Loop City Feat. Me

I had another loop that I made a few days ago, which I didn’t like at first because it sounds very much like a videogame background music. However, I spent some time Eq-ing it and it’s quite pleasant (But it does sound like video game background music).

It reminded me of some early 2000’s indie games. Specifcally FEZ:

Which the comparison is definitely an insult to fez haha.

Abelton has a weird sampler…

Well it’s still simpler but the “slide” mode of the sampler where essentially each segment of the sample gets broken up into chunks that correspond with midi notes. Pretty sick if you’re looking for the linkin park effect from numb.

Pretty cool, I tried playing bass over this and I cant take the damn sound its making. I gotta feeling the fx board that was on the high knob is bad somehow and I need to replace it with just a capacitor somwhere else ala

https://www.premierguitar.com/diy/mod-garage/wire-a-passive-treble-and-bass-circuit

This time I Make a tribute to (steal) a synth sound

This song is great, you should buy and listen to this song.

The primary synth is awsome, I’ve listened to this song like 100 times and it sounded like operator (subtractive synth) so I thought I would give it a shot.

I’m pretty sure I’ve got it 80% of the way there:

Pretty awesome sound, basically it’s a gross as hell chain that then gets some LFO automation on each note.

Here’s me cycling through the operator settings

Pretty awesome I think if I tweaked it further I could get it perfect but ripping someone elses synth is only cool for pure education purporses.

Stream the real song.

I bought a broken bass

I bought a bass with rusty pickups without testing it. The guy I bought it from seemed like he knew it didn’t work so he threw me a t-shirt on the way out (probably as some moral compensation). Went home, plugged it in, no sound, bought pickups, swapped pickups, no sound, plugged in cable half-way, sound. I found out that this bass 1.) had bad pickups and 2.) had a improperly soldered line out. Already fixed the pickups and the line out was a polarity swap, so I fixed that just by swapping to a mono cable.

“Ol’ three string himself”

Next tale here is that abelton has a built in tuner so I jacked into my focusrite and went to tune up the provided strings.

I saw my E string was F so I naturally assumed that it was an octave lower (I had music playing so I wasn’t really “listening” to the strings). The second I turned it, snap, annnd I broke the E string. The rest of the strings ended up fine, I do have replacements but I was too anxious to get something recorded so I went hard with just ADG. (By hard I mean as hard as a 16 year-old who just picked up a bass).

Fun fact: this sounds like probably 3 /4 of the last things I made just done with a bass instead of a synth

Yet Another loop

This one is more heady. I originally had more bass and general fuzz but I decided to tone things down once I found a nice voice “ahhh” sound in abelton. Nothing to crazy but I can see it falling into one of those rainy day vibes videos.

Still need to change that photo…
Auto-pan + a half sample is my friend

I don’t really listen to DnB

But it seemed interesting so I gave a couple hours trying to throw together a faster (180) bpm song.
I went crazy with the scenes in this case which is probably unnecessary, I had 13 in all but most are repeats.

Trying to find a good dnb kit got me looking through some of the newer drum kits that come with abelton which can be pretty sweet. There’s so many now and all are much better quality, I’ve only been messing with the 808 the last few years.

The Majority of the work on this was getting some of the operator settings just right. The first sound that comes in (which I was calling “plane Landing”) Is basically a 1/12 sync lfo with really long attack envelope on all of the oscillators.

The reason the lfo appears to slow down is because I also tied it into the pitch envelope along with the oscillators.

If I wasn’t lazy at the bottom I would have automation to set the pitch envelope slider to zero, but in this case I just copy+pasted the operator and removed the pitch envelope and any attack to make it seem like the “Plane Landing” turned into a stable note (which I called “plane driving”):

Finally most dnb has some kind of silly audio clip in there. In this case I still had the track from pacific rim lying around and I didn’t see a reason to have more of that in everything.

The main thing I don’t like about this is that I didn’t do much eq on any of the tracks. I had some compressors just to save speakers from the snares, wobble and the static-y stabs at the end but really everything seemed to be more balanced than I’m used to. The drums are actually two separate kits, I didn’t have to add any extra reverb other than what was in the base Abelton template. All around pretty great.

Another loop

This one isn’t that complicated. I basically make a quick drum loop I liked, found a very reverb-y synth and pushed the drums and lead synth into the reverb hard to lazily “auto-mix” stuff.

Basically if everything is in reverb you can get away with not equalizing stuff.

..and yes it’s a 8 bar loop that I just repeated like 20ish times, so after the first 20 seconds you’ve heard all there is.

New Song

I do not remember how I made this. It was with the shruthi1 that my brother rebuilt and a premade kit in abelton live. The date was april-may ish (I think) on the original listing. The synth sounds a little too much like a foghorn but I think the breakdown of the couple of snare+base hits are nice.

I know for a fact that I didn’t make the drums because LOOK AT THAT:

You’d have to be psycotic to manually set the velocities to that. Must’ve been someone with drum pads.

Anyways here’s the loop:

todo-remove my stupid pic from 5 years ago from soundcloud.