bug0ut | Entries tagged with mpc

Somehow, I pocketed a win for #949... ok, "somehow." Even I have to take a break from my self-abuse and recognize when I drop the occasional banger. Proud of that one, especially because the source material has been flipped multiple times by Actual Producers(tm) and I still managed to pull pieces of it together into something new.

For #950, I decided to force everyone to use some track I like for a change: some dusty, crusty, musty old Giallo shit - and one track from Mexico, that was suggested to me by someone that fits the general vibe/character and sounded really nice. I tried to pay some extra attention to make sure of two things:

1. The sample sources were as drumless as possible to make things easier. Stem separation is nice, but you know what's nicer? Not taking chunks out of the fuckin surrounding elements that you actually wanna use.
2. There was a decent variety of moods/vibes so folks who took up the challenge could zero in on the kinda shit they like.

I also allowed all outside samples with the stipulation that content from the source tracks absolutely must be the backbone of the track - beyond that, creative freedom in regards to sample use.

Consulted with JoaGymshoe for some special rule ideas and I can't remember if it was my idea or his (99% sure it was his, but I liked it), and ended up also requesting that competitors add some kind of unusual element to their track that the listener wasn't expecting. Same level of freedom for this, though - all that mattered is that the listener didn't see it coming. Jarring vocal shot? Massive tempo transition? A layer of tortured screams? Make it half a bar? One, two, eight bars; idgaf - just surprise me.

I was actually drawn to the Mexican track because I'm a sucker for a nice saxophone progression and a nice saxophone progression is the entire core of the joint. What can I say? The spirit is willing, but the flesh (mainly the ears) do be weak. The Epic Sax Guy era wasn't just my era, it was all of ours. Forever and ever. Anyway, I got to chopping on the 404MKII and once I was done, moved on to tapping around to see how I could glue the pieces back together. Satisfied with the main progression for Sequence A, I recorded the individual chops to the MPC and once I had them there, arranged them in the piano roll. I thought it felt a little dry and boring on repeat like that, so I slapped a nice, subtle delay on it to give it a little extra rhythm and movement and it ended up sounding kinda dreamy.

I spent some time looking through drums and found some nice choices - one of those kicks that's short and punchy, with a transient/top end that kinda sounds like a basketball or something to cut through the mix, a nice moderately hard-but-short snare hit so it's present but not overwhelming or taking focus away from the other elements, and a decent loosely closed hi hat. The beat is simple, maybe you could describe it as a relaxed, cruising down the highway but not in the passing lane type of deal. I especially like how the jazzy hat pattern came out - it's just the one sample, played with 16-levels turned on to give it some feeling and extra rhythm.

Because the original is so pleasant and because my cookup of it was turning out to be really chill and smooth (what? sometimes I'm easily influenced), I didn't wanna sully it up with some obvious synth bassline. I went digging through my collection of MPC keygroups for a nice, realistic bass and found one in the F9 Instruments expansion. I'm pretty sure it was the Jazz Bass. At this point, I've got a 4-bar loop that's comin together nicely so I let it loop another 30 or 40 times while I noodle around looking for an equally smooth bassline that stood out to me. I kept the notes near the bottom of the register for this keygroup, but not too low - maybe an octave above where it starts to sound like ass. I usually sit at the octave right before that for bass because I like the rumble and the added presence of a deep and imposing bass sound, but I wanted the "real instrument" aspect to shine through here and... mission accomplished, if I do say so myself.

