sry for 5s silence at start

M8 all synth no samples -> Analog Heat saturation circuit.

i wanted a chord-driven tune this week, crunched by Heat.  fiddling around on keys, i found a broken chord i liked.  i guess you could call it a flat-9 chord?  but not a typical jazz voicing, so that name isn't super appropriate i think.

the A natural in a G# chord, making a tritone against D# the fifth, makes the G# tonic super unstable.  when i started noodling chord progressions, it really didn't want to be in G# minor.  but i liked the wrenching cycle of forcing it there.

also i'm always a little self-satisfied when i use all 12 tones harmonically in a tonal tune (without modulation).

then i spent way too long playing with intonation.

i invented the scale by going chord by chord, visiting each new note introduced.  G# tonic was 0, then all the others were dialed in by combination of matching low-integer ratios from other notes (e.g. make D# as close to 3:2 frequency to G# as possible, +2 cents) and by ear (like the A-natural in the first chord, which doesn't really make any ratio sense)

it really makes a difference for some of them.  (the first, in particular).  The chords just don't have the same brashness in TET, as their overtones are more spread out, and get smeared by the Heat saturation.

then I started really thinking about instrumentation (was just using placeholders for crafting the scale).  I liked the sound of the chords as I was composing them on piano, so I gravitated toward the Macrosynth modeling engines.  plucked was almost good, but didn't quite fit.  struck drum was too broad (too many other prominent overtones).  I started digging into fluted, and likes the dynamics of it.

(there's a ton of macrosynth in this.  the bass, almost all percussion except for the combo kick/snare thing, the middle section sawtooth rhythms across 4 tracks)

i really like the punch of the middle section rhythms.  again, the bespoke intonation really helps.

the outro sucks lmao that was just hacked together in like 15mins cloning like a madman.  the kick wasn't aligned the way I intended*, and I had the final chords going with macrosynth saw swarm intending to slowly dial up the "timbre" swarmage, but forgot.

*I used the groove trick described in bowl cut to make it easier to sequence the one-sixteenth-ahead chord rhythms.  G00 = 06/06; G01 = 06/00/0C/06/06/.../06 (all 16 steps).  then put G01 on the second-to-last phrase step.  All the chords were sequenced on step 00 of each phrase, and I could start playback from any phrase in a chain, and it plays the first chord immediately on-beat, then all the subsequent ones in the desired syncopated rhythm.  (and G00 anywhere can get it back to the normal groove).

When I had laid out the outro, I didn't account for this groove trick shifting things (i had listened to it in isolation, where the chords changed in sync with the kick)

Tags: analog heat, dawless, m8 tracker, saturation, week 44 2022, View by:wangus