolution of the wavetable makes navigating gain/filter/limiting settings pretty unintuitive to me (like moving values doesn't always have the effect i'm imagining)? but i'm picking up the idiosyncrasies.
The punchiness is done by manually stepping through the waves (the auto sweep isn't fast enough) in a table. An alternate table modifies the first couple ticks to make it a weirdo snare instead.
[side note: the key of the track was loosely chosen based off the rough pitches available to the "pitched" noise channel notes. {to my understanding, the 256-step noise generation clocked at whatever rates the noise channel is capable of, which line up with C's and roughly D's, G's, F's}]
Then, learning from last week, I really leaned into the messiness of panning/Oxx commands. In the intro, a duplicated arpeggio with totally different envelopes, plus detune, to give a wonky stereo image. At the drop, a Zxx (random) modulated Oxx on fast-triggering tiny-envelope pulses on both pulse channels, to blast it into the aether.
Toward the end, a trick I picked up very early with LSDJ when I was disappointed the pulse channels couldn't go all that low: hand-tuned Vxx commands per-note that give the perception of bumping the wave down an octave.
And then the part I think is most interesting: mostly by accident, a sick kick drum that sounds to me almost like a heavy-overdrive 909 hardstyle kick. This was just me playing around with the main bass drum; changing the base waveform from triangle to square was nearly all it took to make this hardstyle tone.
The part that took the biggest hit from having only one day to write this: song structure. It's OK, but it doesn't go anywhere compelling. Just an intro+drop, each having sort of 2 subsections. And just to make things interesting, some surprise harmonies at the very end. (i got that from the intro arpeggio, which features a couple strange chromatic notes. makes it able to fit a wide range of strange chords when i bring it back in the end)
The biggest new LSDJ learning: to make a clone (chain, instrument) increment from the selected track's number, you have to tap edit/A on the chain first. I had expected the select+B to "stash" the value reference that it increments from, like M8, but that reference is only updated on A presses. (the manual doesn't note this subtlety. maybe because most people aren't as anal about organizing chain/phrase numbers...)
This fixes a huge gripe last week where I couldn't figure out why my clones were going to random numbers. (i tend to navigate across tracks a lot, so I was sometimes scrolling the cursor to a chain, and only doing select+B-A)
The title is just a quick pick from my running list of words/phrases I come across that i find interesting (a chain mortiser is a daunting woodworking tool), but it has a nice connection to the tone of this track i think, and the "chain" pun is fun.
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