With only 4 bars down, I decided I needed to direct some much-needed attention to varying it up a bit . It was feeling to m like you were kinda endlessly waiting for it to resolve and it just never did. For this, I did a couple things. First, I went diving for more sax samples and found the perfect way to resolve the end of the loop in one of the longer chops I had on the 404. I tweaked the start and end points of that pad and recorded it to a pad in the MPC. Back on the MPC, I copied over the 4-bar sequence and fixed up the copy to use the newly added sax chop. Playing them back together in order was... well... music to my fuckin ears. I never made any promises to not use cliches. While listening back to the now 8-bar loop (two 4-bar sequences), some of the drum placement made my eye twitch. I picked up the habit of recording drums without quantization on a while back and while it does lead to more human feeling drum sequences, it also leads to some really awful placement sometimes. I popped back into the original sequence to shift the drum hits around a bit in the last of the 4 bars and while listening back, I was tapping 4.1. After a few rounds of this, I was like "goddamn i like how this sounds on repeat). The MPC has a nice feature where you can copy events between tracks or sequences. It's a versatile little option where you can basically say "I want to copy bar 3 to this sequence starting at bar 1, and I want to make 4 copies of it." Makes things super easy sometimes in this kind of context. I went ahead and did this once for the original 4-bar sequence and once more for the second one that resolves the loop, except for the latter sequence, I used the other 4th bar for bars 1-3, then copied the bar that resolves the whole loop for the end. That sax sequence 5 times in a row would be way too much. One thing I don't love is in the original sequence, you get the last bar, and then you get that same bar 4 more times. If you're not paying attention, it almost feels like you're just stuck and the song will never progress any further. Annoying, but whatever. I left it.

This first smooth jazz sequence felt like ti was missing something. Not something big, but just like... a dusting of powdered sugar over the top. What could be more appropriate than a nice electric piano - a family of instruments that has a stronger hold on me than even a nice sax sequence. I pulled up Electric on the MPC, found a preset I like, tweaked it up a bit, and this was probably the single most time consuming process for this track because I am absolutely not a piano or keyboard player by any means. I do a lot of poking and messing around when it comes to stuff like this and while I have a decent understanding of basic music theory (and I mean basic), I certainly don't know enough to be able to just belt out a beautiful chord or note progression without putting a whole lot really awful sounding shit through the speakers first. I started with chords that fit the key and when I had those placed on the piano roll, I got to jazzing it up by breaking some of the chords up into note progressions that played an alternate but fitting rhythm to the beat as it was. I kept the electric piano low and panned it off to the right so it was just there, accenting the melody as a supporting character. It came together really pleasantly - especially in those 4-bar loops where that one bar repeats 4 times.

While listening to the second 4-bar loop, with that sax chop that resolves the whole 8 bars, I wanted to do something different with the bass, so I pulled the piano roll back up and fixed up the bassline so that it follows the sax melodically. This took the bass itself a little high, but it fit like a glove. Good shit! I also doubled back to the two repeating loops and alternated the bass pattern for both to give it a little more variation.

Until now, I had designs on one of the source tracks that has a lot of dark, kind of sinister piano progressions in it. Admittedly, I flipped this track a while back into a nice, but kind of uninteresting trap beat. I chopped it up and proceeded to spend several hours trying to make it work in a way I was satisfied, but no luck. No matter how I arranged the chops, or how I pitched em, or what FX I threw on em, it just wasn't happening. Sometimes, you just gotta say "fuck this" and walk away - a lesson I've been begrudgingly learning for years, and will probably continue to learn for the rest of my days. On this day, I acted on it and bitterly ditched the piano loop. I had a whole idea in my head that the unusual element in my track was going to be an incredibly jarring aca/vocal shot of Lil Fame from M.O.P. from one of my favorite songs (What The Fuck) where, all pissed off, he goes, "What the fuck are you lookin for?" and maybe a couple extra Billy Danze shots, and that would transition the track into a +10BPM tempo boost (give or take) and into an aggressive, gritty boom bap joint. Alas... it wasn't meant to be n shit.

Of the 4 source tracks I dropped for the battle, I was familiar with 2 of them. One, as I mentioned, was the piano joint, which I had flipped before, that crashed me out. The other was one with this really overwhelming organ sequence that I love (can you guess that organs are yet another instrument that I'm weak to?). It's not a dark sequence, though - in fact, it sounds kind of triumphant. I considered transitioning into a more positive sounding, but still aggressive vibe, but regardless of what I was going to end up doing vibes-wise, the overarching decision was already made for me: the organ chops were where I would be throwing my attention.

