ever since listening to the thinner (ye olde netlabel) releases, dub house / dub techno was one of my favourite genres. I am still a learner, and this album (sometimes more clearly, sometimes not) shows my journey, with "reeboatgnist" being from around 2000 and "Just to quickly follow up" being one of the latest from 2018. I have been focusing on live performing and live streaming which is why there's no recent release in this album.

If you want to support me and my music, and you want to posess remastered, high quality copies of the tracks, I'm selling this Album on Bandcamp:

https://halfbyte.bandcamp.com/album/blue-triangles

Buy on Bandcamp

Blue Triangles

Weekly Beats 2024

Finally, some music I feel confident enough to upload.

This track wants to have some vocals, I feel, but I definitely don't feel confident enough for that.

The track is my first track built from start to finish in Ableton 11 which feels like a really solid release. (No comping used, haha)

Probability Zone

Just a dubtechno experiment. The voiceover is more or less a placeholder with a lot of blabbering that will hopefully replace with me having something to say soon.

voice of reason

Another demo arrangement of our #tagtoolmusic session with @benjaminrabe and Fabric Lenny. 

kniffke

Born out of some improvisation with my Korg Montron combo, an original Monotron and a Monotron Delay. The basedrum you hear (and the noisy hihat-ish sound in the background, which is just a filtered version of the original) is the filter of the Monotron self oscillating, fed through the Monotron Delay and then recorded and looped in ableton.

The grit of the Monotron Delay gives the whole thing a lot of character, quite typical for dub techno beats.

Originally the thing (as it was an LFO fed filter sweep) was straight four to the floor, but I decided that this was not what I had in mind and I built a drum rack out of different parts of the original beat filtered to the desired frequency range.

The dub techno stab is a sampled single shot played with the Monotron (also fed through the delay, which creates these weird off beat sounds) turned into a proper stab using simpler, an auto filter, a ping pong delay and a reverb (and some EQ for good measure).

The bass sound uses an Ableton Simpler with the exact same sample looped and filtered.

The synth effects are pure Monotron Delay, freely recorded and then somewhat chopped up and put into place.


Monotronic

Submission to the weeklybeats challenge Week #2

Minimalziel

I've been watching a lot of totally mesmerizing videos of people (mostly music students I guess) performing Steve Reich pieces.
This is a very humble and time constrained experiment to recreate Steve Reichs phasing technique within Ableton Live. The drums have been recorded by myself, circa 2000, on an unknown african drum of a room mate of mine. The piece is essentially two identical drum patterns (four bars in 6/8) with one of them essentially playing one beat less, so that on each four bars, both patterns change phase. It ends exactly after the phasing comes round at half the pattern length. 

drumloop

no silver bullet (Weeklybeats #13)

Surphin Surplus

Weeklybeats 2024 is starting and I wanted to get something done quickly as I knew I wouldn't have much time left during the rest of the week.

This is built around a simple melody on Klevgrand's Speldosa. I absolutely love the sound of it but it is so. hard. to. mix.

I find the track slightly boring, as there's not much happening chord progression wise but I ran out of time in the window that I had.

In the end probably more a sound design exercise than a song writing exercise.

WB2401 It Makes A Sound

Unfortunately I had to skip last week due to some health issues. This week was a bit busy so again, this is more a sketch that shows the potential.

The name is a nod to the all time classic Mango Drive from Rhythm&Sound, which in turn is a remix of Mango Walk.

I don't see this as a sort of reproduction or even remix but more of a study of the spirit and the techniques of the original. 

Produced using the Ableton 12 Beta, but hardly using any of the new functionality (I used "strum" for the second guitar-ish synth chord)

It would by quite easy to stretch this to 5-8 minutes with some melodic variations and some proper dub style echo automations but I ran out of time as I won't have much time during the weekend. (Writing this on friday)

WB2403 Mango Sykkel

This week I stood in my own way, started way too late on Thursday and then ended up with something completely unusable. I thew away everything melodic, just kept the beat and started from scratch.

The sounds are a bit stereotypical, but I like the anthem-ish sound of the super saw synth.

