Weekly Beats technically starts this week, though this non-official track keeps me doing at least one thing per week (since 2014). This one's in line with the all-one-guitar method I've been doing for the last several weeks, and consists of three tracks of PureSalem Mendiola, straight into the converter, put together in Ableton Live. Tracking was two short sessions, and arrangement took about 15 minutes. There's some convolution reverb on the stereo mix, and a bit of high-pass filter on the chordal part. 

Next weekly pieces will be over at https://weeklybeats.com/onezero

Long Arch

Guitar-only instrumental, three tracks of PureSalem Mendiola, no pedals, no picks. For the past year or so I've been doing a lot of these. I like the immediacy of fingers on strings, without a lot of stuff getting in the way.

The title track of my new instrumental collection: https://mauricerickard.bandcamp.com/album/eastern 

$0/pay-what-you-want. Available on streaming soon. All rights reserved.

Eastern

This week was rather busy, but I still had time to work on a track.  This kind of trip-hoppy thing came together in little bits over the course of the week, starting with my take on a half-heard beat on a radio somewhere.  It seemed close to what I wanted, but got even better when I slipped a few of the drum beats off-grid.  That voice uses single-hit samples of a real kit, and I put down a simple bass with Ableton's Operator.  Two tracks of simple electric piano and one track of simple organ followed, and a vibe track seemed like a nice contrast, too.  

On the spur of the moment (inspired by listening to the Radio Web MACBA interview with John Chowning--it's at http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/john-chowning-/capsula) I decided to add another track of something FM-synthesized, and went with a track of Operator that had different FM values brought in at different times.  In higher registers, it's buzzy and uninteresting, but lower registers brought up this great grinding sound, like a giant bow.  So I kept it in.

I also wanted to dirty up the drum machine line a bit, and bit-reduced it to 8, but right after mixing that didn't seem right, so I put it through a cabinet simulator and bumped up the bit depth to 12.  A few tracks got reverb, and a few got a simple delay, and the whole thing went through the full chain master. 

Title comes from a series of associations: the fact that Indium (atomic number 49) is a soft metal, the general softness of the track, and that grinding noise. 


Soft Grind

Here's one that kind of fought me.  Beginning without a real direction, I put a number of drum beats together, thinking I'd go fast (180+ bpm) and abstract (bit-crushing down to 3 bits), and it seemed promising, but I got tired of listening to the harsh high frequencies, even with them rolled off somewhat above 2K. I tried slowing things down (20 bpm and multiples) and it got a bit more interesting, but still didn't really go anywhere. 

Several more passes added voices--several drum machines (brushes kit--bit-reduced to 8--a line of 808, K3M, 606, hand claps, miscellaneous percussion) a grinding Operator line (removed), some electric pianos (promising), an organ (Operator), and finally a couple bass lines at 140 bpm...which didn't invite any other parts or structure until I brought the tempo down to 96.  Then a few more passes on bass--two basslines again, keeping a few of the 140s, just time-stretched and tweaked--and Res-O-Glas guitar (Reuss Repeater + Vox Wah) brought it into focus. 

Even so, a run-through of 7 or 8 minutes wasn't compelling until I really cut away at the structure.  What we have here is the product of severe editing.  Sends: Drum Room reverb, simple delay, filter delay (emphasizing the highs, like an old tape with filter), Beat Repeat (an edited version of the Fill In The Blanks preset), and Buffer Shuffler (kind of feels like time to take a break from it).

The title is from an early name for (of course) Area 51, a place which doesn't tend to give up its secrets, much like this piece. 

Photo: "Groom Lake and Papoose Lake" by Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA - 2010_08_06_rno-phx-bos_071 Uploaded by PDTillman. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Groom_Lake_and_Papoose_Lake.jpg#/media/File:Groom_Lake_and_Papoose_Lake.jpg

Site II

Forward

Last weekly track of 2015.  This one began with a little arpeggio in my mind, and it runs throughout the piece.  Initially I heard it against something a lot faster and drum-breaky, but for tracking I went with something slower, and that ended up feeling more right.  I tracked a few lines of guitar that worked well together (the two themes, some ornamentation, and a chordal part) and then set everything aside for the rest of the week until Saturday, when I tracked more guitar parts (wah + fuzz, some clean), bass, and a few variations on drums and keys. 

The drum line is Impulse with single hit samples of a kit hit with brushes (except for the crash and toms), going through the Saturator (tweaked Hot Tubes preset).  Electric and Operator are the piano and organ instruments, with four channels of guitar (Res-O-Glas, some direct into the A/D, some through Vox wah, and some through Reuss RF-01).  Most guitar channels got a pass through the Auto-Filter with pronounced drive, and bass was the trusty Epiphone, dry. 