For this, I just chopped out the entire sequence on the 404, recorded into the MPC, and chopped up there. Once I had the chops down, I started hitting pads looking for a pattern that jumped out at me. While what I had, in its original form, was workable (very workable, tbqh), I was still mad about not being able to take the beat to a grimy place with the piano. I chose a base sample out of the bunch to form a sort of melodic anchor for the new vibe and, out of bitterness alone, I started pitching the organ chops around. A lot of these chops didn't take well to pitch changes, whether melodically (because pitching chord samples is so often just... like... house music-coded? I'm sure there's some music theory way to convey why this happens) or in terms of character/timbre (where the chord sounds fine at its original pitch, but going up or down even a single semitone brings out too much of the top or low end, throwing the whole sample off balance). A couple of the chops, though, took very well to being pitched. They didn't need much moving around, maybe a max of 1-3 semitones up or down - I just wanted other pads to feel more minor-key, sinister, bleak, dark, whatever in relation to the pad I chose as my foundation. That pad, by the way, has kind of this... swell in the middle of it. Its a bit of a volume swell, but it also feels like a bit of a swell in its stereo width. While it fit the beat well in terms of tempo, I hit the pad again in a bit of an irregular spot to where that swell was throwing things off. As soon as I noticed, I copied that pad over and pushed the start point on it up so that on that secondary hit, the swell matched up with the rhythm. Nailed it on the first try, too - no adjusting, here, bitch!

With time running out and me getting bored of the project overall (and me getting tired of recounting the whole fuckin process here, in this post, too), I pushed through, added a higher-up bassline using the same Jazz Bass from before; nothing fancy here, and the bass wasn't even constant. It was just placed periodically to add a tense kind of vibe. I also slapped a couple of FX on the organ mixer insert that really transformed the chops. First, I added a tremolo to it - no sync, I just eyeballed (earballed?) it until it was like... off-rhythm enough to where it was kind of phasing into and out of the rhythm, almost like an irregular rhythm that loops on odd-numbered bars. There's a word for this shit and it's escaping me. Next,I laid it up in a reverb that kind of gave it a shimmer. It really did transform the sound from this like, one big block of organ chord with little to no variation, into this constantly trembling, foreboding deal with a warm, sickly "glow."

To add on to the tension, I wanted to bring that electric piano back in, but this time instead of being buried in the beat with only the tines and a bit extra poking out, I wanted to make its presence very known. Once again, like the bass, I just wanted to pepper the vibe and not overdo it, so I just laid down a few descending notes that fit the overall vibe and melody - it only appears once every 4 bars, panned off to the right a bit and giving an extra bit of tension and foreboding.

At this point, it's 11PM and earlier in the day, I got sidetracked by some take-home case study thing related to a job I had applied for, so I'm just rushing to wrap this bitch up and put a bow on it... but there's one thing missing. The surprise! The "unusual element" - I had given "a jarring vocal shot signaling a mood shift" as an example, but I knew that's what I was going to end up doing when I was writing down the special rule. Since the M.O.P. shot was going to be way too aggressive for this much more laid back, sinister vibe, I started racking my brain for what I could pull in to serve the purpose of a jarring transition, and then it hit me. It's really like it was handed to me from the other side of the veil or whatever. There's a classic Redman (my favorite emcee of all time) joint called Tonight's Da Night. In it, he starts with a few bars of these smooth lyrics before the record scratches and Hurricane G (RIP, she was a fuckin real one) cuts in and goes "Yo, yo, Redman, man. What the fuck, man? Get the fuck off that... punk smooth shit, man. Get with that rough shit, man! You know how we do!" with a bunch of dudes basically echoing her disapproval in the background. Considering Sequence A is textbook "punk smooth shit," how could I have ever landed on a differnet vocal shot for the transition? I found the track on my hard drive, ran it through UVR5 to isolate the vocals, recorded just her interlude, and... Reggie Noble, please forgive me, but I cut out Redman's name since I'm not using one of his acas or anything and it would've been weird leaving it in.

