I saw a bit on treehoppers on a david attenborough programme.  The sounds            they make are astounding, so varied and full of life and personality, so I found a bunch of samples on the internet.  I also haven't worked with a breakbeat sample before, so I got one, and cut it up in to its seperate elements.  I feel like 140bpm is a good breakbeat tempo to let to drums sing, so started writing a track at that tempo for it.

The bassline was made on the prophet 12, which has some great capabilities to adjust the frequency envelope modulation.  I wanted it to be powerful in the low end up have some space in the top end, so split it into two tracks and gave the top end some reverb and phase to create that extra movement on top of the filter envelope modulation.

Chords were written on the moog matriarch, we has some lovely natural movement in its sound from the analogue oscillators and filters.  I love the ping pong delay as well, which has tonnes of character.  I feel like it added to a natural sound rather than that polished edm synthetic sound; natural being the theme of the track.  

The high end guitar sounding riff was written on the korg minilogue, adding loads of extra reverb and delay, as I feel like the minilogue needs a bit of extra processing to make it sound less synthetic.  

Also wrote a happy little acidic riff on the doepfer a-100 for the middle section, with an arpeggi from the oberheim ob-x8.  

All sounds were given quite low filter frequencies and a bit of movement on the pitch to make them sound a bit more natural.

Synthesized percussion from the jomox alphabase was mixed together with the breakbeat sample.  Manually added a bit of shuffle/swing as well to give a more natural sound to the rhythm hits, rather than just 100% atomically on the beat.

Interspersed treehopper samples throughout the more quiet bits, with a sample of some rain in the background to set the scene, and that's about it!

Treehoppers

Rob Joyce