Nimble Hearsay – Ray Toler

The last few days of Song-A-Day are always unpredictable. Sometimes I’m just dragging across the finish line with whatever fumes are left in the tank, and other times I’m rushing to get several final ideas out before the clock hits zero. This year seems more of the former than the latter. Yesterday’s track was probably the low point. When I was listening back to it today, it struck me as being on par with 90s hold music, which is fine if that’s what you need. It’s certainly a pleasant enough melody that you can hum along to, but I doubt I’ll ever be seeking that track out in the future.

Nimble Hearsay Ray Toler 5:04

Sitting down for today’s track, I realized that despite a couple of attempts, I still haven’t used Stepic¹ on a track this year. Whelp… no time like the present. In fact, since we’re more or less on fumes, let’s make this one a challenge of some sort… Ok. With the exception of the drums, every track has to be run by Stepic. Aaaaaannnnnd…. I can only use one synth. Omnisphere would be the obvious choice for that challenge, but that’s super easy mode. Let’s go with just plain easy mode and use Pigments instead.

I think this genre is called ambient chill, but I’m not really sure. It’s fairly formulaic in terms of the basics, but there’s plenty of room for customization and expression. About halfway through the process I thought about bringing in a Slate + Ash library, but decided to try and stick with the restrictions.

Here’s the basic formula:

Set a key and scale (This one is E minor (natural))
Evolving pad for chord sequence (I used two)
Long bass sound
A couple of plucky / sharp sounds for random patterns and ostinatos
Long “lead” sound or two

I’ve only done a couple of these tracks, but the real trick seems to be in the sound selection. In fact, I was about four tracks in when I realized that everything was a chaotic mess and deleted all of the Stepic instances I had already programmed. I then selected my entire sound palette before starting to sequence anything. This made the rest of it go a lot more smoothly because I wasn’t doing the whole back-and-forth thing where I sequence, pick a sound, change the sequence, change the sound, and so on until I’m back to that chaotic mess.

Make It Move!

I’m not 100% happy with the pads, especially the brighter one that comes in mid-track. It was a little too bright and a bit boring. I ran it through FilterShaper XL to give it a little more motion, but I still think a completely different patch is probably the correct answer.

There are three “sharp/pluck” sounds: an electric piano, a soft synth pluck, and a more nasal synth sound with some digital wonkiness. The piano is pretty much going full random, but I used a lot of probability steps and included random octave jumps and velocity values. The other two instruments started off with the same pattern and stick to their basic sequence, but have a few steps where things can change. The more resonant one, in particular ends up with a lot of cool variety, partially because of the Stepic programming, and partly because the patch itself does the occasional weird thing.

One thing that ends up happening is that the soft pluck and squelchy parts are playing the same thing (with some minor randomization), but it might be halfway through the track before you realize it. I programmed it and that’s still happening to me. The soft pluck is speaking so quietly that you might not even notice it until other things move out of the way. I enjoy those moments in the mixing process.

For additional variety, I programmed 2-4 controller lanes for most of the parts. These were connected to the macro controls of each Pigment instance, and do things like detune, change filters, etc. With a more relaxed production schedule, I’d be a lot more targeted and precise with what I was doing here, but it got the job done and doesn’t sound bad.

The one sound that I end up really liking is that semi-vocoder-ish vocal ahhh patch. It’s largely random, but very slow. My suspicion is that I like it because it’s very similar to a sound in a Boards of Canada track, but maybe I like Boards of Canada because I like sounds like this.

For the drums, I started with an XO preset, changed up the entire kit to use similar but different sounds, then went in and was pretty methodical in picking specific sounds. As I continued programming and working, the little vocal “dah” hit increasingly became the sonic hook I was looking for. I set it to two different pitches so I could alternate when I brought the beat into the main sequence.

Final Assembly

The bulk of the work in these tracks is in the sound selection and Stepic programming. Once that’s done, you could almost just let it run with some judicious fader oscillations and it would probably sound ok. I prefer a lot more intentional arrangement, though, especially since the two pads didn’t sound great when both were playing at their full volumes.

My approach is generally to set markers for sections. I decided on six 16-bar sections, did an 8 bar intro, 8 bar outro. The XO pattern was two bars and eight parts. I brought those in, repeated the whole thing for the entire track, then started deleting individual soundbites to make the drum arrangement. The main work was choosing where and when the vocal hits happened, and only doing that disco-tom fill every so often. The snare pattern is a little busy, so I’d probably go back and tweak that in the future.

One downside to random Stepic work is that you can’t repeat something cool. Once it happens, it’s gone forever. The answer is to record it for awhile, then either take what you got as final (with enough repeated listens it will end up being fine 90% of the time), or to record it for longer than you need and manually select the best bits.

I sound lukewarm about this track, but I’ve enjoyed listening to it so far. It’s probably fine as it is, but I think it might also benefit from some additional attention in the future.

Deep breath. Two more tracks to go. Who knows, maybe I’ll jump into Stepic again!

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Stepic, Pigments, XO

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

PanMan, Valhalla, FabFilter, Portal, Gullfoss, FilterShaper XL

Notes

1
A fantastic step sequencer that I acquired about a year ago. I used it on several of the last tracks of 2025 and have really enjoyed listening to them over the past year.