What I forgot about is the fact that the drum track where I assigned her vocal shot(s) to had an instance of Flavor Pro on it and when I first heard the Hurricane G transition in context, it was filthy. Kinda distorted. Like she got right up into the microphone to put a fucking end to this punk smooth shit once and for all. I loved it.

I wrapped it up, recorded the final output, hit ChatGPT to generate the SC cover image, and called it a night. Named it Gemini because there's a Mobb Deep line that has stuck with me for over a decade now where Havoc goes, "I'm a Gemini, bitch, that mean I flip with the weather." A fitting name for a track with two faces like this one.

Another one in the bag! I really gotta get better at not spreading my process out over an entire fuckin week just for a 2 minute track. Maybe next time.

Current Mood: good
Current Music: _bug0ut - Gemini

Up to my old tricks again... and by that, I mean spending 4-5 days consciously heading in an interesting, experimental direction with a pile of samples I chopped and pitched and abused only to turn around the day before the beat battle deadline and go, "Oh, no! I hate it!" and then flip the source material into something relatively "safe" and conventional.

Without wanting to spend too much time on the "failed experiment" portion of this flip, we were provided with 3 movie soundtrack joints. One from Taxi Driver (which had some fun, jazzy shit goin on), one from Eyes Wide Shut (which had some cool, creepy male vocals that I think were reversed to make it sound more demonic, considering the movie it was for), and a pretty well-known, heavily-sampled Quincy Jones joint called Aftermath from a film called The Slender Thread. The latter is possibly best known for being used for a Pharaoh Monche track called Behind Closed Doors (a classic banger, tbh).

I usually try to avoid source material that's been heavily sampled mainly because its already been done, and often likely much better than I could do it. Considering there are like 10 tracks listed on WhoSampled that have used the Quincy Jones track, I originally decided to sidestep it. I zeroed in on a very short low brass hit in the Taxi Driver joint that I liked, but wished it was a little longer so I chopped it in the SP-404 MKII, flipped it to Ensemble mode (which allows you to change pitch and tempo independently), and slowed it down to about 65% of its original tempo. Sometimes in this scenario, the sample comes out sounding... bad. Metallic, artifacty, and very obviously slowed down. Because this sample was so short, that was thankfully not the case. I then copied it to several other pads and pitched the copies around so that I could maybe make a core melody out of it. Another potential pitfall that I've come across is when you've copied the same sample multiple times and pitched the copies, sometimes it very obviously sounds like its just the same sample pitched up or down from the original... and another stroke of luck: it didn't! This was also probably due to the short length of the sample. Satisfied with my insane luck so far, I got to arranging the hits over a few bars to get some structure down.

At this point, the short little brass hit by itself sounded OK, but I wanted it to have some force, so I pulled up Sub Factory on the MPC and started flipping through the 808 presets. I knew that I didn't necessarily want the pitch envelope to be too tight because I wanted an actual kick drum with a bit of thump to it keeping the rhythm for me, so I auditioned a bunch of presets with and without their pitch envs enabled and landed on one that I liked. At this point, I've got several hits of this brass sample giving me a bouncy melody, with a short 808 burst under it to give it some authority. From the very start to this moment - that's digging through the source tracks and finding the sample I wanted to use, chopping it out, sculpting it, arranging it into a melody and fine tuning the 808 how I wanted it, etc - I'm about 4 days in (I work slow, and in short bursts: sue me). I start looking around the source tracks to see if there's anything I can pair it with and I'm getting increasingly discouraged. I also realize that the whole joint, overall, is sounding a little too close to Mobb Deep's Put Em In Their Place. I step back and give it a couple hours to kinda slow cook in the back of my head and come back with the decision that I fuckin hate it, it's terrible, and I need to dramatically change directions.

This is where I started looking at that Quincy Jones track a lot harder. I originally avoided it out of habit, but goddamn it its no wonder it's been sampled so many times... it captures some of what I love most about Hip Hop: it's gritty, it sounds old and dusty, it sounds mean and sinister. Even the original, which is a very slow-moving and tense track... I wanna go outside and fight random strangers while it plays in the background. I throw caution and habit to the wind and say, "fuck it - we're doin this shit," and start pulling pieces out of it.

