THE FINAL 3

M8 tracker back-and-forth with Analog Heat mkii.  (M8 synthesis, resampled through Heat, layered with more synthesis).  new personal record for most instruments used in one M8 project: 51.

"Seeds" of this track:

* Holiday travel happening, so I knew this track workflow was going to be sampling some Heated loops, and arranging/layering on-the-go back in the M8.
* WB discord was shitposting about everyone doing ambient this week.  idk how to make ambient, but some element of droning/looping minimalism made it here.
* Another shower thought on the 1-bar drum groove, with cycling chromatic stepping bass phrase.  Imagined a lot of expressive variation in just a 1bar loop.
* Thinking about that one M8 FM demo from Ess: one track, all sines, no clipping, no filters (but Heated of course).  Complemented that with some "raw" wavesynth drums too (sine/square/noise only, no mirror, no warp, no filters)

First was the drums.  I wanted simple sounds, to let the Heat carry the punch.  The bass is my fav wavesynth technique, left-digit MULT, and upping/modulating WARP to squash the wiggles to the left.  Rubbery.  Was a placeholder just to get the bassline going, but I ended up liking the tone.

Then I set to crafting a few Heat "contexts", that I planned to flip-flop between in the final arrangement.
* Context A: finally found use for Mid Drive.  the heavy color makes it hard to fit in a mix, but it suited the bass+drum groove nicely.  A peak filter fattens the low end, with the envelope follower pumping resonance.
* Context B: also a first for the Clean Boost circuit, to contrast the Mid Drive color.  But envelope follower on notch filter cutoff, and pretty heavy filter panning, makes it broken while dry-sounding.
* Context C: for just a moment in the final track, Round Fuzz.  It didn't really sound good, but added some fun splash to the percussion.

The intro was 7 or 8 tracks through the Enhancement circuit.  some macrosynth pings (originally CSAW but then i found another engine that sounded cooler); FM mid-high drone; FM bass; wiggly sparkly FM chords; doubled Fluted; granular cloud "crash"; the drum loop from above, mixed up.

I sampled loops A/B/C and the intro through the Heat to my laptop, transferred to M8, trimmed for slicing bar-wise, arranged into track structure, then began layering other stuff.  My favorite is the open hihat the doubles the snare sometimes.  [A+B+C]>D algorithm, with separate EXPD-T -> LEVEL mods on A/B.  I was trying to model the rim-fluttering tone you can hear from some barely-open hihats hit hard.

brush your teth

Tags: analog heat, clean boost, enhanced, m8 tracker, mid drive, round fuzz, week 50 2022, View by:wangus