That thing where you get so carried away adding tracks to a tune that you end up with more than enough for one tune, so you make three versions and then smash them all back together for a 20 minute epic...

Tensed came next once I realised that all of the strings tracks were just too much alongside the synths in Flexed. Swapped out the Bass808 for a double bass, added some long chords and tweaked the hell out of the main riff.

Muscles

Grab it from Bandcamp

Tensed

That thing where you get so carried away adding tracks to a tune that you end up with more than enough for one tune, so you make three versions and then smash them all back together for a 20 minute epic...

All three versions kept the same tempo so I thought I have a go at bringing them all back together, trying to avoid it sounding like just mixing between the three versions by adding/removing layers one by one, and finding great new combinations during the process.

Extended

Leonids De Renard has been gestating for quite a while. It began when a friend (Jon, jokingly known as Renard) sent over a file called "leonids for you.wav", containing some sparkly tinklings he'd made playing around with a Korg synth.  
I add added a baseline and some nice bleepy crushed percussion that came out a bit like a melody and of course, the beats. It was OK, but nothing I felt really happy with so it sat gathering virtual dust on the hard drive for a couple of years.
Then, whilst doomscrolling through Instagram, I saw a video from one of Joshu Doherty/Luke Vibert's I Love Acid parties where the DJ (sorry, can't remember who it was) was playing some truly mental 303 squelchy-ness, dropping the kick in and out making the crowd go nuts. 
I knew then what was missing, so I dug out the file, grabbed the Troublemaker iOS app and converted the baselines into some simple acid riffs - and then got into some virtual knob twiddling, recording some live takes and chopping them up into the '3 flavours of acid', before adding the obligatory 808 kicks over the top.
Leaning into this direction, it seemed like the perfect time to add in the frightfully posh voiceover from an old army LSD research film from the '40s or '50s. Back in the early '90s, I'd also recorded bits of a (landline!) phone call with Jon to my (ancient now, half decent then) Mac and somehow it also included the click of the mouse button which makes a very nice snappy snare substitute, along with some other bits that seemed appropriate too. 

So Jon, if you're out there listening, thank you and I miss you...

Musique Unique Electronique

Leonids De Renard (Three Flavours Of Acid Mix)

Loyal Carnage began with me trying (and failing miserably) to drum along to Loyle Carner's "Hate" from his amazing third album, "Hugo". I tried so many times and never even got close to it, but I did like bits of what I ended up with - at least after I'd quantised the results. 
In the process of fixing my mess, I separated out the various elements and added some effects - the noise gate on the ride was particularly pleasing - and it still kept a whiff of hip-hop.
There were way too many drum tracks in there so I flipped some of them to be bass and lead synths and went from there, editing, tweaking and layering them up to make the melodies.
The breakdown/build up seemed to be missing something, and after adding and abandoning various ideas (including even more drums!) I remembered the little "Frenchapella" from Deee-Lite's "Sampladelic Relics And Dancefloor Oddities" and Lady Miss Keir's voice seemed to fit perfectly over it, building nicely with the music without having to adjust it at all. So I went back through the track and added more little snippets from "Frenchapella" to keep it all in the same vibe.

Loyal Carnage

All hail the maestro Mr John Williams and the master Steven Spielberg...

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was one of my favourite films growing up in the '80s. I loved the sci-fi themes, the breathtaking visuals, and the (somewhat) cheesy effects, but it was the musical aspect that really got me.

The seeds of the finalé with the mothership are sown relatively early on in the film when Francois Truffant's character speaks to the tribal elders in the desert through an interpreter - already starting to break down the barriers of language. He then converts the chant into the famous "5 tones" which are the basis of the 'tonal vocabulary' used to communicate with the aliens at the end of the movie.

I always preferred the way the original chant sounded compared to the 5 tones - almost like it is offset by half a bar, looping at a different point. The choir-like feel of hundreds of voices all coming together in a "Global Communication" - I wonder if that's where Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard got the name of their most famous alias from?

I wanted to try to capture that mood and I dream of bringing it to a huge field in the middle of summer filled with festival goers, all chanting along in unison. 
I started out with the chant, dropping bits in and out, layering different sections - and then built the bass and chords around it.

The original plan was to make the drums build up bit-by-bit, bar-by-bar - kinda like an Underworld epic. However - true to form - I got so carried away sitting behind the kit, having too much fun bashing away, adding fills everywhere, and that just felt right to me in the end so I decided to tidy them up and leave it with a more live feel. Much like the frenzied conversation between the mothership and the scientists at the end of the film.