The main goal from here on out was to come up with a compelling, gritty Hip Hop joint (a la that neo Boom Bap shit you expect from Griselda), using Quincy Jones's Aftermath, and to not make it sound like anything else that previously sampled it. The excitement instantly returned to my creative process and I got to it. I slapped one of my favorite gritty Croup snare samples onto a pad on the MPC and copied it over to another pad. On the first pad, I put a fairly aggressive decay on it to shorten it and take some of the air out of it - almost like it was a rimshot with the same characteristics as the original. I found two nice kick samples - one that was a little flat, and one with a little thump to it. I also went looking for a couple of closed hi hats, one slightly more open and rattly than the other. I wanted to alternate between each of the drum shots - so like, the lightened up snare on the 2, the original gritty snare on the 4. A double kick hit after each snare hit, but the flatter kick immediately followed by the thump. One hi hat hit on each quarter note, but alternating between the two. This sort of thing gives a track some subtle variation and kind of an extra groove/bounce and I've used the technique successfully before.

Now that I've got these drum samples figured out and tweaked properly, it's time to get to the really fun shit: chopping the sample and deciding how I'm going to birth this monster. I take the obvious pieces - the discordant piano chord that kicks off the whole track, the shimmery chimes, the multiple hit of the... I think its an oboe? Its low, and gritty. Those are the pieces that end up forming what I consider the verse sequence. I pitch the piano chord down a good bit (and include a good bit of the pad-like string sound that tails it), then move on to the chimes (and, naturally, some of the pad-like string sound that tails it) which I pitch down, but keep a couple semitones higher than than the piano chop so that it sounds grimy and dissonant against it, and arrange them in the piano roll. Once I'm satisfied, I double it up to be 8 bars. For the chorus, or B sequence, I found a kind of bleak, depressing string sequence which sounds even more grim when it's pitched down. The whole B sequence is just the 4 bar loop, mostly untouched (except for the FX that made it filthy). I double this up to 8 bars as well.

Going back to the verse sequence, I knew that I wanted it to play 16 bars at a time, and that this was a beat more suited to have vocals over it, so I wanted to strike a balance between "repetitive and boring" and "too busy for vocals" so I recorded my 8 bar sequence back into the 404 (disabling busses 3 and 4 - this is super important for resampling if you want to preserve the original sound). I landed on using the Scatter FX module on the 404 just to kind of break up the monotony - which is a cheap and easy way to mangle up a sample in pleasant ways. I only triggered it around when the chimes hit and it ended up being subtle, but helped a good bit with giving a bit of sonic variation.

From here, I laid down the drums (which came out great, as far as I'm concerned, with that alternating sample technique I mentioned earlier), went back to Sub Factory and found (and slightly tweaked) one of the 808 presets I liked (Spinneresque was the one, I think?), laid down the 808 pattern for both sequences, slapped one instance of Air Flavor Pro on the master output (I think I used one of the presets labeled VHS, but I disabled the pitch wobble because that shit is often way too much on an entire track) and took down the vinyl noise by a lot, a VCA compressor on the end of the master chain to level things out and make it nice and loud, and et voila.

A grimy, gritty, Buffalo-style joint to ride around on a cold winter day with the ratchet in your lap and maybe a body in the trunk.

This track scored me the win for this week on STBB, which is pretty dope. I was up against 11 other entries and while the turnout for STBB is apparently fairly quiet lately compared to past battles, the submissions were broadly pretty damn decent as you should expect from that crowd. I'll happily take the win - and I fully expect it to be a rare case, so I'm happy just to have one under my belt.

Since I was this week's winner, next week's challenge becomes my problem so I, like any man, did the only thing I know... IT'S GIALLO TIME, BABY. I picked 4 nice, old source tracks (3 from Italy, 1 from Mexico) and tried to come up with some decent rules without boxing any of the entrants in too hard. Looking forward to the submissions for #950.

