Ok going to have a go at talking through this thing.
So my influences for 303 sounds all come from housey/technoey music, specifically early to late 90's when I was full on in the prime of my life. Stuff from guys like Hardfloor, Josh Wink, Fatboy Slim and other stuff I cant remember now.
This one is a classic!!!
So my tune came out a bit housey in vibes, but I think thats my thing, might as well go with it.
Intro - The pad/atmos things were made with 2 of the samples, one might ave been some sort of organy sound, and one a bit more airy, the end result of both sound very little like the original samples anyways. I put them into Abletons sampler, setup some filter envelopes and a bit of modulation on volume and filter cutoff. Then threw a bunch of effects on afterwards. Im a fan of the mid range phattner setting in Abletons saturator, so that will have been on there, and possibly some more auto filters in the chain. One thing I did with both sounds that really helped them to fill some space, was have 2 channels identical, one panned hard right, one hard left, then I set the delay on one channel to 12 or 13ms, and it does a really nice effect on adding stereo to those sounds. In headphones you dont feel it so much, but even if you have shitty speakers, they should still be able to represent spacial qualities of your sound. When I did it with the sound in the speakers, I could feel it envelope me in a pleasing way, and I just played with the delay time till it felt right. I think I did some subtle changes in effect one the left and right channels, flanger on one and chorus on the other, helps the widening a bit more. One the stable Pad sound I programed the notes, and then put the Chords Midi plugin on the channel, to give it some more musical meaning, cant remember exactly but got a feeling I just went for a power Chord of Root and 5th. I had to returns setup with Izotope Trash with 2 different flavours, both these sounds probably had some of the signal going out to one of these. The wishy washy sound will have also been going to a return setup up with a Band pass filter with a pretty fast lfo on it, and some saturation before the filter.
The vocal came from the long soundcloud thing in the pack, I just listened through to find something hooky, she said my heart is giving up somewhere along the lines. I chopped that little bit out, put in a sampler, and threw a bunch of stuff on it, chorus maybe, filters, reverb. Might have been going out to the Auto Filter return as well, not sure
It was defo going out to the reverb and a touch to the delay return.
Theres one other stab type sound, almost percussive, this came from trying to make some sort of filler for over the bassline, and put it into the intro once I came to arranging it proper. One of the samples, with Envelopes to get the stabby bit, and then going out to reverb/delay/trash returns.
The drums in the intro were just perc bits of my break that I took out, little variations in the hats, that go throughout the tune, some toms, the odd cymbal. I used the 909 kit?? Maybe it was 808, cant remember for sure. It had some processing on the individual hits, but then going through Izotope Alloy on one of the Drum Break setting that I tweaked about a bit to get it to sound fatter. Im sort of just faking this, I have ideas of how to get the drums better, but god its hard lol, need to work more on this. Any louder in their current state would have caused some issues in the mix I think, need to work on getting them fatter without eating into the headroom so much.
There is some 303 in the intro.
The 303 I download and played some notes on the keyboard, and was lost, waht the fuck is this thing with hardly any controls. I programmed in a note of 1 bar, looped and started to mess with it. Nothing ha, I was lost, googled 303 read some stuff watched some guy program a Daft Punk riff bang on a real 303, figured to get that sort acidy housey style, the notes had to be quicker, I was trying to figure out how to replicate the sequencer stuff of the real 303 onto the piano roll in abelton(must be able to do that, I must investigate further), when I had the idea to throw the arp plugin native to Ableton onto the channel. Did this and started to play with the arp setting, and the synth settings, and that magical sound appeared. This was the first thing I did when I got the samples. Made a sub, programmed in the note sequence(1-5-4-6 maybe?, some generic chord sequence thats probably been used a million times in songs over the years), made a basic kick snare beat. Once I had sub and beat, I spent that first night just messing with the 303/Arp settings, just seeing what it could do. When it came to putting the tune together, I had one day totally free and spent about 12 hours on it. I made 4 different 303 Channels(couple of them split left/right like the pads, maybe one was mono'ed, and one normal) each had there own note riff and settings which created a pallette of patterns I could use in different spots to change it up enough to not become static. Just altering the decay time on the arp, and the note steps you can really create some different flavours from the same sound. I think the intro 303 before the drop was automated on the decay time, and the riff opens out as it progresses.
