› track history/inspiration

‹ track history/inspiration

track history/inspiration

What consciously went into this track:
- I wanted to use the 0-coast for something more lowkey, subby (compared to the snarly bass of the past couple weeks).  The 0-coast isn’t great for exactly what I was picturing (would want a typical filter overdrive to fatten/round out the tone).  But whatever it is, it’s distinctive.
- Then I heard @ilzxc poorly and was hooked on the “quadruple-time” kick.  So that was the real initial seed for this track, the 304BPM steady pulse (playing with /2, /4, /8 subdivisions throughout)
- I was out of town this weekend, with a 6hr train ride on Saturday.  That was pivotal for two reasons:
- 1. I wasn’t bringing the 0-coast with me, so Friday evening I recorded a few minutes looping the bass pattern I had, twiddling knobs for some variation.  I’m not used to that level of early “commitment” in an M8 workflow.  But it was a creative catalyst; though stripped-down, the live 0-coast noodling was starting to imagine the trajectory of the track.
- 2. When I hit a soft creative wall in the middle section, I decided to draw in the last tune I made on a long train ride: ontrack, in 2016.  Felt forced at first, but it really shaped up to tie the track together.

Some things that came to mind on further listens after I was done:
- sakuraburst’s remix of whiplash is one of the most impressive tracks I’ve heard.  So difficult to control 16th-note bass action that well.  And the switchup drop at the end is incredible.
- The flow of this track (and some fills) remind me of iglooghost (e.g. this)

› production notes

‹ production notes

production notes

A couple useful M8 techniques I used:
- On the latest firmware, if you zero delay mix volume, but route it to reverb, you can use it as a reverb pre-delay.  I had a quite small-size reverb here, for a synthetic boxy sound, and the pre-delay helps maintain some space to it.
- I used a table to modulate tempo (jumping down in a phrase, then using a table to gradually ramp it back up).  The left digit of HOP in a table has a useful “hop only N times” behavior, but that only goes up to 15 (0xF) hops.  But each hop seems to count independently, so you can nest them for a multiplicative result.  Say you have TPO01 on row 00 of the table, then a HOPx0, then a HOPy0, then a HOP0F at the end to halt the table eventually.  Invoking this table will increase the tempo gradually by (x+1)*(y+1).  So e.g. if you want to add +30 to the tempo, 30 = 10 * 3, so you can use HOP90, HOP20 .  You can space out the HOPs to slow down the rate.
- M8 is really good at handling stem-like recordings.  I trimmed my few minutes of 0-coast jamming to an exact tempo-synced number of samples (use a calculator, 60/
BPM*44100*number_of_beats, or use the tempo-synced-steps feature of the onboard sample editor), and configured the matching SLICE count in the instrument.  I made one phrase with C1

And more specific sound design/composition techniques:
- The small-size reverb works really well with the FM wash in the intro (and throughout).  Really interesting interaction of harmonics.  SIN-mode amp gave a lot of options to vary the tone with AMPxx commands.
- The snare is the STRUCK BELL macrosynth oscillator.  Still not exactly sure how I managed to find my way to a bone-breaking slap out of that algorithm…  The “pre-tail” of the snare is an FM patch with some fast exponential LFOs whipping pitch/panning.
- GRANULAR CLOUD macrosynth also getting good use, in the glitchy ambient swells and the shaker/“tambourine”.
- The chords in the middle section are FM “polyphonic” instruments.  Sin waves with enveloped feedback are good for brassy stabs.  Feedback on square waves adds extra high-end fuzz (it’s a little lofi/aliased in the M8 implementation, but within a chord it ends up a nice sizzle)
- The harmony/melody in the middle mostly follow my original 2016 sketch, but some key variations and countermelody were inspired by how M8 deals with starting a song row in the middle of a chain: when there are multiple scaled grooves at play, they don’t play back at the intended alignment.  So I found some happy accident misaligned melodies/chords that made their way into the final arrangement.

› more thoughts about overall vibe

‹ more thoughts about overall vibe

idk dude just sometimes when i listen to this I get immersed in its crushing tension.  The intro ambient shimmering wash starts pretty neutral, but takes on a sinister character when the bass/kick come in.  So in the middle section, once the melody starts to figure out what it’s doing, the moment that ambient patch starts to force its way back in, just an incredible foreboding.  The mellow chords try to break away, but can’t hold it back before it explodes into the saturated wall at 3mins in.

also holy SHIT the fill at 3:25 is one of the busiest 5 seconds I’ve ever written I think.