Again, sloppy arrangement, but at least this one has a couple of transitions if a bit random.

WB2404 Drilling Through

No idea what this is. The groundwork, including parts of the pads in the background, the bleepy melody and the two drum loops were done on the OP-1, but then I pivoted to Ableton Live as I was getting nowhere on device.

I tried to add more to this but the song actively resisted.

WB2405 Clamshell

I went into the week thinking that trying to do some minimal techno could be fun. I then unexpectedly had time over the weekend, as I was trying to get rid of some cold viruses. 

This became a fun excersise in time and space with various different time signatures running against each other and constantly changing amounts of reverb on the main pieces. I also had a bit more time for arrangement so not only is this the longest beat this year so far, it probably also has the best breaks and transitions.

If you can't tell, I am quite happy with this one :)

WB2406 Drain The Groove

This is another quick one, all in all something like 3 hours maybe. Still I think I came up with some fun ideas and somewhat executed on them. Arrangement could be better, I would love to have more time to get the mix right (I know that the master compressor somewhat messes up the drum levels), but I'm willing to live with these sacrifices :)

The voice is Klevgrand's Pipa, Synths are almost exclusively Live's Wavetable. I'm quite fond of the pads that are quite simple in design but have enough movement and are quite lush and so give a nice backend to the track.

WB2407 Varifocal

Ran a bit out of time here, so it's a bit on the short side. I love the fact that this does not actually contain any form of kick drum. 

The noise in the background, if you listen very carefully, turns out to be the 3D printer I had running in the background today (not super easy to master with that) that I sampled with a handheld recorder and then did a bit of filtering for it to be not super obnoxious.

WB2408 Oat Milk

Bit of a weird one this week: I am not really happy with the end result and the process was kinda painful with lots of dead ends. In the end the result is somewhat coherent, I think, but also very, very stereotypical. I was going for that particular sound aesthetic, but was hoping for something more interesting.

In the end I am just glad I pulled through and had something to upload. Maybe it's just one of those weeks.

WB2409 Regulators

For a while I wanted to do some actual ambient work. When playing around with the release version of Ableton 12 and the new Granulator III, I stumbled across this preset called Piano Quartz that on its own already started like half of a Nils Frahm song. (Don't worry, I don't want to belittle Nils Frahm, the other 50% are 99% of the work, and also, I love his music). It feels a bit like a cheat, but the result is quite soothing I think. I added some well hidden drums, some rainy ambience and a bit of noodling.

I know this is probably a bit of a downer after last weeks track, but I darn well do what I want here :)

Funny side note: My once beefy desktop machine can't handle the 3-4 voice Granulator, I had to freeze the track which is fun on an 8 minute track.

WB2410 A Very Long Preset

Another surprisingly long one. Heavily inspired by listening to too much Von D, but hopefully able to give it my own spin and atmosphere. Lots of different delays and reverbs, definitely not skimping out on the post processing.

It is developing slowly but I wouldn't have it any other way in this case.

WB2411 This Is Not a Cake

I wanted to do this for a while, sort of to prove myself that I'm able to do it. I am somewhat ambiguous towards the lofi genre and do enjoy listening to the Girl's stream from time to time, but I didn't have to create this to figure out that most of those tracks are relatively low effort.

Still, it was fun to play around with some nice chord progressions and the lead melody. 

WB2412 Stereo Type

Just a quick lofi remix as the chords lent themselves very well to it. Basically the track you would expect when the chords start.

Waiting for departure (lofi recapitulation)

As I have other endeavours that take up most of my time right now, the WeeklyBeats sessions become more and more speedrun sessions. Not the "fruityloops a new beat in 20 seconds" type of thing but this one more or less took an hour. Which is about double of what I had to spare. Again, "It's something".

I'd like to have a more normal week next week, please.

WB2421 It's a Mood

Another quick one, roughly 1:30h in total, I think. It's always fun to try to load up on various sources for noise when building these atmospheric dub techno/dub house tunes. This one is a bit overcompressed I think but I liked the aesthetics of it so I left it as is.