AR-DA-AR-YA-RE

Fuzzball began life as a tiny little ear worm, courtesy of a certain hairy giant in the middle film of a classic sci-fi trilogy.
It just had a really nice ring to it, so I built a whole track around it - then decided there was too much of the sample itself and removed it from most of the track! But it did inform the melody and remnants of it are in the baselines and sparkly, echoing synths.

It was originally meant to be a drum and bass style track, but at an intimate gig a few months back, standing right next to the speaker stack, I was reminded of the awesome breakbeat that I subsequently stole and littered throughout it, drastically altering the vibe - but for the better I think.

And I can thank the hairy giant's best friend for naming the track for me too...

Genrematic - EP

Fuzzball

Buy on Bandcamp

The Three Ts is all about me playing around and learning how to play my new Novation LaunchKey workstation...
Tinkling the ivories
Tapping the beats
Tweaking the knobs 
As well as using the cheat mode chords and scales to help create the most melodic track I've ever made. 

I thought the electric piano was the perfect preset to use for this and I basically just played it live with very little practice, learning what worked as I went along and finding out the nice little hooks bar-by-bar. 
Of course, there was plenty of quantising and velocity variations to fiddle with afterwards, and I moved a few bits around afterwards to help with the flow into the breaks.
It was the same for the 808 baseline, playing it live and getting a feel for the ups and downs as I followed along with the other tracks, then tidying it up a bit afterwards.
I had so much fun tweaking the knobs on the buzzy synth, really pushing the cutoff, resonance and LFO to create some mental sounding variations, but in the end they were too much for the rest of the vibe so I had to tone them down a lot.
The drums were also played pretty much live on the Launchkey's pads, but then split into defined sections and copy/pasted along the timeline, before chopping them up again to add in the breaks and fills. Tried very hard to keep them in check this time and not using the V-Drum kit certainly helped stopped them getting too crazy!

For the 'Short Lesson', I took out one 'verse' and removed most of the intro and outro. Still like it, but I think I prefer the full version.

The Three Ts [Short Lesson]

The Three Ts (Short Lesson)

The Three Ts is all about me playing around and learning how to play my new Novation LaunchKey workstation...
Tinkling the ivories
Tapping the beats
Tweaking the knobs 
As well as using the cheat mode chords and scales to help create the most melodic track I've ever made. 

I thought the electric piano was the perfect preset to use for this and I basically just played it live with very little practice, learning what worked as I went along and finding out the nice little hooks bar-by-bar. 
Of course, there was plenty of quantising and velocity variations to fiddle with afterwards, and I moved a few bits around afterwards to help with the flow into the breaks.
It was the same for the 808 baseline, playing it live and getting a feel for the ups and downs as I followed along with the other tracks, then tidying it up a bit afterwards.
I had so much fun tweaking the knobs on the buzzy synth, really pushing the cutoff, resonance and LFO to create some mental sounding variations, but in the end they were too much for the rest of the vibe so I had to tone them down a lot.
The drums were also played pretty much live on the Launchkey's pads, but then split into defined sections and copy/pasted along the timeline, before chopping them up again to add in the breaks and fills. Tried very hard to keep them in check this time and not using the V-Drum kit certainly helped stopped them getting too crazy!

I also made a 'Short Lesson', where I took out one 'verse' and removed most of the intro and outro. Still like it, but I think I prefer this version.

The Three Ts

After 8 is a kinda cover version of a track a bunch of friends and I made on an old Atari ST nearly 30 (yikes) years ago. We put it all together in one evening, with everyone chipping in a chord here or a break there. At the time, we were really into Trance - Rising High Records, Harthouse, Tribal Gatherings and so on, so that influence was definitely present in the original.

At the end of the evening we all got a copy of it bounced down to a C90 tape and mine was certainly on heavy rotation in my Beetle's tape deck. But times change and eventually I would soon reach the point where I had no hardware that could play it anymore, so I made the effort to rip it into the computer a few years back before it was lost for good.

The tape was very warped and worn out by this point, so the quality was terrible. When I decided to try and recreate it, I was relying on my memories of it, much more than the mp3. The drums in particular were very muffled and sounded a bit 'crushed' so I decided to bring some of that through to the new version, but also adding more variations and fills.

