a mess lmao

the short of it: PO-12 through Analog Heat mkii, sampled into M8.  Chopped up into structure on the M8, then more layers of M8 synthesis.

the long of it:

week 37, @kaibuster got me thinking about the PO-12, and how it can sound through a nice overdrive.

yesterday i powered up my PO-12, took a pattern that was sitting on it from who-knows-when, made some basic changes, and plugged it into the Analog Heat.  The Classic Dist circuit had the nicest crunch on the bass drum for the groove I was working with.

The Heat envelope follower was set to a mid band, catching the bass and snare drum hits.  It was routed negative to Drive, giving a compression sort of sound.  It was also modulating a second thing, but I forget, and I forgot to save the preset so I can't check.

The LFO was modulating a peak filter, triggering off the envelope follower, to give the "wow" tone to the PO-12 bass drum.  Up until I set that modulation, I was just noodling, but that tone locked in where I was going with the track.

Finally, I knew I wanted some reverb pre-Heat (reverb ambience gets really nicely squashed to the foreground, super impactfully with the a stereo drive).  Strymon Bluesky did the job.  Every mode sounded great through the Heat.

I recorded like 8 minutes or so of tweaking Heat and Bluesky knobs with the PO-12 looping.  Sampled into the M8 to finish the jam session.

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Today: first I trimmed the samples in the M8 to an even number of bars.  The goal was being able to use the N-slice sampling mode to super easily recall bars of the recording using one phrase and chain transpose.  Sub-bar sequences are easy too; STAx0 will start at step x in the bar.  (the math: let SPB = samples per bar = 44100 * BPM / 60.  compute original_sample_length / SPB, and round down.  crop sample to that rounded number of bars times SPB.  best to use a calculator app that allows hex input/output)

Then I came up with the harmony in the last sections of the track.  The theory behind it: I didn't have time to really mangle the PO-12 sample, so I was locked in to F# as the bass note on every beat 1 and 3.  So the chord progression's bassline has an alternating form, jumping between other notes and F#.  I didn't want to repeat the same F# chord every time, so I looked for some variety: F#-, F#-7, F#half-diminished, F#maj6, F#sus.  Those helped make some anchor points, from which I filled out the harmonies by some fluid motion of the top/bottom voices.  The top voices are a basic FM poly patch; the bottom voice is a macrosynth sine/triangle (i think?) patch.  I liked the hardsync-kind-of sound of modulating that engine, and some rhythmic LFO choices locked it in as another key element of the track.

Then I started from the beginning and built back to that chords section.  I just scrubbed through the PO-12 bars I had recorded and picked out the ones that were particularly spicy where I wanted some fill/variation, and ones that were particularly cool to just groove on loop.

The intro was clearly going to be the Heat-lowpass-filtered bars.  To add variation to that section without getting the PO-12 track too busy yet, I layered down some sparse chords/melody, contrasting with the busy harmony later.

Then the main beat drops.  I largely left the PO-12+Heat bars untouched; just rearranged bars, and sequenced some stutters here and there.  Starts off with the reverb off, just cronching the beat.  Reverb swells make fills.  Then we transition to some Bluesky shimmered loops; creates a really cool compled woody knocking sound through the overdrive.  There's one moment where I snuck in a timestretch-sort-of effect by setting a short loop length, then stepping loop offset in a table.

Sudden dip to the bridge, where I let everything other than the PO-12 be the focus.  Sin-tri sync-y rhythmic drone, blippy arps, a trumpet sort of sound that I managed to dial in surprisingly quickly from scratch on M8 FM.  (subtle tip: if you PSL between notes, and simultaneously do a fast PVB with depth dialed in just right, the vibrato counteracts the pitch sweep partly, and you can make the glissando sound steppy.  Like a trumpeter keying through notes really fast).  The trumpet melody (which you also hear notes of in the intro) was a lazy mid-day shower thought.

Buildup for the beat to drop again: the PO-12 beat "pitchshifted" up an octave.  (PIT0C, short loop length, sweep loop start offset in table.  needs a little bit of trickery to get it smooth and even, because it needs to move 0x10 per step, which doesn't divide evenly into 6 ticks per step.  I looped STA03/STA03/STA02 in the table.).  The Bluesky sounds sick with this glitchy octave.  Like a chorus vocal generated by an AI that doesn't know how words work.  (there were no vocals or vocal synths used in this track)

then i ran out of time and just scrapped together the final section.  had almost no time to even think back on the mix, which was pretty muddy.  the PO-12 takes were not easy to layer against; just squashed dynamically and spectrally, little room for anything else.  oh well.

------------ edit 2022-11-02

video

Tags: analog heat, bluesky, m8 tracker, po12, pocket operator, week 43 2022, View by:wangus