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:

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:

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.

As part of my spring collection of tracks I have been using a string instrument on every piece.

The aim of this track was to mix things up and make the synths sound like guitars and guitar recordings sound like synths. Can you tell which is which?

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:

I’ve been a bit lax posting up my weekly beats tracks on here, So I’ll amend that over the following few weeks.

On Week 17 I decided to go back to basics and just play a piano, After several sessions of improvisation I worked out the piece, recorded it several times and then picked the best take which is what you can hear by clicking the link below.

Occasionally it’s good to get away from the electronics and to the raw development of a track. There is nothing better than just putting your thoughts and ideas down in their elemental form and sitting in front of a piano does that for me:

The Past two weeks tracks made for weekly beats work together as a pair so I thought I would include them both together. Week 15 entitled Otdel Mokrykh Del is one big and dark swell of electronica before the guitar driven track Bloodlines kicks in on week 16.

Have a listen below:

Week 15:

Week 16: