Remember two days ago when I waxed poetic about Stepic, the amazing new step sequencer I got? Remember how I was fawning over those 80s Tangerine Dream soundtrack bass lines? Remember how I said that you’d likely hear more tracks with that kind of thing? Well, here we are.
This is darn close (if not massively over the line) into pastiche territory. If I played this without comment for a Tangerine Dream fan, I suspect they’d be trying to figure out which album it didn’t make it on.
- Gold Obelisk Ray Toler 5:27
Now, amazingly, I only used Stepic on two tracks in this piece, but they’re really the heart of what’s going on. There’s the sharp sawtooth bit that comes in early, and then the slightly more chill plucked arpeggio that makes itself known round 2:15 or so. What’s amazing to me about tracks like this is how much they can compress time. This one is over five minutes, but it feels like it really just got started and could go a lot longer. It’s no surprise that Tangerine Dream was making songs that filled an entire side of an album. It’s both frantic and calm all in the same moment.
The initial “sharp” arp is a fantastic example of a divide function along with probability triggers. Ever now and then you’ll hear a note roll 32nd notes instead of the normal 16th notes. I didn’t program those directly, but I told the sequencer that on the third and ninth steps (out of 16), randomly decide if you’re going to play 32nd notes or not. So sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.
A bit of the art of using sequencers like this is knowing which things to randomize, which need to be directly specified, and which can be a sometimes thing. If I had made every step of the 16 a potential division step, it would sound a lot more chaotic and somewhat less musical. We need some things to hang onto as anchors while chaos provides the seasoning to keep things from getting boring.
One final thing to talk about here is the difference between tempo and energy. If I asked most people (especially non-musicians) whether this piece is fast or slow, I suspect the majority would say it’s fast. It’s not, though. The tempo is 88 beats per minute – squarely in ballad territory. Sometimes I have the project tempo set at half or double the “real” tempo of a piece because I need those values for programming or sequencing purposes. But in this case, those 16th note arpeggios have so much energy in them that it makes everything feel fast. Meanwhile, the lead synth lines are just meandering around, smelling the flowers and gazing at clouds. You can mentally move your brain between the piece being slow or fast, and that’s another reason it seems to compress time.
I could talk about this stuff for pages and pages, but you get the point. I’m pretty sure that my biggest challenge once this Song-A-Day is over will be not using Stepic on every single thing I do. I have a lot of exploration left, though.
Colophon
Instruments & Samples
Pigments, S+A Cycles, S+A Landforms, Omnisphere
Effects, Mixing, & Mastering
Stepic, FabFilter, Gullfoss, Kraftur, Valhalla VintageVerb & Delay, Panman