This week's track started from a minimal point of view--I'd wanted some synthesized drum lines with slow attack for a kind of lowercase sensibility...but then added some guitar lines with the Res-O, and it acquired a loungey, chill-out kind of vibe. To keep it from becoming a deluge of guitar(y)-ness, I added an inverse gate on the guitar tracks, to catch just the notes in a narrow dynamic range, and cutting out everything else.  I used a similar treatment on a track of fretless guitar, as well, and at the last minute added a return channel of grain delay set to pitch up a fifth, and feed that to a long reverb. 

Everything other than the guitars is done in Live's Analog instrument: kick, snare, flutter, low-mid lead line, and occasional high-q sound effects (two of them).  Other return channels were the usual reverb and delay, and the whole 2-bus went through mild limiting/compression. 

The name comes from the gating and the fact that my kids pointed out that the fretless waveforms looked kind of like manta rays. 

Manta Gate

I got an early jump on this week's track, anticipating a tight schedule.  Given the recent beat-oriented work, here's a long-tone, beatless piece as a contrast. Three tracks of Live's Analog instrument as pads (often with unison offsets and four voices--a mix of sines and filtered sawtooths), with two Simpler tracks of Mellotron samples (choir and string).  I also put down several tracks of sustained Moog guitar, and mixed those in.  Two different reverbs as send channels.  There's a long version at http://www.onezeromusic.com/weekly/index.php/Sustain and a shorter version here. 

Sustain (short Version)

After a music- and travel-filled week, this week's track...is kind of low-key.  A few interlocking drum machines (real kit single-hit samples--through large-room reverb, 606, K3M, and square-wave Vermona) seemed to carry a kind of a groove, and an occasional B3 pad helped.  I put down two basslines (Epiphone on P-bass pickup) and Danelectro baritone, cherry-picked the stuff that seemed to go together, and here we are.  Title from the 26-face irregular solid of this name.

(Image made by en.wiki User Cyp using POV-Ray. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rhombicuboctahedron.jpg#filelinks)

Rhombicuboctahedron

A lesson in discovery, and letting the piece lead you.  I started late this week--Thursday night--and didn't much of a sense of where the piece was going.  I started with an Ableton Tension instrument for a harsh drone (through a return channel of pitched grain delay for atonal melody), added drum parts for Rhythm Ace and Rhythm King samples, and some distorted grand piano.  The result...was kind of like happy Throbbing Gristle.  

I added some guitar lines the next night, and at the very end of the process, grabbed the guitar lead for hand-grounding, and through the ring modulator...it sounded compelling enough that I wanted to throw the rest of the recorded pieces out.   The next session brought a sparse Morton Feldman-like piano line, so I went with that, along with bass through the Redux bitcrush plugin (downsampled to 4-bit).   

Guitar didn't work with that background, so I put both ring mod and clean guitar channels through resonators, and stretched them to 999.99 tempo, some preserving tones, some preserving texture for more audible stretching artifacts.   Final return channels were two grain delays + reverb, one large factory reverb, and a delay channel.  Everything got a little limiting with a mastering effects chain on the stereo master, because the ring mod guitar through the resonator got pretty loud.  

The end result...kinda dark ambient.  Title from the abandoned-factory effect of the final piece, reflecting the rustier Rust Belt vibe of my youth. 

Rust Belt

This week's piece--28th of the year, and my 80th weekly piece overall--is another example of following the thing where it leads, and not imposing a direction on it. I started with the first guitar figure, added to it, added a few more to respond, put in a simple kick drum, and then kept adding little responsive bits.  There are three tracks of guitar (Res-O through a cascaded EHX LPB2ube), two tracks of bass, one track of trap kit, one TR-606, some percussion, and a multi-sine-wave pad playing a major third. It seems a bit fuzzy (one return channel is delay into space-chorus reverb, which puts out some interesting harmonies), but hypnotic.  Title from the imminent New Horizons flyby of Pluto (photo courtesy of NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/new-horizons-last-portrait-of-pluto-s-puzzling-spots).

Distant Places

This week's track started on Friday evening, with a few drum machine tracks (three total: trap kit through mild saturator, TR-606, and MXR drum machine samples) and a track of Live's Electric keyboard instrument--I was hearing something syncopated, but not sure what else to do with it.  I added some guitar lines, and then Saturday's purchase of a Wah pedal added some interesting guitar voices (particularly with the Reuss Repeater Fuzz).  I added some basslines, which pulled it together, and some send channels for further percussion syncopation, reverby ambience, and a granular delay to roboticize some of the electric piano lines. Title from an Ed Ruscha painting--I've lifted a few titles from his work over the years. 