The title comes from the feeling of forward progress--this piece seems slow, but inexorable, and I expect to keep doing these weekly tracks in one place (here?) or another (if weeklybeats.com comes back) starting this week for 2016.

Final stats: 54 tracks (weeks 25 and 33 had alternate versions), five hours and thirteen minutes of music.  Shortest: Week 38 (Cascade) at 4:07; longest: week 25 (Sustain, Long Version) at 15:56.  720MB in 320kbps MP3 form, and a working directory over 10GB (though I have FLAC-encoded some of the final mixes). 


Forward

I thought I'd be getting back into http://weeklybeats.com this week, but it turns out that composition *begins* this week, so with the past week I have an extra piece--week 53 or 2015, or perhaps week 00 of 2016.  I wanted to do something kind of ambient with the piano and Dan Harpole Cistern impulse in the Max for Live convolution delay, and met one of those goals.  Beats emerged (built-in simple drum machine and tabla samples), a simple organ line in Operator and guitar lines appeared (both through the buffer shuffler and just through auto-filter).  Epiphone bass and Moog guitar on top as well.  Send channels include the convolution delay, Corpus (for the resonance on the tabla), a filter delay, and a couple different other reverb spaces (foyer and drum room).  A couple tabla sections got a trick that I've done a few times, as partial very simple patterns that only take up partial measures, to make for long offbeat iterations before coming around to the start again. 

The result...kind of meditative, maybe.  Looking forward to more weekly stuff in 2016. 

Lots of family and work things going on this week, but I found some time for a (hopefully) hypnotic little track.  All MIDI instruments in Live: Impulse (acoustic kit--though that isn't heard directly, hand claps), Drum Rack (MPC), Analog (drone and pad), Electric (melody and bass), Tension (Zheng), and Collision (Vibes).  The impulse kit went through the vocoder to play the Analog synth (a tweaked version of Space Pad with a couple LFOs on the filter cutoff and resonance). Everything got M4L Humanizer and Auto-pan as usual, along with Full Chain Master. 

The vocoder synth channel got loud occasionally, when the resonance went up.  Otherwise, apart from the usuals, not much is going on in-line. Sends: two convolution reverbs (smaller chamber and very large space), filter delay, and that Max/MSP modulation delay network from last week. 

Title comes from the 24 spokes of the Ashok Chakra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashoka_Chakra).

The initial version was a bit crowded between Rhodes and Zheng, so this one's slightly improved. 

Spokes

Mid-week I tracked some drum lines (kit, percussion, handclaps, tabla--because I was listening to Miles's On the Corner a fair amount this week) and two basslines that were pretty satisfying, particularly when one was offset from the other by a quarter note--there was a kind of King Crimson "Discipline" thing going on there. (You can hear them at 55 seconds and 3:19)  It would have been very easy to put some not-really-odd-meter "Discipline"-like melody lines over that...though I didn't want it to tip into not-very-good-copy territory.  So I sat with that for a few days, and then tracked a lot of guitar (Epiphone Moderne)--way more than I could have needed, some of it ok, some not.  In the end, I spread it out over five channels, though not all of it was sounding at the same time.  There's clean guitar, some with wah, some with Reuss RF-01 and wah, mostly rhythmic patterns with a few chordal sections.

To give it some bottom, I added K3M deep kick in places, and for some atmosphere, sparse Rhodes and vibraphone.  To give it even more atmosphere, I decided to add a return channel with convolution reverb going into a delay, and then feeding it back into itself--you can hear that on the cleaner guitar. (This was inspired by reading about Hungry Robot's pedal The Wash.)

Other sends: convolution reverb, filter delay, and beat repeat on the drums for some variation.  This really needs M4L Humanizer on the MIDI instruments, but I ran out of time on that.  Sorting through it all was time-consuming, but I managed to give this a kind of shape just before the deadline.  There are some ideas here, but...it could probably use some humanizer and another editing pass.  Anyway, here we are.
The title comes from association off the fact that it's week 38, and 38 is the atomic number of strontium.  Apparently Acantharea, a group of marine radiolarian protozoa, have (or leave?) skeletons composed of strontium sulfate.  (Here I thought every skeleton was pretty much calcium, but apparently bodies want to treat strontium a lot like calcium.)

Radiolarian

Weekly Beats 2016 track 47, better mix and better arrangement.

Dub Surf

Filtered Noise Source

All we want for Christmas is...bit-crushed to one bit, and downsampled all the way.

U Downsample

Musician, composer, programmer, vertebrate

onezero

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