Thats pretty much it for the intro.
The drop starts, and my style I always like the tune to start a little low and build as it progresses, again harking back to my prog house roots. So it starts off just rolling out with the sub(I layered the sub note with the same synth playing one octave above to fill in that gap of sound between pure sub and mid bass range, to give it a bit more depth while the mid bass was dropped out of the mix. There is just some little stabs at the start of each 4 bars of the mid range in the 1st 16. The 2nd 16 was my idea of it leading to something more coming next, almost pre chorus, by bringing in the pad, and some messing with the 303 bits through that section.
Next bit is where I bring in the mid bass sound, in what I guess would be the 1st Chorus, some automating the 303 arp settings. I go back to the pad and winding it down into the break.
The Break was just a variation on the intro really, slightly different build up, that leads into probably the most energetic bit of the song for 2nd Drop, the pad I thought helped that bit along, with lack of mid bass in there to help bring out the 303 riff the most, and try to make this the 303 payoff section, and I set the decay quite long on the arp time, and it created that nice flowing acid sound, rather than the intermittent stabs of it, then to try to create some contrast dropped the 303 completely out of the next 16, let the bass roll along with the wishy washy pad sound, in a we nearly getting to the end of the tune type fashion, then I just popped in the 1st Chorus again to finish off into just the pads and 303 sounds for the outro.
When I was arranging the Drums for the tune, I just had kick and Snare at first, but quickly programmed in some toms, couple of different hats and cymbals. I made 1 16 bar loop of Kick and Snare with a little variation at 8th bar end, and a bigger one at 16th bar end. I also made 2 different filtered 1bar snippets for using in some of the transitions. I then made 3 varying loops with all the perc bits in differing layouts, and used them to mixup the drums just a little each section. In the a couple of sections I used one of the dubstep breaks, and just set it to the tracks bpm, and layer a hi passed version of it over the break, it just added very very subtle snap on a few hits really, not that noticable. To be honest this is about where I am at with drums, they need work, would love for one day to program the whole tune start to finish as one big piece of drumming, rather than piecing together 16 bar loops for each section. But I tried to make that 16 bars go as far as possible, think I did an ok job varying it enough to not get boring.
The returns on the track were really a big part of the sound, and are one of the major parts in all my stuff lately. I had a few different reverbs, might have overdriven some of these in someway, but short, medium, long decay times really, and fit elements into each one as I messed around twiddling knobs. I had 2 Trash units set up also, hi passed. 1 was setup in mind to give the sub sound some extra harmonics higher up the scale, to fill it out a bit, and the other was more geared to altering the mid sound bass layers to add some grit. I always try everything through all of these returns so a bunch of stuff ended up going into these 2 returns, they just sounded better with some of this sound mixed in, soundbetterisers!!! The last return I like to use is a band pass filter with a fastish LFO I usually settle on 3/8, always groove well with drum and bass that time setting. I think I added the Mid Range Phattner Saturator, and maybe changed the curve it was set to to something harder like the sinold fold setting. I like to put the wider sounds through this bus so you get the normal channel filling the whole width all the time, but this saturated version is swirling around. I set the phase on the filter to 180 degrees as well so the LFO also pans the sound around the image, and gets that swirl going on, was a decent part of the Pad sounds I used. Really helped me make those 2 pads sounds all big and spacey. I mess around a lot throwing sounds through returns and this technique sounded cool when I stumbled upon it messing around.
That is about it I think, bit long winded, fuck!
Karl I was interested in the digital comment you made after playing it to your buddies. Elaborate, i tried to rough up everything in some way, bit crushers the distortion sends, all that jazz. What other ways are there to help get that digitalness away?
