Today’s audio post came out of nowhere. I’d been dabbling with this and that. Nothing was sticking. No inspiration. Maybe sell everything and… no hang on let’s take the studio apart, it’s a desktop setup anyway and pack it all away for a few days and focus on some other things?
So that’s what I did.
I decided to move the gear to another place in the house, sounds daft but a different worktop might help?
I proceeded to (sounds a bit like a crime drama) assemble a simple setup of nothing more than the Rolands 404 and S1 being driven by the Oxi One in Matriceal mode, which is a deep sequencer and I’ve found to be extremely extremely performative. It’s easy to get lost but I see that as being a superpower rather than a hindrance.
I turned most of the S1s settings down to minimal in a sense, so plucky sounds abound with next to no attack or much in the way of decay. No filter, delay or reverb to begin with and no LFO. I wanted to build those up along the way.
I then programmed in a set of triggers in matrices and slowly added notes within the scale, was it Mixolydian or Phrygian (didn’t make note and I’m writing this away from the setup). I increased octaves here and there, dropping them down in other parts and that is the beauty of this sequencer mode, you can turn things on and off with ease, shift the whole lot a semitone or so. It’s ludicrous in its versatility.
All recorded onto the 404 and some effects were applied at that end too, mostly just reverb.
I ended up with this song and I’m very happy with it.
Newsletter frequency
Due to things going on in life and work being busy. I’m not able to publish stuff as frequently as I’d like right now, so hence the title, Slowing down!
ModCaf
Sadly I wasn’t able to make it there this month, as a number of things cropped up on the day and there is no way I could’ve got there in time.
Slowing down in order to keep going