I was playing around with some Portal
effects last night, on a really basic chord progression (Cmin, Ab, Gmin/Bb), and wound up with a cool, glitchy sort of arpeggio (Track 13). I decided to try and build around that, and this is the result thus far. It's still VERY rough; the drums (specifically the snare) are way too intense, and once again perhaps to 'acoustic' sounding, so I'll play around with some stuff and see what happens there. I also added quite a few other layers, mostly using the Seaboard and ROLI MPE Synths, which, generally I like here, though some of them need editing, or perhaps just to be removed and replaced entirely. I also recently downloaded a free pack of MPE presets, which has instruments for lots of synth plug-ins, including Serum, Pendulate, and Vital. I used two of the Vital presets here, with Track 5 providing the chords which is just a 5 bar loop for the whole tune (1 bar of Cmin, 2 of Ab, and 2 of Gmin). I think the break needs to be longer, and maybe have a filter that cuts off some of this pad, just cause it does repeat the same for 2:30 minutes so far, and that's a bit too repetitive for me. Track 6 is the bass, another synth from those Vital MPE presets. Vital synths have multiple oscillators, and this bass sound had an additional sort of buzzy, rhythmic thing on top, which I removed. This instantly made it a lot heavier, and fit quite a bit better. The bass plays the line pictured next to this paragraph, accenting our chord changes, but also adding some movement with those lines down to F and Eb.
Track 5, Vital MPE Presets, Basic Chord Progression
Listen to Newcomer here...
Tracks 8 and 9 (grouped together) both use the Steven
Slate Drums demo, specifically the hats and snare sounds. These drumkits are great, as there is such a variety of sounds for each piece of the kit, allowing you to get some cooler sounds compared to a more basic Ableton kit. As I mentioned before, snare is way too loud and bassy, and probably needs to be effected a little to make it more interesting. Track 10 was audio bounced from that drum group, which I effected with Portal, then chopped off the low end, and used Ableton's beat preserve tool to get some weirder, background percussion sounds. Track 11 is just a 909 kit, and provides the kicks. Track 12 adds a little chord tone line, which has a long release, so the notes sort of bleed over each chord change. This wound up working really well, though it was entirely unintentional. Tracks 13, 14 and 16-18 all are used at various points to add little synth fills, mostly done around the line in Track 12. Track 19 is a lead part; I like the progression, but the Seaboard MPE effects wound up getting messed up at some point, so it's all choppy and strange, so I'll need to fix that, or replace it with something cooler. The only track we missed is Track 15, which uses a ROLI FX sound to get those little digital bleeps, used only 2x in the song. At these points, on the last snare hit of those sections, the BPM of the track also suddenly drops from 120 to 70, only until the start of the next bar, elongating that rest, which turned out to be a pretty dope little effect. Overall, this is still a VERY rough idea, and needs to ironed out, but I like it, and think there's potential, so we'll see where it goes!
Hope you dig the beginnings of this idea!
Check out my new E.P. numerical here.
Click here to listen to all of my Splinterlands inspired songs!
⚔️ JOIN THE OFFICIAL SPLINTERLANDS TELEGRAM ⚔️