Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone is enjoying their leftovers. Here is a track fresh from the oven:

MW - Hollerin'

I use Ableton Live 7. This song is composed of synth bass, drum machine, and samples all sequenced with MIDI. The piano and horns are all sampled and played on a drum machine instead of with a sampler. This technique is useful when using punchy sounds that you don't need to pitch bend, and it keeps all of the programming for those samples in just one MIDI track. The pulsating sounds are sidechained to the bass drum. 

Another technical detail that I learned while making this track, but only employed sparingly, is using two bass synths at the same time. If you mix them together playing the same pattern you can create a new bass sound. Then, if you delete a few notes in the middle of the song from one of them, you can start to get some interesting variation. I came up with this idea when trying to emulate the bass in Genesis by Justice.

I also got some good practice getting rid of extraneous loops. I felt that without vocals or some other kind of top line the song was too repetitive. If I revisit this song I will add either sampled or real vocals, or I will take pieces of this and put it into a larger dance mix.

Our voyage has begun. I am excited to hear what everyone comes up with!

   My initial idea for this blog was simply "a beat a day." I was going to challenge myself to produce and post one instrumental music track a day. I soon realized it would be more fun to invite all my musical friends to post along with me.

   Every day one of us will post a new song, beat, or mashup that we have created. Along with the song we will post some information about the process of creating and recording the song. The purpose of the text will be two fold: to share any new techniques that we discovered, and to share any insights into songwriting, composing, and playing music we may have had along the way. Eventually we will have built a catalog of new and eclectic music to share with the world, and ignited each other's creativity along the way. 

   It's going to take a little while for me to sort out the technical details, but you will be swimming in hella gems very soon.