Eighth day of Techno

Day eight....
dayeightdayeightdayeight....

I think I'm getting pretty deep into cheese territory. I don't know. I can't really tell. Sometimes, I get in that zone where I'm overly critical of my own ideas, and keep second guessing everything I'm doing. I was fully doing this all morning, and couldn't come up with anything I liked. The weird thing is as I was working on this, the things I hated the most at the start, became the qualities I loved the most by the end.

I was thinking it would be cool to use some super abstract percussion on this track, so I pulled out some of the first samples I ever made in Logic. Some pings off a Coke can. I dropped a bunch of these into Battery, as well as some Kicks and Snares, and a couple of other percussion. I didn't end up using all the Coke pings, but I definetly got a few of them in there.

After that a spent a few hours looking for something inspiring, and couldn't get anything, so I busted out the turntable, and started looking for some interesting needle drop samples. Just some quick little noises hoping that that would give me something to get excited about. I found some nice sounds, but they weren't getting me anywhere.

So I went back to the synths, and pulled up a really nice Jupiter 8 sample in Omnisphere, and came up with something that clicked. I tracked it, and immediately doubled it on a Piano. So, yea... it's a bit cheesy, but it was something. And it has something to it. Maybe a bit melodramatic, but I'm kind of into it. I was also really trying to stop editing myself at this point. I also want to make sure all the tracks don't sound the same. It would be easy for me to just write a bunch of loud ass tracks. That's sort of what I'm inclined to do.

Then I went back to those needle drops I'd sampled, and they were in key, and TOTALLY fit.! The track immediately started coming to life. I then did a cool portamento rif (See video) on the oberheim, and it started sounding pretty awesome. I just figured out this video thing. Kinda neat! The sync went all out when I uploaded it to Youtube. Boo.


For the last year, I've been really studying a lot of this stuff on a super micro level, paying attention to sounds, and production techniques, but I haven't spent as much time studying the bigger picture of arranging. I come from a song/band background with verses and choruses, and it's awesome how this stuff doesn't follow that at all. So, I started working more towards builds and drops.
I spent a lot of time working out the piano parts in the beginning and the break in the middle. Again, it would be easy to have every track just run into each other back to back, but I feel like that would fry the listener after too long.

I'm pretty stoked that this project has really streamlined my workflow with my synths. They used to be such a pain to use, with the Midi, the CV, Logic's Latency, and their own little quirks, but I'm getting really fast incorporating them into my workflow.
Eigth Day of Techno by Spell 'n Math