Novembeat 2020: Day 5 - Outpaced

Alright, this one’s fairly straightforward. I wanted to make some DnB, so I made some DnB.

Drumbrute Impact is a lovely analog drum machine with a lot of awesome features and a really industrial sound and I guarantee I’ll be using it a lot more over the course of Novembeat. It’s real fun.

After getting drums dialed in, I took a ringmod bass patch I’ve made (and used repeatedly in my music before) and messed with it a bit to give it some better filter movement with the LFO and the envelope generator, and then ran it through the Digitech Nautila (which, along with the RE-20 Space Echo from Boss, is one of my favorite pedals ever). This gave the bass a lot of stereo width, like most neuro-basses have.

Lastly I took the Keys, dialed in some chords, and ran them through the NTS-1 to drown them in chorus, delay, and reverb to make them super spacey. This worked less well than I’d hoped, but it did work for the most part. A bit of multiband compression in post helped the chords and the bass play nice with each other enough to be able to post.

Novembeat 2020: Day 4 - Zoned Out

So, this one was made using the exact same setup as Friends, but with a slightly different musical approach.

For one thing, I wanted to use something that was a bit less four-on-the-floor in the drums, but that still felt laid back. That was the first thing I dialed in.

Next was the harmony. This was inspired by a segment of a Mr. Bill video I ended up watching the other day where he uses samples from his Discord server to make a track. In particular, there was the section where he mentions “planing” a sample with harmonies in it (in his case it was a Rhodes chord), which is more or shifting the chord shape in the sample up and down.

Now, I do technically have a sampler, but I couldn’t help but feel like that would be too much work. So what I did instead was pull out my Launchkey Mini Mk3, and used Chord Mode on it to take a minor 7th chord (minus the 5th, since the Volca Keys is three-voice polyphonic and not four) and programmed a quick eight-bar sequence on it (because you can do 8-bar sequences now thanks to the sync-rate selection in the new firmware! Thanks, Korg! :D)

Programming the bass was hell, though. for one thing, unlike Friends, using anything that wasn’t a sine or triangle in the bass was overpoweringly loud and would drown out the Keys coming into the Mono Station. Second off, I just struggled to get it working. It took way too long to figure out a sensible bassline.

(But I did figure out a sensible bassline. So there is that.)

Programmed a lead, and then tried to film, and I tired to do the whole moody-lighting thing, but that just ended up…not working. So instead the video looks like it was filmed with a beetroot. But the sound’s fine, at least, and I’m still on track for a perfect Novembeat streak, which is nice, so I’ll take what victories I can!

Novembeat 2020: Day 3 - Friends

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.

Novembeat 2020: Day 2 - pH Balance

If you take two seconds to listen to the track, I bet you can get the general idea behind where the title of this one came from.

First off: the Volca Beats is criminally underrated as a drum machine. It’s actually a decent drum machine, despite all the hate it gets for whatever reason. Just want to put that out there and get that out of the way.

Anyways. Acid bass!

The patch involved here is actually fairly interesting. I was more or less just messing around on the Monologue, and ended up making this odd patch that’s both a kick drum and an acid bass at once.

The acid part’s fairly easy, the Monologue’s got a real squelchy filter if you crank the resonance, and you can run a sawtooth wave through it with some filter movement to get a real nice 303-esque acid bass. That’s exactly what I did here. The one thing to note, is that the way I’m playing with the filter cutoff is through the LFO on the Monologue, not the actual VCF. You can set the LFO to 1-shot, and it will run through a single cycle of the waveshape it’s set to, and then stop. In this case, I have it set to ramp-down, and I’m tweaking with the actual speed of the LFO to keep the filter open for longer or shorter periods of time.

The reason that’s necessary is because I rediscovered the old-school way of synthesizing a kick drum: take a sine wave (or triangle wave, in this case, since that’s the closest thing the Monologue has), and give it a fast pitch-envelope. Boom, instant kick drum. So how did I get this and the acid bass at once?

Well, the Monologue has two oscillators, and a thing I keep forgetting you can target with the envelope generator is only the pitch of oscillator 2. So I can have the first oscillator be my acid bass, and the second be my kick drum, using some clever routing to make both the kick drum sweep and the filter movement for the bass tweakable during the performance.

