Continuing with the generic titles, I bring you “Beat Oriented.” When people ask me what kind of music I write, I usually end up drawing a line between “serious” music and “beat oriented.” This sketch falls right in the middle of the latter category.
I didn’t know it would end up this way when I started, but in a way it’s a retro track, bringing back ye olde sounde of 1997 - 98. There’s definitely a lot of Propellerheads in there along with Chemical Brothers. With the tempo cracked cranked up to 152 bpm, it’s a little bit drum & bass as well. Hopefully there’s a little bit of me lurking about.
The main percussion track is an acoustic drum kit which I just played a standard 4/4 beat at 120 bpm. A little boring, so I thought I’d see what happened if I sped it up. Sort of nice, but very busy since the snare rang pretty long. I played with the amplitude envelope of the sampler plug-in (Logic’s EXS24) until it had the right punch (effectively cutting the sound short before it had a chance to play the whole sample). That was fun, playing with that setting while the track played, so I recorded an automation track while doing that. That gave it a nice organic constantly changing texture, so I added some more automation of other parameters, including the attack time (which makes it sound almost reversed), and the filter cutoff and resonance. Since these parameters affected the kick and hi-hat as well, the whole drum track changes quite a bit as it progresses. I also added a bit crusher, and automate the bypass on it so that in select places the drums go very lo-fi. Cliché? Yes. But fun nonetheless. It’s just a sketch, so why not go with it?
I knew right away that I wanted that cheesy ’70s cop show bass line, so I recorded a clavinet simulation with an auto-wah and some distortion. Crunchy distorted organ was the next logical sound. This procedure continued as I layered sounds and took things away, etc.
The electric guitar at the end is a canned loop, which is there as a placeholder to remind me to record something later. Actually, this whole track is a placeholder to remind me to record something later.
Have fun.
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