STBB943: Dope Ish

Skipped 942 and another battle that came up because I was entirely focused on getting to know the 404mk2.

This week was 943 and the rules were pretty simple:

Use the provided Billie Holiday track (The End of a Love Affair), keep it between 85-95BPM, and if you can't recognize it as a headnodder yourself, kindly drop tf out.

I spent the entire week fiddling with what was (and sort of is) still a kind of alien device. I've made a lot of headway in different spots and feature sets, but I've barely scratched the surface in other places. I managed to mine about 3 half-decent chop-ups and subsequent loops from those, but I was still unimpressed with myself, overall. Of those 3, none of them could really relate to each other - they sounded different, didn't mesh with each other melodically, and if I'm being honest, each one demanded different drumming styles which further divorced them. Two nights before the deadline, I returned to a section of the song that particularly resonated with me where it gets a little sad and dark and while I normally try to avoid pulling vocals into a chop just out of habit, I decided to take this as an opportunity to break with that mindset.

The vocals being chopped for this one originally say "Do they know? Do they care?" but I was able to chop it in just the right spot to give it the slight illusion of saying "Do you know?" by chopping on the first instance of "know" and allowing it to move to the second "do they." Additionally, if ordered the right way, it sounds like Billie is asking "Do you know? Do you Care? No." which was one of those happy accidents that I'm always chasing and hoping for. The resulting loop, with nothing added, had an infectious bop to it and I got that itch in the back of my head that said, "Yeah, this is the one." I was nodding my head to the dry, chopped loop. Self-disqualification averted, I guess.

From here, I spent the rest of the day (and a chunk of the next) slapping together a simple, thick bass patch in Serum 2 (goddamn, what an upgrade from Steve Duda and the Xfer team recently), and playing that into the Mk2 while the pattern played, realizing I didn't like the timing, deleting it, and going again (gonna need to consider finger drumming lessons soon, as the folks at /r/synthesizercirclejerk might suggest with a sneer). At some point, I also came up with the variation of the "do you know" loop where the "know" repeats to make it sound like she's answering her own question with an emphatic, "No. No no."

This is about where the brick wall is that I usually slam into face first. I have multiple chop sequences, none of them want anything to do with each other, one is a clear standout, and I'm down bad for a B sequence that I can't even imagine at the moment. By this point, its the evening before the deadline and I'm in my usual despondent state because I took way too fuckin long on the setup and now the time for the actual execution is slipping through my fingers. I grab dinner, get Squonk (my sidekick and parrot) out for some time out on his playstand, and spend the whole time racking my brain on what to do. While finishing dinner, my fiancee goes upstairs to bed and I decide its feast or famine. I'll give it 10 more minutes and if I can't come up with something, I'll call 943 a wash and just be happy that I learned a lot about actually leveraging the Mk2 in the process.

Lucky me, my head returned to a pretty simple and basic technique that every single YT video about flipping samples usually starts with and one that I often forget because it feels cheap and lazy... but I'll be goddamned if it doesn't really shine. There's a reason reversing a sample is one of the oldest tools of sample flipping - because it works. I took the entire "Do you know?" chop sequence, resampled it without the drums or bass, and just... flipped it. Magic sparks. It's not obviously garbled, whooshy nonsense like a sample reversal can sometimes be. It sounds like Billie is saying something entirely different, in a style that would have been decades ahead of her. The rhythm is unique and catchy. The melodic elements fit right in. It sounds like a chorus or a hook from maybe a kind of poppy Hip Hop song from the last couple decades.

The final step, and one that I hadn't even attempted yet other than to print a few chop sequences to share with friends to get their opinion, was to actually export/record the track. I have about 4 sequences I'm working with:

1. The plain sample chop sequence which I want to use as an intro
2. The main "Do you know?" sequence with drums and bass
3. The variation of #2 where the "Know" repeats
4. and the reversed chop sequence with the drums and bass from one of the other two (can't remember which offhand)

At this point, while fiddling around with FX, I've found a few really nice, interesting ways to twist the knobs between the sequences for transitions and I consider that maybe it's best that I attack this like a live set. I don't have a Pattern Chain set up - just the Mk2, hooked via USB to my laptop with FL Studio opened and armed for recording on a mixer slot. I channel the spirit of famed dickhead and tightass prick Bill O'Reilly and go, "Fuck it, we'll do it live." Hit record on FL, and start beating ont he pads and twisting knobs.

The outcome is a little rough, the timing may be a little sloppy, but for a first proper go at doing something on the Mk2, I'm pretty thrilled with it. The whole experience reaffirmed my decision to pick up the SP-404 Mk2 and may have cemented it as a central piece of my sampling workflow. Here, I thought I'd have to work it in, but it seems like maybe the MPC - my previous centerpiece - is the one that's going to have to find its place.

Oh, one more thing. While I have a general distaste for AI slop in a broad sense, I also acknowledge that we can't ignore it - whether for professional or personal reasons, it's here and we should at least understand it. For the cover image on this track, like I sometimes do, I generated a custom image using ChatGPT's latest and greatest image generation algo that was recently released. The vibe of the track is fairly dark, the times we're in are fairly dark, and that's the vibe I went with for the image. I grabbed a nice picture of Billie Holiday and gave it to ChatGPT as a reference and asked it to stick a joint in her mouth, aviators on her face, give her a beaming smile, and show WW3 raging behind her. The legendary Lady Day, in this image, is kind of a personification of how I'm trying to cope with the atmosphere we're currently in. Fitting.