Current Mood: jubilant
Current Music: _bug0ut - Valley of Death [STBB949]

Dibia$e came back from a bit of a hiatus for his 24th flip challenge, tossing up a sample from Low Key's upcoming Nostalogy sample pack for his Discord server to mangle and shape into something new and that brought me out of my own mini dibiflip hiatus to jump in on this one. I have this thing where sometimes, I just don't dig the provided samples for a challenge and I'll pass on it, or I might load them up and play around and if I'm not getting a spark, I'll just ditch it. It's happened with the last couple of STBBs and a couple of dibiflips before that, but this sample was pretty nice so I got to work. This was my first chance to actually make something with both the MKII and the MPC since I updated to the 3.x firmware and had been spending time getting acquainted. There's still a long way to go for me on that front, but I'm comfortable enough to fight my way out with what I know.

To start with, I laid out a bank with chops from the first half of the provided sample - this bank basically had chords and some sustained melodic sounds. For the second half, there were enough individual piano notes that it felt suitable to have a separate bank for those. I noodled around for a while and came up with an initial sequence that I liked well enough, but after some time I decided I wanted to really transform the source material. I popped into that second bank and just reverse the entirety of it and start noodling around in there, eventually coming up with my A section, which is what the track starts with. From here, it was a matter of recording the pattern and, once satisfied, reconfiguring the A and B FX busses to run consecutively so I could add some first-mile FX to it. I landed on Ko-Da-Ma (an MKII synced delay effect that sort of uses a send and sounds very pleasant in a lot of different use cases) to fill the empty space between my chops, which I then ran through To-Gu-Ro (a sort of stopper/tremolo/gate type of effect on the MKII that I often use very subtly to give a slight pitch warble and very mildly age a sample - I literally have the depth setting set to 1; that's how subtle). From here, I recorded one run of the pattern into an Audio track in the MPC.

At this point, I decided to lay down drums so I picked a few samples and got the kick and snare recorded. This ended up being one of those situations where I just couldn't find a hat sample that I liked or that sat well in the mix, so I did the sacrilegious thing and ditched the idea of using any hats entirely. Honestly, the ends of those reversed samples were doing a pretty OK job of kind of simulating the rhythmic tap of a hat, especially with the delay present, so I was OK with the decision.

With the melodic core of the track laid down, and the drums placed under it, I wanted to get a bassline in. The way this track was sounding, a modern synthy or 808-style bass didn't feel right, so I pulled up a nice electric bass keygroup from the F9 expansion. I wanted to go for kind of a sloppy vibe, so I thought up a decent bass progression and slapped some notes in slightly out-of-place spots, and made a couple of notes feel off melodically, too.

After that, I landed on making heavy use of the MKII's Scatter effect to do a lot of the heavy lifting for A section variations, but my current A section - even with the delay applied - was still a little too empty for Scatter to do its job well. I recorded a variation pattern of the A section on the MKII where I used the same pattern of pads, but repeated them on rhythm to fill out the space - I also reenabled both of the previous effects because while I didn't really need the delay to fill the space, it did a really good job of giving individual piano notes within the sample some extra flair by repeating really nicely. I took the pattern and ran it into the MPC's sampler, doing the Scatter knob-twisting live until I was satisfied with the output. Got two variations recorded like this and they went into their own Audio tracks, and then their own sequences.

For a B section, I originally wanted to go back to the initial bank with the chords, but the difference between my original recorded pattern and what I was using for my A section was too jarring... and so was every other attempt I made using that bank. In the end, I returned to the bank with the reversed single notes and cooked up a new pattern. Followed the same process as before from there: record pattern into MPC, record a Scattered variation into the MPC (just one this time), lay down a new bassline using the same bass keygroup (I did one bass progression for each B section variation this time).

With everything ready to go, I did some last mile mixing, filtering, and EQing, slapped some limited Flavor Pros onto the tracks that needed them, slapped one final Flavor Pro on the master output to give me some vinyl filth on top, and arranged my sequences in the order I wanted them in Song Mode on the MPC. Once I felt like I was good to go, I simply played the entire song into FL Studio (I've moved to using the MPC in standalone exclusively) and recorded into Edison!

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: its right there in the embed, dawg