macroscopic formulation
By wangus on February 1, 2026 11:55 pm
low effort post this week but that's OK!
after the days of ruminating through last week's, i didn't think about WB at all this week until yesterday. idk just noodled a melody and started fitting some chords. then popped into m8 with some shitty temporary wavsynth instruments.
actually it's especially wavesynth this week? i feel like i don't actually use it too often. there's the chippy leads, but also the FM-sounding chords are just wavesynth (sine wave, set MULT to 10 or 20, put an envelope on WARP). and the bass is a sawtooth through AMP WRAP, then just lowpass filtered. the WRAP adds just a bit more spice, and it can get slappy if you accent with some table commands. the fuzzy bass feels like a cheat; just pick a wavetable waveform, SCAN to a place you think sounds good for the sustain of a note, then ADSR envelope the SCAN to make the snarls.
when i was first sketching the stuff I was noodling, I clocked down to a 12/12 groove (half speed, like every line is an eighth note) just to reduce the number of phrases. but then I just went with that? it was a nice simplification, not being able to explicitly write any 16th notes.
it meant I had to have some fun with the drums. i only used one track (actually had one track to spare even in the densest part of the song). the bass drum + hat combo is a (A>B>C)+D algo FM patch. was interesting dialing in a passable hi hat with only 3 oscillators and no dedicated highpass filter. the other fun instrument was the breakbeat style hat/snare ghost note; it's again (A>B>C)+D but D is triggered with a delay so it sounds like two instruments in 16th note succession.
so overall, not very inspired track, but it was fun still (which is a good sign, having fun with the less-effort lower-standard weeks)
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
