DARK

𝘧𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦

Rich Kids

Rich Kids (feat. thea wang)

Making music could be stressful. Making this project is like constantly bashing my brain with sonic weapons. But I'm satisfied with the result (more mixing is needed though, and I have to extend this track beyond 3min). The entire process is trial and error. I try out different instruments, samples, effects and see whether they work or not, and slowly the music develops. In the process, I played around with my sampled Kontakt instrument that is designed to produce an array of industrial sounds. This turned out to be the metallic percussion that entered the song after the first drop. I also layered a Massive Hihat in the song. I'm tired now, I need some exercise.

Demon

Kon Boogie's rapping was awesome, from the moment I heard the vocals, I knew the general direction of the remix. I want to fuse the old-school rapping with contemporary glitch-hop.
I used the samples from a stems pack and warped each using a different warp algorithm. The first technique I used was chopping samples inside of simpler, I took the intro section of the vocal and manually adjusted the slices. I played the chops to the beat and used this chopped version of the vocal as my intro.
The second technique I used was rather simple, I isolated a section of the vocal, warped it using the complex pro algorithm, and pitched the vocal down. I really enjoyed the complex pro's pitching function because it does such an amazing job at preserving the original sample's tonality. This is one of the features that makes me really like using Ableton, in FL studio, the pitching functions always leave a sample feeling digital.
Finally, I added effectors on different elements of the track using Glitch2 and Raum (Native instrument's reverb plugin).

Glitch Rap

Experimental house music. The melodic element was created by reversing an orchestral string sample.

Gilded Age

"Hollow" is a fusion of rap and deep house, with an emphasis on vocal production and sound design. My inspiration for this track came from an improvised live performance on my MIDI keyboard. The song’s production process explores the Ableton session view’s loop-based production capabilities. 

Production:
Improvised melodies and chords for 10 minutes, then laid out the song structure using loop performance. Sidechain, reverb, and other audio manipulation techniques are utilized to make the vocal fit the groove of the 4-on-the-floor kick drum.

Hollow

Listen as intense cinematic soundscapes transform into glitching electronic bombardment. Composed at the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian War, this Midtempo Bass music expressed my growing concern for military escalation. 

Production:
The first cinematic section consists of layers of synthesized drones, reverberated sirens, and distorted reese bass. The introduction of 2 synth lead arpeggios, combined with white noise risers and accelerating drum beats, created an effective buildup. After the apex of the buildup, all previous music elements are suddenly removed, allowing the heavy bassline and tom drum roll to punch through the mix. Then enter a barrage of distorted glitches, gated electric hum, and thumping kick drums.

Dystopia

What happens when kankyo ongaku meets musique concrete? "Inorganic Nature" explores the juxtaposition and harmony between environmental recordings, sonic artifacts, sustained soundscapes, and spontaneous microsounds.

Production:
Field recordings were gathered during one spring outing to the local botanic park. Microsound collage created in the Max/MSP software, where I utilized frequency modulation, bit-crush, comb filter, and allpass filter to transform simple sine waves into complex microsounds. Ambient soundscapes synthesized using MassiveX. Postprocessing (panning, EQ, compression) added in Ableton Live.

Inorganic Nature

Prisoner's Cinema

DATA

Tainy, Bad Bunny - MOJABI GHOST

The Forgetting Curve

my beat from Andrew Huang's 4 Producers 1 Sample Challenge

video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvKY_DnM1PA

Glitch Rap

Shu Xu

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