My Little pony Música

Download for free at Bandcamp: https://psfmer.bandcamp.com/track/hice

Felt like making some fast techno thing with like really tight kicks and percussion to give it a really fast pace. Also tried a polyrhythm thing which I often hear in techno. I tried figuring out what sort of polyrhythm it was but I'm not versed enough in the theory to determine such haha. Also I find it rather hard to make a groove with tempos like this, so I settled with a really simple one using a delay trick with the hihats. Overall had a very fun time making this.

The whispering you hear in the background is actually the entire conversation the M6 had on a train, about whether fluttershy is a tree or not.

Hice

Figured it was time to make some G5 stuff, so I decided to try something new. Sampled a bunch of lines and characters from the movie, and also used some AI generated lines courtesy of 15ai. The percussion and rhythms in this are afrobeats-styled and I find them to be quite groovy. By now, you'd have realised that I love lots of emphasis on sub frequencies and groovy drums, and I think there was plenty of that in here haha. Highly satisfied with one, and I'm especially proud of how that snare is sitting in the mix. I made this song in two days so I could submit it for Race 38 of Dustcar.
credits

Twilight Sparkle voice generated by 15.ai

Unicorn Attack

Grab this track for free: https://psfmer.bandcamp.com/track/dreamstate (press $0 after pressing buy)

Pipp has nightmares about her inner self.


Time for some halftime drum and bass. It was interesting to try and get the feel and 'quickness' of standard dnb track on a halftime rhythm. Not sure if it worked out or not, but it was very fun to make. I sampled Pipp's voice from that podcast thing that's supposed to help you fall asleep as you listened to it. I don't know about you, but some parts sounded a little scary to me if taken out of context, with a healthy dose of reverb on it. So I decided to construct a dark vibe song around those vocal lines. 

This track started out as a deep dubstep concept, and I intended to submit it to p@d zenith. But I soon realised it was really hard to make without everything sounding too empty or too busy. Needed more practice in that department. So I ditched it and converted the track into the current halftime dnb idea. Halfway through I hit a creative wall and decided to take a break from it. Ended up not submitting a solo track to zenith at all. But last week I fired up this project again and finished it up. Better late than never right?

Artwork by myself.

Dreamstate

PSFMer - Dreamstate

Get this track for free on Bandcamp: https://psfmer.bandcamp.com/track/zone

Second installment of my techno learning journey. I have learned a lot since my first techno track, and I hope this one did better.

Big thanks to alias and Certedia for technical and creative feedback!

Some reflection/rambling:

After listening to my first techno track again after a couple months, I realised that I've made some pretty big mistakes. I didn't have a clear vision of what flavour of techno I wanted to go with, so it ended up being a giant mishmash of ideas thrown together without much coherence. Also, there wasn't much sense of groove in the first track. I had an open hihat dominating the higher frequencies and seemingly drowning out other elements. The overall mix sounded somewhat muddy in the low end, and highs sounded kind of pinched and congested.

In this track, I sought to address those problems. I had a good idea of what kind of style I was going for, which was the sort of dark and repetitive techno found on labels like Polegroup. I studied and listened to a bunch of tracks and they seem to have a strong focus on rhythm and abstract synthetic sounds. And despite the tracks having the same repetitive motifs throughout, they never sound like they stagnate because there is always something changing every 4 or 8 bars. It can be something as simple as introducing a continuous loop of 16th note hihats, or automation of filters so that elements seem to phase in and out of the track smoothly. To address the groove problem, I added more rhythmic elements with changing velocities, like shakers and some syncopated percussive elements in the low mids. I feel like this was somewhat successful. As for the overall mix, I made sure to leave/make space for each element in the spectrum. Also made use of some sidechain compression on the hihats and shakers so that they make space for the main offbeat hihat.

Overall, I think I did a slightly better job for this attempt. I checked the final mix on Tonal Balance Control and it seems to be ok in terms of tonal balance while comparing to reference tracks. Learned that I should be making ample use of stereo tools to create interest (autopan etc). Also learned that adding gentle saturation on every bus/certain elements will stack up to create a richer and fuller sound and save some headroom.

Zone

Grab this and many quality tracks for free at the Ponies at Dawn Bandcamp >> https://poniesatdawn.bandcamp.com/album/eclipse 

Aaa I managed to get accepted in Ponies at Dawn once again, what an absolute honour!! Thanks so much to the P@D crew for putting the album together!

Really loved how this track turned out. Recently found out some new production techniques from some producers I really like (QZB, Monty et al.) and applied those while making Sublunar. Stuff like making nicely varying shuffles and putting together drum fills to move from one section to another. Really really effective and learned lots more in regards to making this sort of fast clinical dnb. In retrospect, I wish I changed up some of the elements of the track and the mixdown, but ehh

Big shouts to the Drumscape Library crew and Single Purpose in particular for their helpful feedback on the final mixdown!!

Album art by Anticular.

Eclipse

Sublunar

Aspiring horse music producer, amateur SFM pone animator.

Owadio