i'm heading out of town this weekend, so i'm eking this one out

happy whittling

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little late to the party but i've been meaning to do weeklybeats since like 2014 but thought this'd be a good way to  get back to putting music out again after a long time away from making it.

didn't want to overdo it so kept this one pretty simple by focusing on some interesting metallic rhythmic elements and some dreamy/melancholic atmosphere with some 808 to beef it up.

thanks to anyone to listens and gives any feedback. i'll do my best to set aside some time each week to listen to as many submissions as I can and leave comments on ones that speak to me.

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For this piece, I was really feeling how cold it is now that January is hitting. I didn't intent to make such a wintery piece when I started out, but it's cold in my house and it snowed last week, and everything just kinda came together to make this Winterlude.

The drone melody that repeats throughout the song was created with the Ellitone Multi-Synth. It was one of the first synthesizers I ever bought, and I think it's really fun to run it through my M-Vave reverb pedal. It doesn't have a lot of the controls that more traditional synthesizers have, but there's a lot of great happy accidents that you find within minutes of setting one up. I let it play uninterrupted until the end, when I turned down the volume attenuator I had between it and my pedal.

I created the drum beat by connecting the output of one of my Stylophone DS-2 oscillator outputs to the Overdrive input on my Behringer neutron. I used an SQ-1 sequencer to trigger the filter, which I set to be rather quick. As the track progressed, I brought the beat in and out by attenuating the cutoff and volume. The other oscillator went wild, with its cutoff LFO connected to a secondary LFO in order to keep the energy shifting throughout the piece.

I created the "snare" that you hear at the beginning and throughout the song with my volca drum synthesizer, and I sequenced it to trigger in tandem with the drum.

When I showed my wife the original version, she said it felt like something was missing, so I created an additional recording of me holding different notes on my Crave with the arpeggio hold function and the Glide knob cranked all the way up. I thought it sounded kind of like a wintery siren going off in the distance, and it created a really cool synth lead even though I had it mixed much quieter in the mix than I would normally.

When I was mixing everything, I thought it would be fun to animate the panning of the snare and the Ellitone drone melody so they would move back and forth in opposing rhythyms. I may have overdone it a little, but it was still fun.

The video is created by a quite lucky clip I recorded last week when it snowed for the first time all winter. I caught two lightning flashes on camera, and when I put the video to the music, I realised they lined up perfectly to bookend the beginning and end of the video. I shot the footage at like 6400 ISO on an old DSLR so the image is really grainy, and I raised the contrast and modified the colors a bit to enhance the effect.

https://youtu.be/kuopMyDF1fg

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When I sat down to make this one I was thinking about opening themes from sci-fi TV shows that I loved as a kid. I started off by resampling Diva into a rompler to make a pad. As the track grew it morphed into something else, maybe reflecting the nostalgia I was feeling from the prompt.

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Some nuclear jungle produced entirely on the Dirtywave M8 for week 3.

For this week, I started out with a heavy focus on the drum choppage with an idea to keep a lot of "space to breathe" in the leads and breaks, but it ended up resulting in me finding a new bug for the 6.5.1 firmware on the M8. I was not able to render out my track without the drums becoming mangled by the bug, but thankfully Tim (the GOAT) fixed it the evening it was discovered, so it did not set me back too far.

I am sure I will be coming back to this track in the future as a remix or something, as it is a little short and could use another switch-up or something.

Let me know what you think down below - I'm always happy to hear feedback, whether it is positive or constructive.

If you like what you hear, you can find more of my music on streaming and on Bandcamp at 0x_colt.

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the thing didn't know what it wanted to do this week, so here! have an epiano jam (again) (there's gonna be a lot of em)

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Track was composed by me. No time to articulate the performance, but was very enjoyable. Might do something more fleshed out in the future. Feel free to download, chop, and sample this.

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Subdued eight-bit melancholy.

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tried a new process this week; i spend 20 mins each on Monday working on a few simple 20-30 second ideas, then picked the one i liked the most to work on during the week. these songs do take me quite a bit of time, usually between 5-10 hours so it helps to make sure the initial idea is at least passable <3 I'm not a particularly fast songwriter, and between work it can be tough if i start something only to hate it. can recommend trying this if you haven't already !

i also learned how to use a fucking compressor correctly to even vocal levels this week; i was hitting it way too hard in the past which might have cut a lot of sounds and made it less clear sounding. learning is fun, i think my technical skill is surprisingly low. it's all vibes and smashing my head against the wall until i make a hole <3

for week 3, i wrote a song about reggie from riverdale and putting all of ur hopes into something like football. please can we just forget about all this stuff and just go for a drive. i feel like at least in the earlier seasons (i'm only in 4 at the moment) he gets a bit of a bad wrap and his main purpose seems to be as someone the viewer is annoyed at or frustrated with :(

thanks so much to everyone taking part this year! it's my first time trying and it's been such a blast so far <3

lyrics:

my baby's had it tough, you can count the scars

but now he's a high school football star

i cheer him on wearing town pride royal blue

(cuz) it's a big life baby but I'll only dream of you

spend the cold nights in the back of his chevelle

i don't dress for the weather cuz he keep me warm instead

(i think ur so fit, baby let it go to your head)

won't talk about it, but I know he's going thru hell

it's a long life baby before you end up dead

my baby's had it tough, you can count the scars

but now he's a high school football star

i cheer him on wearing town pride royal blue

(cuz) it's a big life baby but I'll only dream of you

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