Everything else was centered around this. The PO-20 is something I’ve been using a lot to try and force myself to be more creative (it’s a thing with many limitations, and I find limitation breed creativity), the NTS-1 plays extremely well with the PO-20 as an FX box (and allowed me to use the chord drone) , and if I’m doing this weird acid-y thing down low with the digital stuff up top, I’m going to want a nice little classic-sounding analog drum box doing percussion (the Volca Beats was practically screaming “Pick me! Pick me!” at that point"), and from there it was all just making a jam that felt right.

I’m definitely using that acid-kick patch late on in something else later on down the line, it’s a lot of fun.

Novembeat 2020: Day 1 - Conquest

Alright, day one!

This one' started with me wanting to use the Monologue a bit more. I’ve felt like I’ve been neglecting it of late, and boy did that prove to be a mistake.

The Korg Monologue holds a special place in my heart, as it’s the first hardware synth I ever bought. I’ve used it on a number of different tracks, it does everything from leads to wonderful synth brass to experimental stuff to really gritty basses.

Speaking of really gritty basses, that’s what I’m using it for here!

So the fun thing about the Monologue is how easy it is for me to sit down and patch something pretty quickly, so I patched a bass here with the right amount of sub and grit to be able to be fun, and sequenced a quick repeating bass to use as a sort of pedal point.

From here, I figured out sone harmonies on the Volca Keys, which I’m learning to love these days. Lovely little box, and the three voices force me to think about slightly simpler harmonies instead of just using 7th chords or 6/9 chords for everything.

Drums were next, sequenced something with the PO-12 Rhythm from Teenage Engineering. This thing was a gift from my mother last Chirstmas, and it’s seen a fair amount of use in my setup. It’s probably jockeying with the Drumbrute Impact for the title of my favorite drum machine in my repertoire. There’s not too much explaining that needs to go on about this bit, the thing’s small but packs a hell of a punch and I used it to lay down a somewhat heavy beat over the current bits and pieces.

The last bit here is I think the part that made things all actually come together, was the idea of using the NTS-1 to double-up on the bass, and to turn on the arpeggiator part of the way through.

Now, the idea here stemmed from a thing I’ve been using in a few different tracks lately, which was in turn inspired by Loopop’s generative MIDI video (specifically the segment about parallel MIDI chains), and that’s setting up a bunch of MIDI FX in nested groups so that I can press one key, and make a lot of other stuff happen. I have a track called Mindspace in the works at the time of writing this where I do this to layer some hand bells samples in this nice rhythmic arpeggiation over a bassline, and I’ve got another jam performance where I do the same thing with the NTS-1, just in a slightly different manner and context. Here, it’s the same concept, only using the octave chord shape, and the VPM oscillator, which is essentially a variant of FM synthesis that gets you some really interesting and inharmonic sounds.

After figuring out my routing, and what needed FX and what didn’t (thank you Korg for making the NTS-1 an amazing little FX box!), and the general flow of the jam in terms of performance, all that needed to happen was the performance. This only took about two or three tries to get right, honestly, and I felt it was a strong start to the challenge.

Novembeat 2020

Hey y’all.

Yeah I’m doing the blogging thing, because some folks convinced me it might be worth my time, and hey, worse comes to worse, I already blab about things on the internet enough already.

Anyways!

For the time being I’m going to be blogging about my thoughts and processes while participating in the musical challenge known as Novembeat 2020.

Novembeat was/is a thing that Paul Starr came up with, where you try and make music once a day (if possible) for the entire month of November, and post it somewhere for people to listen.

(If you want more info, there’s a website at novembeat.com, it’s got an FAQ and a bunch of artists that have participated and stuff.)

Long and short of it, is that it’s Jamuary, but I can use a DAW if I want to. And I might, because I’ve been having a lot of fun with Pigments lately.

Now most folks are in this to see if they can do it, and I’m convinced I can do it. I also participated in Jamuary both this past year and last year, and got a jam in for every day I was involved in the challenge (I only got drawn in halfway in 2019 by the wonderful AA Battery, but I managed to do a jam every day for Jamuary2020). In my case, I’m involved with two main goals:

1. Have a daily goal to get me into (and keep me in) the regiment of making music every day

2. To keep me sane during a period of a lot of uncertainty in life by interacting with other musicians that are also just in this to jam out and have fun.

Now I’m starting this blogging thing three days in, mostly because Kumie started blogging his processes, and convinced Jason Wardell to start blogging his process, and then the two of them both convinced me it might not be a bad idea.

So, thirty days of making things, posting them on the varying social platform places, and then blogging about it here. What can go wrong? :D