encroachment of insect

By wangus on September 19, 2022 12:01 am

MORE LSDJ

no overclocked tempo this week.

instead i went bonkers with grooves.

The initial idea: i wanted to play with a groove where there would be fluttery interjections of very-fast-groove chords. Like using phrases as tables. There's some of that on one pulse track, but that's about as far as I went with it because I got deep into other elements.

I wanted groove 01 to be set up so that one full phrase in groove 01 is equal to four steps in groove 00. Setting G01 to all 02 ticks, and G00 to 0A/06 gave a nice swing, and kept good step resolution (compared to G01=01 and G02=05/03).

It gets a bit fiddly switching grooves like that though; any track with the G01 switches will need to have more phrases to match chain length. Pro tip: you can make "noop" phrases with H00 on the first step, to pad out the other tracks so that you can shift+play and b-left/right somewhat sensibly. LSDJ will spend zero time on those phrases. (n.b. you can't have two in a row though)

There's also a couple other grooves set up just for some rhythmic variation in the lead melody.

The bassline came vaguely into my head while I was brushing my teeth the other day. The groove in my head at the time was Koan-Sound-ish. I think a bit of that came through. obviously limited sound design options on the DMG, so it's not going to get that distinctive sound. I purposely drove a bit away from the original bass loop in my head, because I thought it sounded like a certain Louis Cole riff. In retrospect I don't think it actually did, but here we are.

The track started with a couple-hour session on a train ride on Saturday. Basically just iterated the "chorus" bass groove+drums+melody. I quite like the slidey character on the melody. Some smarter harmonist (on a different instrument) could work that out against a microtonal accompaniment. Pro tip: going from one note to another in the "wrong" number of even steps is one great way to kickstart microtonal harmony.

I worked out the "chorus" harmony today when I was back at a piano. I treated it as a progression with two chords per bar. The bassline is basically two notes per bar, with chromatic passing notes between. This was the jazziest thinking i've done in a while. Can't describe it right here, but it's built on repeated (but kinda weird) V-I action, and some nice extended chords. The chromatic passing bass notes harmonize nicely with some tritone substitutions/motions. In a couple places, the slide-y lead melody acts like a blue note, ambiguous between a major and a minor interval in a chord. So while the harmony is all 12tone equal-temperament, the "off the grid" lead sliding still has some harmonic function, which is cool.

One key implied detail there: I wrote the melody _before_ the chord progression. That's unusual for me; usually my melodies either come out of the progression directly (top voice), or are fit on afterwards.

There's only one novel (for me) trick in the sound design: by total coincidence, the "140BPM" tempo (actual song is 105BPM through the 0A/06 groove) has a tick rate unexpectedly close to the A# tonic (68cents out of tune, not great but close enough when it's that low). So a 2-step table action can make a reasonable deep sub-octave effect. Here, it's a OL-/O-R table loop on the noise channel that makes some stereo gnash, always layered with the wave channel the A#1 octave up. I meant to solo that noise channel sound at some point in the track, but forgot. Really cool timbres coming from noise volume envelopes through that sub-bass table oscillation.

Anyway, as usual, there's a lot more i imagined that didn't make it into the track, for lack of time. but that's weeklybeats...

did you know that house centipedes are capable of stridulation? did you know that the act of rubbing body parts together to make sound (like a cricket's legs chirping) has a name? and that that name is stridulation?

avoid encroachment of insect. stay safe.

----------- edit 2022-10-17 lmao ----------

vibeo