Hopefully, after next week, I will be back to having a bit more time for the WB stuff.

WB2422 Noisy Beach Bop

Still made with relatively little time, but at least I took the time to properly record and edit a more complex lead improv. I did not play this in via a keyboard, though. Instead, when I recorded the adlibs, I just scatted along with the chords and then used "slice to MIDI" in Ableton to turn it into MIDI, it then took quite a bit of editing (I am not a good singer as can be heard in the end of the song, where I offer you a glimpse into the process). 

I started this with a completely different set of chords and then had to go back to some preset chords of the latin variant to turn it around because it wasn't working at all. Then I processed the beats a bit more and was reminded of the Underdog Remix of Risingson by Massive Attack. The switchup in that remix is obviously much more refined, but I liked the idea of going double tempo in the middle of the song.

WB2426 Sand In My Backpack

Another quick, sub 3 hours track, as I still can't muster the energy to have multiple sessions over the week. Things do get better, but it all takes time.

WB2444 Ultra Fruit Dub

When playing around with Pigments presets, I came across this lovely lush pad that instantly reminded me of Goldies "Timeless". This track is clearly inspired by Timeless, one of my all time favourite drum and bass songs. It is still a weekly beat so it lacks a lot of the finesse and the storytelling that makes Timeless so compelling, but I think it works for a tribute of sorts.

WB2445 Callback

Again, bit of a weird one, it was quite exhausting to try to turn this into something that feels like it would work. I am not super happy about the weird pattern lengths which I was hoping made the thing more interesting.

Mid session I changed the drums from a more trap/dubstep halftime affair to these uptempo garage beats (that's also when the bass changed completely) and I still think the track is missing some additional elements, but I'm done with this one for now.

WB2446 Those Stabby Chords

Had very little time this weekend, so I thought it might be time for another low effort lofi track. Quite happy with the result, took me about an hour net.

WB2447 Klimperei

90's Drum and Bass vibes. Been listening to a lot of this stuff recently, mostly stuff like Photek, the Metalheadz compilation, etc. Could do with a bit more variation but this is weeklybeats after all.

WB2448 In Your Love

Testing out a bunch of new FX, (new to this install at least), including Valhalla Supermassive, XLN's RC-20 and a few others. Quite Noisy, but I like it that way (Had to dial down the noises when listening with headphones for the first time...turns out a random, somewhat good mono bluetooth speaker isn't exactly a monitoring setup)

WB2449 Long Range

Had almost no time for music making this week, so this is a beat I had lying around half done from last week and I turned into ... well ... something. I really enjoy these excercises around some chords (To be honest, I often snatch them from Scaler2, I suck at chord building). It started out as an experiment to play around with the recently aquired RC-20 effects processor which is great and gives a ton of control to the various lo-fying techniques. (and also looks really cool)

NGL, I am looking forward to being done with Weekly Beats for this time. It was fun, but also really exhausting sometimes.

WB2450 Boom Clack

My week turned out to be an absolute emotional roller coaster (with a preliminary good ending) but it left me almost no time for this beat. I have, again, no idea what this is. It's something.

One week to go.

WB2451 Silver Stripes

I had a bit more time this week and so I worked on and off on this. The weekend will be a bit more busy, so this is an uncharacteristically early upload.

It's a straight techno banger, no prisoners taken. It took a while to get everything together in the mix, but I am quite happy with it.

WB2452 Self indulgence

First track released after Weekly Beats. This time I've been experimenting with some more Dilla style beats.

Ambiance by newlocknew on Freesound (https://freesound.org/people/newlocknew/sounds/782297/)

Vaulty

After listening to the tune again, I found it to be one of the best pieces of music I ever created - And that's why I wanted it to be on soundcloud.

I made this tune around 2000 in Heidelberg (stayed there for 6 months on an internship).

(This track is now part of my "Blue Triangles" album available on bandcamp.)

Reeboatgnist

Just do it.

A rage track inspired by dumb people.

Wear Your Bloody Mask

Our monthly livestream this time had some deep dub vibes.

half/byte

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