FARTLAB
By wangus on February 22, 2026 11:55 pm
fartlab
all m8 synthesis, except vocals n some resampling
voice samples from
@Paisleyfrog on discord
@DadBoy (i think theirs made it in?)
@PrincentVice (i think theirs made it in?)
@ MRDRCat (i think theirs made it in?)
@tonematrix (i don't think theirs actually made it in)
@Wisefire
@0x_colt
@ my gf
@ me
and of course @bobbyd
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i was feeling like chemical brothers this week. big beat.
some thoughts on the genre:
obviously samples out the wazoo. i don't usually work with samples, and digging them up is not something in my wheelhouse. so i synthesized a break! and rendered it. in addition to lots of velocity/command variation, I got an especially more convincing sound from synthesized drums by double-tracking the snare and hat. generally mellowed, more mid-range copies of the instruments were panned differently. suggests the vibe of a multi-miked drum kit, perhaps. (like the main instruments are the individual mikes, and the copied mellowed instruments are like the overhead).
I didn't end up hitting the layers of big-beat-ness that i was hoping to. something distinctive is how precise the layers are in good big-beat tracks. like you could easily have 3 breaks going at once, and they're carved out both in rhythm and mix so you just get this whole composite complex groove.
but i think the drums, bass, and wood-block-ish sound together do a good job in that direction. the wood-block sound is an FM patch, crafted with the physics in mind. struck things can have a whole mix of resonances that aren't harmonically related (frequencies aren't even ratios), but many decay quickly and at distinct rates. so i think i had A+B+C+D algo, with some oscillators at some odd ratios, and all four mod slots with decay envelopes. And in the table (or maybe one of the envelopes, i forget), some very short modulations of pitch or filter cutoff or amp for an initial clicky transient.
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ok, elephant in the room now. FARTLAB.
there's some university-associated building nearby with big "ARTLAB" letters. every time i wish for an F to show up around the corner. so the seed of the track was a bit of stimming on that. i asked the discord for some samples to accompany, didn't know where they'd go yet. i was given more than i expected lmao (ty bobbyd).
i had an early duplicate of the m8 project that became just for sample prep. do some eq, some distortion, some leveling, some layering, and a long-decay master limiter to get things at consistent volume for resampling. everything was sequenced into phrases so that I could easily navigate lots of oneshots in one sample file, with the m8 slice feature.
the vocal solo doubling at the end was recorded at 20% lower tempo. then the normal LFO-based M8 "timestretch" technique to bring it back up. there's enough else going on in the track that you don't really notice the jitter. also some micro-edits in the phrases to fix some out-of-tune notes.
the lead melody took like 5 or 6 rewrites until i got something i was happy with. unfortunately, i had a lingering GRV command that messed it up some, and i had never actually played through the whole track to notice. (so i didn't know until the render)
i'll probably have some more thoughts to share later.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
