Cake Mix.

August 14, 2011 1:26 AM

Cake. Delicious cake.
posted by loquacious (3 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

love it, when the mega bass (that's the best way I can describe it) kicks in, you know shit's about to go down. The upping synth is a nice pull, when the club melody hits at 55secs(ish) it again is cool. The background arpegio synth has a few notes which cross swords with the main melody line and jar a little. Maybe they borrow a couple of notes from different scales? If you can fix that, I would happily have this on my playlist. Love the 8-bit effects that come in everynow and then as well :)

Good job Loquacious !
posted by Cogentesque at 2:23 PM on August 14, 2011


That synth is actually what I consider the main melody, not the "major 5ths" string/wash, which is technically the bassline, but I've buried it quite a lot because if I bring it all the way to the front it's way too hectic.

Anyway that synth is actually two synths with a matching pair of two sets of patterns, and one set of patterns is an octave lower than the other one. So what's going on is they're playing against each other, and they do share some notes, especially if the same pitched pattern is playing on each synth in sync at the same time. Each synth has it's two sets of patterns, identical except for being an octave apart.

Those little clashes and moments of dissonance and chaos are intentional. I like them, but I like noise and I'm writing less to be club friendly but more techno friendly, which uses a lot of dissonant resonance like that sometimes. I'm playing the filter/resonance of the two synths against each other, then running the patterns "in the round" off each other a bit.

And as with like the last 5 tracks I've posted I'm working with really fundamental/basic synth tech to teach myself some fundamentals, basically trying to recreate the basics of a techno/house PA rig. Yeah, I'm using Live as a DAW and tracker, but the total instrument count for this is super small. Three of the basic 4x oscillator soft synths (Operator), 1 basic drum kit with mostly stock 909 samples tuned to taste and 1 sample played in the intro.

There's a simple delay on the drums, a frequency-based stereo delay on send A, and an EQ and compressor on the master out. No VSTs of any kind, no 3rd party filters. I think the most complicated object in my chain is the subtle beat repeater I put on the drum kit.

I'm running this all on a netbook with no monitors or speakers. To engineer my mix I'm swapping between various headphones from fairly crappy earbuds to nice earbuds to a pair of Technics, then even listening to it on the netbook speakers. I'm using a korg Nano Kontrol as a control surface for my filter sweeps, and the netbook keyboard for triggers and programming.

And yeah, I'm a total noob. I don't know shit about writing melodies or traditional song structure, so I'm just experimenting. I'm happy I've been able to get even this close to making the sounds I want to make, as opposed to the really random stuff I was making ages ago.

Thanks for listening!
posted by loquacious at 6:04 PM on August 14, 2011


Brilliant, great words and I totally understand you man, impressed you are doign as well as you are with the gear you have as well! - awesome stuff, keep rocking (techno-ing?)
:)
posted by Cogentesque at 2:27 AM on August 15, 2011


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