This is another one rescued from WIP purgatory!
Started it 9 or 10 months ago trying to sample my bass playing.
The initial idea was to record bass parts for a full song, and then arrange a song around them, exactly as I’d written them.
I recorded into Studio One, edited and did a little light mixing.
The I recorded that into my M8 and started writing a drum groove.
I quickly realised I could get more interesting parts by chopping up the original lines.
Then experimented with layering an M8 synth lead with the bassline, which is where the first minute of the song comes from.
And then I got stuck. No matter what I did, I couldn’t find the right progression to finish it off. I abandoned it and came back a couple of months later with a fresh idea.
I thought, if I can’t fix this, I’m going to break it and see what else I can come up with.
That’s where the rest of the song came from. There were loads of fun resampling experiments (most of which didn’t make the final cut). But nothing seemed to fit. It felt like I was working with 3 or 4 related, but different songs.
So I was stuck… again…
This week I decided I was going to finish this thing, no matter what.
I did! And once again, it involved breaking things. This time, instead of resampling my drum grooves and synth sequences, I had to break my conception of what a song is.
I’m a structure-first writer. I like to build solid repeatable sections and then add variation. Even when I’m writing an instrumental, my brain works in terms of verses, choruses, bridges, etc.
And yet there isn’t a single section that gets repeated in this song. It’s a wanderer, ambling through the wilderness, with no idea where he’s going or why.
As much as I tried, it defied every attempt to wrangle it into some sort of recognizable structure. All I wanted was a chorus, but everything I tried fell flat.
Eventually I decided to Frankenstein my favourite parts together, did some aggressive editing (read - throwing out most of what I had), and finally had a working draft. Then it all came down to creating transitions, and tweaking of the initial sound design.
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Weekly Beats is such a great opportunity to work on your chops for your chosen instrument. I’m flying on the M8 (relatively, speaking. I’m probably still a snail compared to some of you guys!) But everything is starting to click. Haha, I’m even starting to gel with the arcane madness of FM synthesis.
One of my favourite discoveries is the workflow of resampling my bass playing. For example at around 01:56, I wanted an 8th note pulse from my bass, but didn’t have it with me. So I just chopped my original bass part and pitch shifted it to the notes I needed. It’s funny, because when I’m working in studio, I’d never use a pitch shifted bass part. It feels like the low effort, low quality thing to do, and I’d always rather just re-record whatever I want to change. But by letting go of the need to follow my ideal process, I ended up with something different and interesting (at least to me).
Looking forward to hearing lots of awesome music this week. I didn’t get nearly as much time as I would have liked for week 5, so I’ll have to do double this time.
Lots of love,
GregVK
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