Butters  -  Post 2

R&D

I didn't go too far into research for this track. Like I said in post 1; this track is a product of uninterrupted creativity and what will happen will happen. If it were fall flat I wouldn't have used it for my unit 8 submission, but it kept growing in its own way. I took guidance from lectures about some of the structural aspects of the track but the majority o the track is just in the moment. 

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My foundation was this 3 octave synth. I had this 4 bar loop playing and decided the avenue to investigate would be a drum track. I tried programming my own from a variety of VST kits and chopping up samples to build beats. For some really strange reason I had Radioheads "High & Dry" drum beat in my head...it's nothing like what the synth track might suggest by that song definitely influenced how I went about finding a drum beat for this track. 

My process of programming/finding a suitable drum part for this track took me to the Logic sound library. There I found a few variations of a drum beat that fitted my BPM and had a very very strong beat. Love at first sight.

The exact same process happened for the bass line. I tried writing my own but I found a really meaty sample in the sound library. It contrasted with the melody of the synth which added to the trippyness of the track. To throw things off a little more I pushed some of the bass note transients out so it didn't match up with the drums and synth perfectly... all about weird for this one. 

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Building an interesting structure out of very little was the challenge for this track. as it is based around basically 3 notes, I had to be able to offer variation to keep it interesting and flowing. I didn't need to research that; thats just a bit of common sense. 

I found a "massive" synth that was pretty basic but had a very interesting envelop on the trigger. The decay way pretty long and the attack pretty short... making it quite an ambient sound. I places some reverb on the synth track and started to jam. When I felt I had a decent idea of what I was going to play and how some of the flicks were going to go, I pressed record. I utilised the pitch bend feature on my MIDI board so I could go through chromatics smoothly to keep the trippy/odd vibe. I was thinking alot about the vocal line to "Ghost Town" by the specials when performing the lead synth.  

To implement further variation I wrote a very basic piano line that is introduced a third of the way into the track. I played the piano into the logic using my MIDI board and altered the velocity (as my keyboard doesn't always interpret as accurately as I want). I decided not to quantise the performance as I wanted a slightly old school/sampled sound. Thats kind of what I wanted for everything. I was feeling a sound that made you feel like maybe it was live performance (like an Ableton session) or something. Basically not heavily produced, which is why I left some of the region cross fades out.

I wanted to sample a vocal of some description in this track. Something quite contrasting like an operatic soprano or something odd. I went looking through youtube and found a sample of a mock BBC news broadcast from the 1940s. It was A) interesting B) funny and C) contrasting. I ripped the sample off youtube and pushed it through an array of effects. The bass and the drums are the only really consistent instruments during the vocal sample so I created a "down the phone"/low-fi tone to contrast with the bass heavy instrumental.