reality tube bending
By wangus on August 1, 2022 12:01 am
week 31! a jamuary's worth of weeklybeats!
Acquired a toy piano from the side of the road.
It was an interesting creative starting point. The key and central chords were picked by what sounded good on the tinny wires (aesthetically nice tuning and overtones).
Sampled each key, some chords, and those chord notes arpeggiated into the M8 with my Zoom H5.
Everything else is synthesized on the M8.
First thing was the main middle section. I just sequenced the main chord arpeggiated with the single-note recordings, and messed around with sample looping and pitching. Playing with octaves was fun with the cheap metallic timbre, weird self-similarity in overtone octaves.
A super basic 3-chord/note bassline cycle.
Next I composed and recorded the chords of the outro. I knew I wanted a stripped-down sound to emphasize the toy piano on its own. But to fill it out, I constructed some randomized granular-ish playback of the arpeggiated chord recording, turning into a weird glitchy shimmer of the main chords. Even though I sliced and looped the samples to follow the tempo modulation, I still chose to record the chord sequence in a single take. I liked the little clicks and taps of releasing keys and moving between chords.
And then the intro... i absolutely love how it turned out. for sure some of my best M8 sound design yet. I think the best part is the deep liquid heartbeat shockwave kick. The key piece of that is a broken double-transient by down-pitching the first couple steps of the table. (or in other words, stepping pitch up in the middle of an exponential pitch decay, so there's a double-hit effect).
The grinding bass is good too. The core of that is a sine modulator heavily modulated by a "SW5" operator. The SW5 waveform is one cycle of a sine wave, followed by equal length of flat. The null part of the waveform gives a sort of audio-rate gating sound. To me it sounds similar to dialing up heavy filter resonance on a bass sound, then through overdrive. At the peaks of the bass fundamental, the high-pitch resonant overtone is squashed into the overdrive stage, so it's almost like the high-frequency component is amplitude-modulated by the bass tone.
There's a bunch of other interesting patches here, and a new personal instrument count record (34 instruments in this song), but those two are the defining ones.
I spent too much of today making the intro and had to kinda scrap together the rest of the track. But it worked out; the 3-chord cycle lets it be repetitive without feeling stale (always in motion). So I could simply bring in another layer or two every loop, and laser-focus on the fills between.
The project tempo is STUPID lmao. in the intro/outro, there's a whole track nearly dedicated to tempo nonsense. The only sound it makes is a noisy swell ambience because it might as well be doing something while the table is spinning TPO commands.
Two rendering mistakes before I managed to get a good recording:
* Last-minute, when constructing the surprise break into the outro, I accidentally edited one phrase without cloning. And it really was unbearable; not only did it have the stand-out "clickclick" sound, but it had a HOP00 that hurled every earlier case totally off sync.
* Couldn't get the M8 to render the correct length, so after a few failed attempts, I had to just pad the end with a bunch of extra phrases to get it to do the full song. Probably a result of my stupid table tempo modulation.
But that's what I get for working till the last minute with a sample- and CPU-heavy track...
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