Oh boy. Where to start with this one…
I went totally overboard on this.
This started out as a simple idea, based off a previous jam I’d done during a turnaround point in a bout of quarantine depression: process chords through the Mono Station, but instead of using the PO-20 like last time, I decided to use the Volca Keys to get some more precise harmonies by programming the chords I wanted to use.
I also wanted to try making something in a major key, instead of minor, because I’ve mostly been doing things in either really ambiguous key centers (mostly by sticking to 2nds, 4ths, 5ths, and 9ths to keep from giving away whether the scale’s major or minor) or just writing in a blatantly minor key center. So I wanted to mix things up a bit.
I picked E flat major as my scale, figured out my set of chords, and recorded a bassline I liked a lot. And this one in particular was going of a sort of house-ish feel, where I could open or close the release time on the VCA to create a sort of hook that would work really nicely.
Volca Beats came along to make a really basic house beat. It’s house, I didn’t need anything fancy, just something centered on a four-on-the-floor pattern that isn’t boring.
Then I tried to make my melody, and decided to use the NTS-1 as a way to avoid having a lead that was also slaved to the VCA on the Mono Station.
This is where things got out of control.
I hooked up the NTS-1, patched a lead I liked and dialed in some FX, and then patched a simple melodic line.
And then another.
Aaaaand then another.
And then I figured out that I could probably double it up with the second oscillator on the Mono Station for some fun movement at some point, since I’d have one lead playing along with the VCA and filling in the gaps on the Mono Station and the other one in stereo that was totally clean and separated from those shackles.
At this point, I realized I didn’t have just a jam, I had a proper track sitting in front of me. So I’d better get this right.
Cue tweaking the volume on the individual drum parts on the Volca Beats for a more even mix, tweaking the kick drum to sound cleaner, making sure the Volca Keys had decent settings, dialing in the right sort of pulse width modulation on the bassline, and triple-checking recording levels into Logic.
I got the performance done in a single take, which is….really rare. I’m not normally the most proficient performer on a lot of these synths, but somehow I got everything both caught on video and recorded into Logic in one go.
This is one of the few Novembeat jams I did some actual post-processing on. I widened up the sigher ends of the Keys and Mono Station, since…well, everything going through the Mono Station is in mono (almost like it’s in the name), and I added a bit of parallel compression on the Volca Beats to fatten it up a bit, and then sidechained everything except the NTS-1 to the kick (because it’s house, of course you need that pumping sidechain compression).
I don’t think I’ve had this much fun doing a live performance for the channel since…probably XIV this past Jamuary. I still have the MIDI and the sequences saved on everything, I might end up polishing this up further, or doing an extended cut of it later. I’m actually really happy with how things came out.