I kept the simple pluck sound and chords pretty much the same, but extended and accentuated them more as the track builds up.
The synth strings are a reinterpretation of some sparkly stuff that I might have imagined as it was buried so deep in the muffled tape recording. And I'll admit that the acid-sounding synth was a total fluke I found whilst flipping through the presets trying to match something from a long ago musical memory.

After 8

The gong being bonged here is actually a fire pit being tapped with a stick by my wonderful wife while we were on a little 'cabin in the woods' retreat with Unyoked over the summer. The click/snare/rimshot sound is taken from a burning log popping and there's also another gong sound in there that is actually the sound of something on a train cooling down that I noticed whilst waiting for it to leave the station a while back.

When preparing the fire pit sample, a harp seemed like the perfect instrument to accompany it and so that became the main melody, with an arpeggiated rhythm underneath it. From there the spacey chords were added, with a cheeky little 303 accent to round out the sound.

And I actually managed to keep the drumming in check this time...

GongBong

Me and Phil playing around with his Moog Mother 32, twiddlin' those knobs to get the acid flowing, backing it up with a Modal D, some Modal 15 chords and (several) Roland 909 patterns, adding flavour with a bunch of vocal snippets, then cranking it up to 11.

Maximal Tendencies

Mother Lambe

My entry for the TrackLib "Make the Next Iconic Flip" competition.
Samples taken from "Tinitini" by Nyame Bekyere and Seaboy from Ghana, originally released in 1973.
https://www.tracklib.com/music/artists/nyame-bekyere/tinitini

For this competition I really wanted to try for an afrobeat kinda vibe and after searching through the available songs on TrackLib I settled on this amazing tune from Ghana. I was hooked by the drums and especially the fills, but I couldn't believe my luck when they sang "Afrofunky" halfway through it! So that became my hook, along with the rest of the vocal parts. I separated the various parts, chopped them up and rearranged them along the timeline, together with a nice chord that I've repeated throughout the track.

After that I tried not to listen to the original so that I could create my own baseline and melody parts using a 'real' bass guitar together with a couple of clavs and synths with the Roland Juno plug-in. Then I drummed along to it, adding some extra patterns and beefing up the fills before adding a chopped-up bongo topper also from TrackLib.

Afrofunky

This one started out with the beat which was originally built for another track, but it was not needed there in the end. I'd just joined Roland Cloud and was playing around with the Juno plug-in and fell in love with it almost immediately. It was something about the amazing difference in the sounds it can make by just changing the velocity of the notes.

I found the arppegiated synth (Orion's Belts) and the chords (SY Anthrax) then laid down some simple sequences, and sent it as a demo to my niece who is studying Music for her A-Levels and is already an amazing multi-instrumentalist. I asked her to see if she could come up with a funky bassline to go with it, and after a couple of key/scale changes she sure delivered.

I worked on the arrangement and then we recorded a couple of takes with her playing the bass live into the laptop. From there it was just a matter of chopping up the versions and finding all the best bits - no quantising required! I dropped another Juno preset (MegaBass) underneath it in a few places and then spent ages trying to find a lead to do it justice before realising that, of course, the bass was the lead. So I just added in a couple of freestyling melodies following her lead with the Anthrax synth instead.

Constant Time

A visit to the excellent Korg exhibit at the Musical Museum in Brentford gave birth to Korgin. A whole room dedicated to Korg synths, including one built into the wall that was used to teach Japanese school kids how synthesisers work, an all chrome Prologue that looked like it must have belonged to Daft Punk (but probably wasn't) and of course classics like the MS-20.

At one end of the room there were a bunch of hands on demo units including the Volca range, a MicroKorg and a Minilogue. After checking with the curator I plugged in my laptop and had a play around with as many as possible, recording the random outputs of preset pattens and jams, with plenty of knob twiddling on top.

When I got home, I listened back to it all, discarded half of it and chopped the rest up into what became Korgin. Everything in the track comes from that session at the museum apart from the 707 kick.

Korgin

Two hours of mellow deep house summer vibes to soundtrack your sun drenched BBQs, lazy afternoons at the seaside, or Ibiza morning after recovery sessions...

Some new stuff, some old stuff, some classics inspired by Bicep's Chroma in the Park and a retro Darren Emerson set. Featuring a double dose of Dusky, a sprinkling of magic from Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard and finishing off with a cheeky Roisin reprise.

As the late, great Roy Ayers said, "Everybody loves the sunshine..."

