Weekly Beats 26 (Signing Off)

Week 26 (Signing Off)

This week measures the halfway point for the year and the last track in my Spring collection which will be up on bandcamp as an album for downloading soon. The aim for the spring collection was to release a track each week that contained at least one instrument with a coiled spring as its sauce (namely Guitar or Piano) and I achieved it.

Signing off was a way to send off things with a more ambient sound something of a pallet cleanser before the summer collection which will roll on next week. Have a listen bellow:

Weekly Beats 25 (Shadows On The Silver Screen)

Week 25 (Shadows On A Silver Screen)

During this week I got hooked on the repetitive dark bass line that opens this track. Yet again teenage engineering OP1 provided the background to most of the synth noises and an electric guitar crashes into the track halfway through turning the whole thing into something new.

Weekly Beats 23 (filament)

week 23 (filament)

This week was a bit of a struggle. I almost came to the completion of a track by Wednesday but didn’t like where it had gone. However instead of scrapping the whole thing I stripped down and sampled all the individual instruments to the core elements I liked.
I then added these fundamental samples to a collection of drum racks in ableton live and by triggering the samples with ableton push created a new track from the core ideas of the original one. The majority of sounds are from the OP1 with a sampled 909 for the drums and guitar played by myself and then chopped up for the new track:

Weekly Beats 22 (Standardised)

week 22 Standardised

After several weeks of a more structured fare I decided to go back to something more repetitive and hypnotic. The basis of this track was made using several of the sequencers of Teenage Engineerings OP-1 but sending the midi information out over usb to some synths in Reaktor.

Tombola was a key sequencing element from the OP1 which gave me little control as to the rhythm of allot of the instrumentation giving the track a rather woozy feel. Once the randomized base of the track was there I then added guitar and bass instrumentation, trying to follow the timing of the piece before finally adding drums to a fixed tempo. The aim was to create something that is quite hard to pick up on as the instruments drift in and out of each other and give a mixed feeling of Loss, hopelessness and tiredness:

Weekly Beats Week 20 (Indigo)

Week 20 Indigo

Last week I made a jaunty little track which was based heavily on the chord structures surrounding the piece.

The original idea was to come up with the basics of the piece on piano at first and then expand those ideas to multiple instruments. My thought process behind this was to come up with a track that was orientated towards a more complex structure than my usual works outside of my solo piano pieces.

Weekly Beats 18: (James is OK, James is Cool, I’m not bothered)

Week 18 (James is OK, James is Cool, I'm not bothered)

This track is a little out there. The aim was to make someting using randomized textures from my Portable synth and started with the FM synth On the OP1.

I ran it through an LFO so its operators would randomly change frequencies and their signal path four times in a bar. From that basis I then added layers of different textures on the OP1 all of which were randomised by the LFO to create sounds I hadn’t heard before.

All Textures are from the OP1 although a few guitar samples were used and processed through the OP1: