Name: Gate by emanuele.ballasina
Duration: 4 min 10 s
Description: Made into Renoise 3 with samples and TranceGate

I'm a big fan of sequencers. This is great!

Made into Renoise 3 with samples and TranceGate

Gate

All done with Fury-68 (18 instances) and DrumTraqs (1 instance).
https://www.fullbucket.de/music/fury68.html
Recorded with Reaper 64.

new edits on an old, old, old ting... bingo bango bongo... bla bla bla

dblue - wobbles - 2025 tweak

This track samples from 'Son of a Preacher Man' quite heavily and obviously.

When I made the song, I hadn't realised quite how unoriginal that was. I was young.

I still like the pitched-retrigger of the main line :) That's how we made rave, grab a sample, play it like an instrument, make a new line for your song from something else.

Also featuring some punchy vocal retriggers and sine-bass! :D

And the ever-loving YEAHBOP beat :)

Love this track!

I believe the awful scratching and rewind in this was also actually mine. I was naive and a very poor turntablist indeed.

Written in '97, I think!

Fat Preacher

This was one of my first attempts to emulate the Prodigy.

At the time, Fat of the Land had just come out and I was just finding my feet with music - but we had zero access to synths, only samples and precious little sample-RAM.

The name 'Respire' was a clear nod to the fact I was listening to the structure and components of 'Breathe' by the Prodigy.

The guitar parts were by my friend John Haselden and the drum fills clearly show my intent to emulate the structure of the tracks that were rocking my world at the time.

I continued to fail to emulate the Prodigy, but, further down my musical career, I managed a little more subtlety ;)

As with all other tracks on this album, this was written in Fast Tracker II, using a Gravis Ultrasound card on a PC that I assume was running dos 6.something.

Respire

Messy, dubby piece of smashed-up breaks and bass.

At least in this track I wasn't attempting to emulate anyone at all (directly), this was me putting together influences that I loved.

Slow part, dubby part, dark part, frenetic break part.

Tinkly bit!

The name stems from the bird squark that can be heard in seminal 808-state tracks and the general techno-as-rave sensibility, but as a track, I think it actually did pull together the sounds of the day and the way that tracks that got played out now moved back and forth between the speeds and mixed it up. Rave was not dominating dancefloors any more, but there was a flux of genres that was starting to happen, keeping the floor interesting.

Nostalgia

Totally DeathBoy track.

This obeyed absolutely no fucking rules whatsoever. Maybe close to an Aphex track in that it was made to be what it was.

For once, I wasn't trying to be anything. The synth noises played themselves and told me that the track should sound LIKE THIS.

Basslines played themselves in, tinkly noises entered themselves into the trackerline.

This track was instinctive drum and bass from a 90s boy full of tech.

I'm sure it would never have got played out then, but I love it now.

Phone

And this, to my infinite shame, was my response to hearing, adoring and wanting to emulate the Prodigy's 'Firestarter'.

(again, hence the name)

Mentasm synths, punchy breaks.

Then, when I might have just about nailed the dance-factor, SUDDENLY I ROCK IT BACK INTO 90s TRANCE-RAVE! HAHA!

So what we end up with is a hugely fucking bipolar track, both halves of which I adore, and which would have neatly fit well into the early 90s sets that rocked tracks by Acen in which the same sort of schizm rocked the fucking house.

I didn't have much of an excuse, I was trying to sound like Firestarter and I was 19. The results were nothing like it, but they did show what I was built out of at the time and where my music would go in the future.

It IS full of energy and spunk, and I love it for that :)

Bassline UTTERLY sampled from John and Julie's "Circles (Round and Round)"


Pyromaniac

Up-speed track from my bad-bwoay days.

Notable for my not using the Amen break for the first 8 bars.

Lots of soft, mellow synth sounds, bounded by a well-rounded sub-bass.

Some more delicate break fun, with the re-pitched snares playing about SORT of shows that I was moving toward the idea that breaks needed to be melodic.

Dune sample "ALL RHYTHMIC VIBRATIONS" mashed up with a heavily time-stretched classic 'PEOPLE JUMP!'

Big fat basslines and trippy tinkle-synths abound.

The fast, spinny high synth pattern was a double-speed nod toward the trill in Opus III's 'Fine Day', which I adore hugely.


Rhythm

Proto-trip-hop!

This was my first attempt at 'a slow track'.

Called 'syrup', as I felt that a half-speed track felt like swimming through syrup.

As somebody who was (at the time) writing drum and bass, this was an attempt to move back to the hip-hop speed and obey the rules of that music, as a transition back up and into my own speed.

The track (like many in the genre) exists at two speeds, as the influences of the music did. We danced and listened at two speeds.

Before dubstep, there were many gigs where the sound pulled down into a dub-speed song for a long time, before being raised back up into the energy and BPM of the evening. DnB nights (at least some of them) were not always frenetic and relentless.

This track pulled and pushed between the two speeds.

Syrup

Hugely proud-of and happy about this track.

It was my first attempt at an ambient track, as the closer for 'deftunes'.

Stole heavily and unashamedly from several tracks I adored: Fine Day / Halcyon, tracks from Tricky's "Nearly God" (Keep Your Mouth Shut), Primal Scream's "Higher Than the Sun" (more in terms of inspiration than samples)

The idea was to create the sound and experience of diving in and out of a splashing, crazy, foaming water.

The majority of the filter effects were from a 4-track tape-recorder, applied to the entire track, live, while recording back into the PC that I'd written the music on.

I wanted to make and hear the sound of splashing in and out of a seething ocean of sound.

I'm very proud of and happy with this track. My first 'concept' track, I suppose. I adore it.

For me, it DOES sound like splashing in and out of the water.

I had very little to work with, but I tried to capture something of the dream I had in my mind and I think it worked.


Sub-aqua

My music! In progress or complete, keyb or soft!
Keyboard: Yamaha ES6, Access Virus TI, Nord Stage 2, Kurzweil PC361, Mutable Instruments Shruth1, Yamaha FS1R, Yamah plg150an/dx/vl.
Software: Renoise, Reason
Plugins: z3ta+2, korg legacy collection, synthmaster, discovery, arturia bundle.
Enjoy!

Gate

emanuele.ballasina

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