Mind If I

Another follow-the-flow kind of week, with a lot going on, but I did carve out some time to work up some 5/4 and 10/4 percussion tracks, with some sense that I'd put guitar over them.  At first I thought that it'd be harder/krautrock-y, but it ended up a bit funkier.  More percussion tracks came together (seven total, all synthesized in Live's Analog instrument), then a pad (Analog), four (four!) guitar tracks, some with wah, some with Repeater Fuzz and wah, and finally bass.  Kind of an odd, floaty, hot-summer-day track.  And here we are. 

Point

While I had one thing in mind earlier in the week, one night I picked up the Street Klein (a fretless guitar made by Phosphene Audio from scraps of a broken acoustic 12-string), and suddenly I was in ostinato-land.  I ended up putting down a bunch of parts in three different channels with it, and started playing with rhythms in hand percussion voices.  One percussion part seemed to suggest another, syncopated part, and I found myself with two channels of rhythms built from samples of hand claps, two of different hits on an Indian hand drum I have, and one of assorted percussion.  For all those tracks, it didn't seem complete, so I put down three more with the Res-O-Glas, and added one of Ableton's Electric for bass. That's six tracks of guitar.  

Some parts lent themselves to 4/4, some 6/4, some 5/4, and some 7/4 in there, too.  This was a tough one to edit--lots of little pieces that fit together in different ways, trying not to clash, or get too busy, or lose energy. I might have found the right balance, just under the deadline here.  

Two of the Street Kleins got plugins: one the Saturator on Hot Tubes, and one an Amp simulator (starting with the Blues preset).  Res-O went in straght to the board, but on different pickup and tone settings.  I used two reverb return channels (starting from Living Room and Wooden Room presets) and the mastering effects chain on the two-mix.  Title from the Street Klein and the general syncopated busy-but-not-too-busyness of the arrangement. 

Your Street

The recent article* on the 30th anniversary of the Spacemen 3 Northampton gig had me in an S3 kind of mode, and this week's track started with seven tracks of Moog Guitar through the Reuss RF-01 Repeater Fuzz.  I quickly put down seven tracks of drones/pulses at different hard tremolo speeds, and the interaction reminded me of Steve Reich's early process music.  That could have been enough, but the next night I put down three tracks of Res-O-Glas guitar, this time through the EHX LPB2ube to dirty them up, and a soft tremolo with Live's Frequency Shifter set to a very low-frequency ring modulator.  Finally, I tracked bass, finger plucking pedal tones while going through the RF-01 again, without fuzz, at several different speeds. 

Drums were the hardest to get right, since I tracked the initial pulses without any set tempo, but I came up with some that had a kind of groove--though (as sometimes happens), the real 1-beat should have been where I put the 4.  Easy enough to compensate for in Live, but it made some of the edits a bit strange. 

Three return channels, all reverbs: one wooden-room-like (drums and Res-O), one a large room (Moog/RF-01), and one concert hall (some of the Moog tracks). Typical compression/limiting on the 2-mix...and it's a dense one.

One pass-through was eight minutes long, so this one--at just under five--is edited down enough to work...but one could listen to the first part for quite a long time. (Or maybe that's just me.)

* https://medium.com/@noodlepie/a-side-are-your-dreams-at-night-1985-sizes-too-big-e122596968a0

Space Process

I've had Live Suite 9 with Max for Live for a while, but this is the first chance I've had to get into it at a productive level.  I came up with a little sawtooth oscillator with resonant low-pass filter (the excellent-sounding lores~ object in M4L), and played around--first with seven tracks of a simple one, and then three more tracks of a slightly more complex version, with finer tuning of the oscillators. Frequencies used: 10, 20, 40, 80 (doubled; different filter cutoffs and resonances), 120, 160, 360, 480, and 585.35.  All tracks went through auto-pans of different rates with a send channel of medium-large room reverb, and a few went to a cathedral-like reverb.  The 20Hz channel got slowly-increasing auto-pan from 0.05 Hz up to 11.7 Hz, and back down again.  The whole stereo mix needed DC-offset stripped out, so I did that and skipped having to compress or limit.  Double-checking the mix, I decided that a half-speed version would be fun, too, so as a bonus, there's one at http://www.onezeromusic.com/weekly/Saw_You_Up_There_at_Half_Speed.mp3. 

Starting next week, look for new weekly tracks at https://soundcloud.com/onezero


Saw You Up There

Serial band-starter, compulsive music-maker. Also see http://soundcloud.com/onezero

Maurice Rickard