0:00:00 - The Rhythm of Life Commandments - Sammy Davies Jr. as Big Daddy from “Sweet Charity”
0:00:22 - St. Germain - What’s new?
0:04:22 - Maceo Plex - Stay High Baby
0:10:20 - Atjazz & Fred Everything - Back Together (Fred Everything’s Lazy Days Original)
0:15:10 - Barry Can't Swim - Sunsleeper
0:18:02 - Four Tet & Ellie Goulding - In My Dreams
0:22:10 - Simulis - Holding Pattern
0:27:24 - Singer and the Instruments - Afrofunky
0:31:04 - Enmeshed - Rose Valley
0:36:56 - Justin Robertson - Sunshine Whatever
0:41:11 - Ian Pooley - Sundowner
0:46:22 - Bicep & Hammer - Dahlia
0:52:48 - Sasha / Emerson - Scorchio (Full Length Version)
0:57:27 - Gat Decor - Passion (Naked Mix)
1:01:51 - Drum Club - Sound System (Underworld Mix)
1:08:49 - Bassfort - Last Night
1:15:21 - Hot Chip - How Do You Do? (Todd Terje Remix)
1:19:50 - Wamdue Kids - Echos & Instruments
1:26:36 - The Beloved - The Sun Rising (Mark's Deep House Mix)
1:31:46 - amillionsons- Misti Blu (Schmoov! Mix)
1:36:56 - Global Communication - The Way (Secret Ingredients Mix)
1:44:40 - Dusky - Lost In You (Herbert's Lost Dub)
1:51:41 - &Me & Black Coffee - The Rapture, Part III
1:56:34 - Dusky - Skin Deep (Global Communication Remix)
2:01:58 - Jeigo - Pearl Leaf
2:07:09 - Roisin Murphy - Crazy Ants Reprise

This one was kind of a companion piece to my recent mix for the Feel My Bicep Discord Mixtape series - I selected so many great tunes for it and these are some of the ones that didn't really fit with that vibe. Check it out:
https://soundcloud.com/fmb-discord-mixtape/fmb-discord-mixtape-007-discotechnological

summervibes

A bunch of my fave tracks from Bicep's CHROMA shows over the last few years, plus some others that fit the bill, 140bpm all the way.

"Biceptasy" photo by DubsDaly1 and named by Jakewef from the Bicep Discord Community 

00:00:00 - Floating Points - Vocoder (Club mix)
00:05:32 - Special Request - Shellshock
00:09:25 - Ineffekt - Long Sleeves
00:13:33 - X CLUB - Desire To Stay
00:16:58 - Effy - Pitched
00:19:42 - Clara La San - Let You Go (V$T Speedgarage Flip)
00:23:23 - Little Simz - Torch (Canary Yellow & Next To Blue Edit)
00:25:25 - Simian Mobile Disco & Beth Ditto - Cruel Intentions (Joker Remix)
00:28:38 - Joy Orbison - Flight FM
00:30:56 - Weval - DOPAMINE (On Acid)
00:36:17 - Cameo Blush - Head Knocker
00:38:54 - Bicep - HELIUM
00:43:15 - Singer and the Instruments - Fuzzball
00:46:26 - Underworld - Pearl's Girl
00:52:10 - Spoon Wizard - Spoonkey
00:57:53 - Morgan Wright - Yr Lead
01:00:38 - London Hatred - Charlatan
01:04:30 - Cotto & jyc. - M1 Massive
01:07:43 - The Chemical Brothers - Electronic Battle Weapon 7	
01:12:22 - Biosphere - Novelty Waves (Mark Bell Remix)
01:17:11 - Outputmessage - Glintz
01:20:30 - Twin Complex - Horizon
01:24:56 - Dauwd - Could It Be
01:29:14 - Tarrak & Bicep - Taarsitillugu
01:32:55 - Leftfield - Storm 3000

bicepesque

programmed, sequenced, bleeped and tweaked by Singer and the Instruments at piStudios on the banks of the River Thames.

Buy now on Bandcamp:
https://singerandtheinstruments.bandcamp.com/album/dronegazing

Dronegazing

Evolving Vintage

programmed, sequenced, bleeped and tweaked by Singer and the Instruments at piStudios on the banks of the River Thames
additional live drumming by Andy Barnet

Buy now on Bandcamp:
https://singerandtheinstruments.bandcamp.com/album/dronegazing

Early Morning Sea Helix

programmed, sequenced, bleeped and tweaked by Singer and the Instruments at piStudios on the banks of the River Thames.

Intros, Outros, and the Beats Between

Lost Kontrol

music to listen to, mostly made without any singing and not really with any actual instruments either...

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