How do I write this? There are too many words. This week was filled with tons of awesome.
Collaboration with AiDeRen this week, details below, but please make sure you go listen to his track too if you came here first and I thank you. And so starts the wall of text:
Sometime last week AiDeRen reached out on Discord shortly after collaborating with my friend Crash Overture, because let's face it, Weekly Beats is a giant musical family, connecting all manner of musicians from every genre you can imagine, all coming from different places ... like I said, too many words. Anyway, AiDeRen asked about collaborating, and of course I said yes!
I have absolutely loved AiDeRen's intro/outro series this year, and his skill on the M8 is just out of this world. My fave thing about the M8 is its power and flexibility - and never a week goes by that I don't hear something someone made on the M8 on WB that I'm not asking myself "oh wow how did they do that?" ... AiDeRen, that's pretty much every week.
› an awesome week of collaborating‹ an awesome week of collaborating
So it was an absolute joy to work with him on our songs this week. Prior to the start we discussed how that'd best work - it seemed fitting to both work on the M8, given our mutual love for the device, and I suggested we do a sort of "exquisite corpse" style collaboration, almost. First day we'd start our own songs, and work with four tracks (out of eight), and that night we swapped songs/bundles; next day we'd fill in the remaining four tracks in each other's tracks, completing a first "drop" or "loop" - basically a full musical idea that's 50/50 between the two of us.
Third day we'd have our original songs back, listen to what we added for each other, and then develop that further into an opening with a main melody. And then swap again!
The second swap we focused on making a "b-section" for each other, and then our songs were back in our own hands with the weekend to finish.
Right out of the gate on our first swap, AiDeRen added this wonderful, wistful, echoing little melody line that danced in a call-and-response to what I'd already written and it was just magical and completely transformed the track. This is what I love about collaboration - having a chance to work with musical ideas I could never arrive at myself, and doing something awesome with them.
And that's how the week progressed ... AiDeRen's b-section on my song came as another fantastic surprise, and transformed this bit of ambient-techno into something with whole movements, a sorta groovy ambient-house suite that I am totally in love with. Finishing the track was an absolute joy.
And on that note ... the finished product didn't add anything in Ableton like I usually do, which I really think speaks to how much we pushed the M8 on this project (AiDeRen to his credit always works M8-only, and again, something to admire for his skill!).
Throughout the week we had a great back-and-forth with ideas, not to mention plenty of technical strategizing as we discovered some of the intricacies of this kind of exchange (I didn't actually understand how Bundles were meant to work...) and Sunday afternoon we hopped on Discord together and mastered our tracks.
It was amazing fun and I learned so much, my two fave things about Weekly Beats.
If nothing else - reach out and collaborate with someone! You'll have a blast.
› a few musical notes‹ a few musical notes
We'd both set out to make some ambient techno for the RMR Discord Challenge, but I think mid-week we realized we should really only use that as a "guide", because the spirit of collaboration demands that you follow where the music leads you and that was amazing.
I think this track still qualifies, but it's got three distinct "moments" or "movements", so arguably not quite "sonic wallpaper", but I think it's awesome.
There were a few pads on this track; the main one was sampled from Grandmother and built from eight notes; others came from the sample challenge (see below). I was very sample heavy on this one - and again used pads for percussion like last week. Gave it a bit of groove cuz it's gonna make you move when you hear it.
We both used samples from the WB sample challenge this week, which featured MANY BIRDS. And I love the birds. Details and accreditation below:
Unofficial WB friendly sample challenge #4
Details on Discord
Sample contributors shoutout:
- dreat (GOING OUT TO RECORD EURASIAN BLACKBIRD)
- Dustsucker (REMCOVIOLA)
- quasor (LARK ASCENDING)
- sleepside (C_HARMONICA)
- TheDaeVolta (EFFEDUPWHISTLE and Verse2_Week32)
- 0x_colt (LOONS
AiDeRen (MOUETTE)
HUGE THANK YOU to AiDeRen this week, you were a wonderful collaboration partner and I had so much fun and learned so much. And my first M8 collab ever! It was amazing <3
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