Weekly Reflection (Week 4)

Week 4 is upon us and I guess I’m still settling in and figuring out this whole ‘holistic grading’ situation. It’s definitely the way to go, but not having deadlines and being responsible for uploading blogs consistently is still something I’m getting used too. This week I have started working on my scratch track. I started by producing a drum sequence using the 707’s the Ableton comes with. While I was doing this, I was thinking about my reference track ‘Hours’ by ‘Tycho’ which sounds like he uses very compressed/ dry acoustic drum samples to create a simple drum pattern that carries the song through its entirety. Perhaps they are acoustically recorded it’s hard to tell, but they do sound like samples to me. Eager to get something down I just listened to some samples in Ableton went for the 707’s because they sound more like an acoustic kit than the 808’s or the 909’s and are very tight/ punchy and dry. It’s really my first time using Ableton, so I had a lot to learn in order to get the shape of song underway. First of all, I wanted to make the drums sound more realistic. When listening to acoustic drums being played you can hear very definitively that the hi-hats have louder and softer parts which are accented to give a groove or movement to the drum pattern. So, I researched how to do this in Ableton and applied this technique to the 707 drum sequence. Here’s an image below showing the amplitude of the MIDI data for each hi-hat hit.

Screen shot of Ableton session showing Hi-Hat velocities.

Once I had a rough idea of a drum pattern in the same tempo as my reference track to achieve a similar sort of vibe, I set out to create a synth pad to introduce the track quiet like my reference track and the plan was to have it act as the fundamental layer to the track and give it a dreamy/ drifting feeling that kept the track alive at all times. In sat down in class with Pete and listened to my reference track as we tried to recreate a similar synth pad. He helped me realize that the Tycho pad was using a chorus effect to give it some thickness and character, a phaser to give it some movement or an almost wobbly effect, an echo or delay was used in a triplet fashion to create space and add another dimension and a filter was cutting out some of the high frequencies.

Screen shot of DSP on synth pad patch.

After playing around with this drum track and synth pad, I sort of got carried away with finding all kinds of different instruments in Ableton. I went a little berserk and just started making sounds and adding all kinds of random noises and effects just to see what I could do until I came across a bass synth sound that reminded me quite a lot of the kind of bass synth you would hear on almost any LCD Soundsystem record. Me being a huge fan of this band just wanted to use it straight away so I wrote a bass melody that was reminiscent of theirs and the vibe of the track in my mind has now completely changed and I’ve decided to change my reference track to ‘Someone Great’ by of course… LCD Soundsystem. This brought me pretty close to the end of my writing session and I was kind of confused as to what to do in regards to changing the vibe of my track since me and my group had discussed what we wanted to do prior to this. I went about showing the other two group members what I had done and wondered if they’d be ok with this/ even like it. Once I showed them they both liked what I had done and were happy for me to continue producing this track. They were both still referencing their original tracks so I started to realize that maybe our two final deliverable tracks are going to be pretty different but I guess we are ok with this since we’re all still learning Ableton and I guess that’s what we’re here for… mainly…

Here is a screen shot and the bounce of what I had done after my first session of tracking.

Screen shot of end of first session writing my electronic single.