The song is from the future. It’s got these smooth, frantic, yet pleasant synth melodies floating up top, with tones dropping off and bending all over the place.
I can’t reveal the entire song yet. It comes out on Friday January 19th. I can share a piece though, and then I’ll share some of the details behind how I made it. I love this beat in case you couldn’t tell.
The melodies are loosely tied to the wonky keyboard pattern beneath, a steady and rapid-fire stream of elevens. Then the drums pulsate against all that, a falling-down-the-stairs kind of pattern that wraps polyrhythm-style around the main keyboard pattern.
Somehow the whole thing comes together in a beautiful and logical way. Upon listening, it isn’t the feeling of absurd math - it’s smooth.
Maybe it’s the fact that the unusual rhythmic patterns are rotating around each other, rather than hitting in unison. Your brain does not go lurching from one downbeat to the next, it floats on top. Feels like free jazz, but tastes like groovy electronic music.
Separating The Melody/Drums/Keys
Anyway let’s take a look at some of the individual elements that make up this beat.
A safe rule of thumb for production is: Limit yourself to a small number of sounds. Counting the drum set as one sound, try not to use more than 3-4 sounds total for any given spot in a production unless you have a really good reason to.
For example - a drum beat, vocal harmonies, and bass will already sound pretty full. If you don’t believe me this song by The Dirty Projectors is a great demonstration of that:
In the case of The Art Factory, the ideas in this beat are so crazy… However when I broke it down for this post, I realized that it’s only three main sounds: Melody, Drums, and Keys.
In particular the melody stands out as a wild tonal experience when I solo it:
There’s two different synths playing in unison to create this sound. They are both tweaked out versions of pre-built Alchemy synths:
One gives it the grit, the high-frequency edge, while the other is a softer, sine-wave-ier sound that has some radical pitch bends built into it.
Then there’s the main keyboard part which sits a bit beneath the melody and is closer to the sine sound. It’s non-stop 16th notes in an 11 note pattern just cruising on and on.
Later in the song there’s more chordal variety but you gotta wait until Jan 19th for that.
Lastly, the drums. These sound way out, flowing and rolling around across the melody/keys as they hold together against the force. But when you put them by themselves, they’re a little more tame lol.
I still love it, the sounds are cool, unusual use of click-clacks and high pitched crash cymbal.
You dig? I did not use my usual favorite of Ultrabeat to program these drums. Instead each sound has its own track in Logic Pro X and it’s all manually cut and pasted with raw audio.
Looks like this:
I do most of my drum programming this way, especially when I am not using Ultrabeat. I find it easier to get that real final good quality of sound when I’m in raw audio mode…
matt sokol - the art factory OUT ON JANUARY 19th
This will be a Soundcloud EXCLUSIVE! Not on Spotify, iTunes, etc, although I will definitely cross-post it to Steemit.
Follow me over at Soundcloud and you won’t miss it.
OK that’s it for tonight. See ya.
