Right?

I was happy with yesterday’s track and had a reasonable chunk of time to experiment. I’m starting to hit that blank page anxiety feeling every day, but so far they’ve all turned out. Despite being re-committed to making music that I want to make instead of what I think people want to hear, I still have this nag in the back of my mind. “Another DnB track? Boring.” “Nobody needs ambient.” “You’ve been writing lyrics. Don’t be lazy.” All of those inner critics that Song-A-Day has helped me quiet, but who will never be truly silent.

There were several aborted attempts at this that or the other, but I just wasn’t feeling anything and nothing seemed to be grabbing me. I started playing in XO, which is often a good starting point because the beat drives things, but even that wasn’t sparking any ideas.

Finally, I decided to just do an electronic thing of some sort. Maybe house? Sure, why not? But I wanted to do something different in some way. A lot of my house-ish tracks are very simple. Quarter kick, squelchy bass, house chord… they’re perfectly competent, but I want to see if I can find something weird that works.

The best way to shake things up is often to use something that I’m not very familiar with. I scanned through the available synths and decided that I haven’t really used Synthmaster 3 very much, even though it’s highly regarded. That’s one of the great things about making electronic music right now – nearly any soft synth you pick up will be incredibly good. This is one of the reasons I’m (mostly) on a year-long  moratorium on new software and hardware.

Ok… that doesn’t work… that’s ok… no… no… maybe… how would I use that? The sound I finally landed on is that kind of weird dooo-dooo-dooo-dooo-dooooooooo sound that starts the track off. I further messed with it by distorting it with an amp simulator and then sending it through a fairly complex effects chain using Cableguys ShaperBox 3. Ok. That’s weird. And kind of cool and hypnotic. Fine.

Kick drum. Good. 303 bass line. Nice. The disco-ish drum loop – nice! Sounds very Daft Punk. Weird little “talky” synth. Yeah, that’s a placeholder and maybe I’ll put lyrics on this one later. Time for bed, though.

The Tyranny of the Routine

My mornings have become pretty standard: Wake up, coffee, write my blog post for the previous day (including hand writing the lyrics if needed, generating images, uploading the track to my website, make/update the various audio players, publish, go to the dog park. I’m getting back home in the early afternoon and finish up whatever it was I was working on the previous night.

I’m still not quite working a day ahead. I’d like to get to the point where my morning is just doing polish and final mix / review instead of having to finish a sketch. I’m making progress, though, and the last two tracks have been finalized before 6pm.

A benefit, though, of that gap between sketch and final is that my brain has time to do all of those idea-things while it’s bouncing around in my head. This was certainly the case today when I realized that I finally had a track that I could drop some fun samples from an old educational film I’ve been wanting to use. I stripped the audio out of it and then went hunting for fun things.¹I would like credit for not using “He knew his large sack would be hard to handle.” I’m not saying I’ll never use it, though.

The “Right? Right.” line was the obvious hook and a fantastic drop. Everything from this point on went fairly quickly. I decided that the “he wants to do something different” was a good way to give the track a serious lift with variety and went to the whole breakbeat thing.

When the arrangement was finished, I told Mary that long ago, I used to make these types of tracks all the time when it was just me and an Ensoniq EPS. No studio, just me, a sequencer, and some samples. The stutter beat re-triggers, in particular, are something I (over)used and it was fun to throw them in again.

A technique that I’ve really embraced is not trying to get crazy with automation when needing to have multiple effects on something. The example in this track is that the delay on “Right?” is different every time. Rather than try to do multiple sends, I just cut that word out and moved it to its own track with its own effects chain. Back in the early days of recording, this would be impractical because tracks were severely limited. They’re basically free in a DAW, though. I really used this on The Match Went Out two years ago.

Oh, I also want to document two happy accidents where a computer glitch led to an editorial choice. There were two points where I had started playback and the sample got started late or the system had a tiny slowdown, which made the audio play back in a different way. One was just an off-beat delay on the hook sample, but the other ended up becoming that chopped drop near the end of the track. While the drop outs can be annoying when you’re trying to do work, sometimes, they lead to you hearing something or having an idea that you never would have otherwise.

At this point, I hadn’t really recorded anything, but the track was largely done. The mixing process was a little tricky because there are, at one point, four drum loops and a kick drum all happening at the same time. I sent the main kick drum to a compressor on each loop’s channel that did a side chain ducking. This gets the loops out of the kick’s way for just a brief moment and keeps things clean. This is something that I can probably improve further with some EQ and surgery, but it works for now.

The only other tricky thing was the “He doesn’t know it yet…” sample. There’s a weird noise in the background (a squeaky bicycle pedal) and it was super loud and very annoying. I didn’t have time to completely remove it, but I was able to EQ the high pitches out enough that they weren’t painful anymore.

The rest of the mix was just getting the overall loudness correct, a little compression and saturation, and bang. Now for the most difficult part – the name. I had three obvious options:

• Right?
• Right? Right.
• Right

I decided that “Right?” was the best choice, with the small issue that a question mark is a forbidden character for most file names. But that’s the computer’s problem, not mine.

Right? Right.

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Chop Suey, BT Phobos, f.’em, Pigments, Synthmaster 3, Hive2

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Valhalla Delay, ShaperBox 3, Gullfoss, UAD ATR-102, Black Rooster OmniTec 67A, PanMan

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Notes

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  I would like credit for not using “He knew his large sack would be hard to handle.” I’m not saying I’ll never use it, though.