Hi,
Very unexpectedly for me I am participating in this edition of the SWC. With "electronic music" I have mixed feelings: on one hand, I already know how to make good tracks in some subgenres (or so I think
) so it should be easy -- on the other hand, almost every day of my week I am doing something related to electronic music already, so it was a challenge for me (pun intended) to find something interesting and fun to do.
This track I made in only a few hours today afternoon. The theme of the challenge is "bleep blops" so it obviously had to involve analog subtractive synths, simple sounds, for which I used my Minilogue XD exclusively for all sounds -- drum sound design, as you will be able to hear, suffers a bit as a consequence. I chose to make some "minimal house" so it is easy to get going fast (I already know what to do).
The track is here (both WAV and MP3):
Link to OneDrive folder
Funnily enough I just moved into a new house and I have almost no furniture so it is very fitting to call it "New House" and it being a bit "minimal". It is the first piece of music I make since moving in, while waiting for some acoustic treatment to arrive.
To make this I used, again, my Korg Minilogue XD recorded into Reaper. I didn't use plugins, only some Reaper included effects like the compressor for pumping, ReaEQ to remove some bass, some waveshaping distortion on buses, ReaVerbate for the melodic elements bus, and the Event Horizon Limiter/Clipper plus ReaLimit in the master to control peaks and get it to a little less than the specified -14 LUFS-I and -1dBTP. It was very fun to not use plugins and get deep into the mix.
For the curious into how to make the drums, it's quite simple. The hard part is to fine tune the sounds to get the attack, body and decay that you want:
- For the kick drum, simplest wave (sine or triangle) in the bass region. Use a very fast envelope with the oscillator pitch to make it go from high to low quickly and that gives you your body. Changing the envelope decay and the amount of modulation you can get different kick drums. A good thing is you can tune it by playing a different note in the keyboard.
- Hats: If it was an FM synth, you could create metallic noise (atonal modulation) and use it, but since this is a simple analog I had to use white noise. Fast decay on the amplitude envelope with some variation and there you have it.
- Clap/Snare: Similar to the hats, but you use the low pass filter with some resonance to remove some high end and introduce a more tonal frequency that you use as body. Some delay to give it some effect of stacked claps.
- Congas/Percs: I got a sine wave by cranking up the resonance of the filter and making it self oscillate, then just make a short amplitude envelope to make it a bit clicky, play to taste because it's tuned. I used octaves only.
I hope you enjoy it
A friendly reminder:
