Here’s my 24th free track I wrote within a week.
Aims
This week I tried to do things differently by:
- Using only one sound source
- Using more silence
- No filters
Reckons
So this unsurprisingly turned out really minimal, but I like it a lot. In part my aims were to accommodate travel – something both simple and very process-y meant I could put it down and pick it back up and not lose the thread, as such.
Process
My key idea to meet the above aims was to set up the notes of one chord to loop over and over with ever so slightly different loop lengths, so they fall out of phase with each other, and then add more movement by changing the shape of the sounds over time from short and snappy notes to something long and sustained.
I picked a key and tempo arbitrarily and sequenced one note to just hold for 4 bars and loop. I loaded up a synth, disabled any filter, and then automated the attack, decay, and sustain of the sound to change over 96 bars.
I also modulated the pan, pulse width depth, and pulse width of each note each time it plays. I used my usual pseudo-random approach to modulation, so the track always plays back the same way in in my DAW each time I listen to it. This involves sampling and holding values from an LFO with each new note on. (In my DAW, Bitwig, I used Polymer synth with the Bite oscillator, and that’s as good as a literal description of which modulators I used for each parameter: a tempo-synced LFO modulates the index of a Sample and Hold set in “hold” mode and triggered by “gate” (note on).)
I duplicated the first synth four times, and transposed the one note to create a 9th chord. The duplication includes the automation, so they all change shape in the same way, and sound like one synth. I tweaked the loop length of each one to be just a little bit longer than the one before, to create the phasing I was after.
The reason I chose to play each note of the chord on separate instances of the same synth was so I could add random-sounding delay effects to each note. I set up two possible reverbs (a short gated reverb and a long hall, different settings of Valhalla VintageVerb) and two possible delays (a 5/8th ping-pong delay, a 3/4th stereo delay) and then created an irregular-length step sequence that would mostly not send a note to any effect but would change every 4 bars and occasionally switch to one of the 4 options. I then copied and pasted this effects bank on to every synth track and edited the step sequence to be unique for each note, meaning a different effect might be applied to every note of each chord. Try 1:12 or so for an example, where you can hear two different notes of the chord sent into different delays. (Bitwig peeps, this is using Steps modulator on an FX Selector device and I found I needed to adjust the phase position so the step changes slightly before the beat for it to have effect on the first beat of the bar. There must be a little smoothing in there.)
For interest’s sake, I changed the voicing of the chord by transposing some notes up or down octaves, so it’s no longer just ascending from the root up to the 9th. From memory the 9th is now the lowest note.
After listening through a few times, I decided to finesse the structure of the track by:
- introducing each note of the chord at the start, one at a time,
- boosting the output of the synths at the start, because they sounded much quieter than the more sustained ones later on,
- trimming the final chord down to just a 3-note major chord so it might feel more resolved,
- speeding up the tempo a touch (88 to 93bpm),
- rearranging the fx step sequences so every note of that final chord goes into a hall reverb, and
- increasing the decay time of the hall reverb gradually from 12 seconds up to a chunky 48 seconds over the last third of the track.
As a final, final move, I changed the automation of the synth envelope changes, so every 4 bars it jumps to new values, instead of smoothly changing over time. When it was changing continuously it gave more of an impression of a new, sustained sound fading in between the jumpy chords, whereas now it’s much more like each time a chord plays the sound has changed.
Completely by luck Bitwig had recently introduced a new feature that did exactly what I wanted to do here easily – you can select a point / node in an automation lane and switch it from continuous values to held values.
Compare the result below with the above screenshot… Steppy!
