Having some fun and doing things a little differently (at least for me) on this one. 

Afrofunky uses a licensed sample via TrackLib as they were running a competition (which I didn't win). I picked a track from Ghana called Tinitini by Nyame Bekyere and Seaboy to use as my starting point and had a lot of fun with it.

Constant Time features live bass played by my supremely talented niece, wrapped around a bunch of Roland Juno synths.

Mother Lambe is my first foray into hardware synths, with me and my friend Phil messing around with his Moog Mother 32 to create the bassline.

And finally, Korgin, is a full on hardware session, made almost entirely from recordings of Korg synths at the Musical Museum in Brentford - chopped up and layered over a 707 kick drum.

Grab it from Bandcamp

Maximal Tendencies

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.

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

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

Maximal Tendencies

Singer and the Instruments