Filtering the Noise

Staying true to my apparent cadence of "Every Other Beat Battle," I skipped STBB944 - which asked for a trap beat - and I bitterly blame the god-fucking-awful Roll functionality on the SP-404 MKII (still luv u tho boo xo <3). Really, there are some things that the people who designed this thing clearly never actually tried to use. But enough about beat battles I didn't do, what about 945?

Came out alright, actually. This week's challenge was to take a 7 minute Loudspeaker Coloration Test record from JBL and... you know... do some shit with it. These types of records are a potential goldmine for samples - basically, its a stuffy guy from some distant, sepia-toned past talking about how your new speakers should sound, and then playing a sequence - usually an isolated instrument - so you can hear for yourself. This specific old gem had a ton of material to work with: drums, piano, plucked and bowed acoustic bass, an oboe, a flute (two different flutes, maybe? can't remember), you get the idea.

I spent the first day playing around with the drum break sequence and, while that was fun and I got some really off-the-wall shit out of the MKII's groove function combined with the drum loop I hacked out of the sequence, it wasn't the direction I wanted to head in so I jettisoned the drums (they're still there, saved to a pad and probably destined to be forgotten, but whatever).

I landed on the piano for my melodic backbone - like God intended - pitching it up pretty hard at +6 semitones. Even though I had those pads set to use the Ensemble stretch algo (the most reliable for me for samples like this), that much of a pitch jump did make it a bit warbly. Sometimes that's great if that's what you're going for, sometimes it doesn't really matter - it was thankfully the latter this time, because the Backing algo made the piano sound like a robot trying to hum a nice song to comfort itself while it died a slow, painful, solitary death. I chopped the piano up, laid out the chops into a 4-bar sequence, and in true _bug0ut form I wasn't thrilled with the result, so I adjusted some start/end points on the individual chops to let the track breathe a bit so it wasn't just constantly piano noise, and ended up with a couple of fairly decent 4-bar loops I decided would be good as the core of the verse sections. From there, copied those sequences to new pads and laid drums under them on those new pads, then copied those sequences to new pads in preparation for... my accent chops.

I had originally chosen the violin sequence for my melodic accent chops, so I went in on the violin sequence, pitching it around and chopping (for this, I just auto-marked it into 16 chops). I had to get a bit more surgical from there, pitching individual pads around to try to seek out something that would support the piano melody, but for the life of me I couldn't get the violin sound to sit nicely in the mix with the piano. As much as I love a violin sample, this was a little too screechy and jarring (though it was pleasant enough on its own, to be fair), so I ditched the violin entirely and dug up the flute from the source track.

The flute sequence was incredibly short and repetitive - the reason I initially ignored it outright - but it turned out to be kind of perfect for the purpose of accenting the melody. Since it was just 4 short sequences, each one identical to the last, I hacked out just the first iteration of it and got to work. In order to get as much mileage out of the flute, I was going to have to chop and rearrange it, and then work out some one-shot FX using those chops. It ended up being really handy in place of a riser; kind of a warning that a transition was coming as we're moving out of the A/verse sequence. There are two main piano loops (mostly similar, just a double hit of one of the chops at the end of the second loop), but I copied one of those piano patterns to a new pad and laid some really nice flute chops at the end of it to signal that we were moving into my B/chorus pattern... which didn't exist, yet. Fuck. OK, though, focus on the flute, dickhead - you're in the middle of that. I wanted to get more out of the flute than just using a few dry chops, so I took a really nice little flutter and slapped the MKII's Cloud Delay on it, cranking it just about half way (50-50) which gave it a nice, sort of granular shimmer. While that was nice, I wanted to squeeze a little more out of it so I reversed it and got a really pleasant sound that I could use as an FX one shot... but where?

Ah, yes... we need a B sequence. At this point, I flipped back over to the bank where I had my piano chops laid out and I started tapping around to see if I could find something that contrasted with the A sequence. I prefer not to make any use of already-used chops in my B sequences if possible, but I'll occasionally allow for it a bit if it ties the whole track together better. In this case, I found two unused piano chops that sounded nice together and changed up the feel of the track enough, but still stayed coherent enough with the A sequence melodically. Those two pads along just being tapped back and forth would have been a bit bland, so I pulled in one of the chops from the A sequence to kind of polish off the end of the first 2 bars of this B sequence, and another to lead us back into the A sequence at the end of the 4th bar. And here, at the end of the 4th bar, is where I found a proper place for my reversed, cloud delayed flute flutter to shine - as a trail back to the verse.

So at this point, I have 3 4-bar loops (one of them repeats) for my verse for a total of 16 bars, and I have 2 4-bar loops for my chorus, and I need a bassline. For the bass, I pulled out the trusty iPad, ran it over USB-C to the MKII, and started thinking of how to rig up a nice, fat bass. Thankfully, I picked up a couple of bass enhancing plugins on deep sale last month on the App Store called Mammoth and Gorilla from Aurora DSP. While these are seemingly marketed heavily toward heavy metal/djent-style bass sounds, they can sound good on anything in the low end. I've used them on anything from regular electric bass sounds to 808s and Gorilla specifically is a goldmine for fattening up your bass, giving it a bit of distortion to push up through the mix, and even laying some utter filth over the top to give it a gritty feel (Mammoth seems better for that layer of filth, but I use Gorilla heavily for the same). I fired up AUM, opened up a single audio channel, slapped Mela Classic on there and threw Gorilla in the FX node. While Mela Classic is a pretty nice, versatile synth, I often just use it for the available waveforms and use external FX modules to sculpt/shape and add movement. In this case, all I really wanted was a fat bass sound with a fast attack (but no clicking) and as little of a release as I could get away (also without clicking). Dialed in what I wanted in Gorilla (in fact, I think I just used one of the presets) and I had a really pleasant, fat bass - I don't know wtf you call it, but I call this kind of bass a Touch Bass because the signal is only coming through while you're touching that shit. This allows you to almost make your bassline another percussive instrument, like a tuned, secondary kick drum almost, where you're adding to the groove while leaving empty space between bass hits.

Now I've got my sequences laid out and I'm coming up on the more painful stretch of the MKII experience: recording. Recording with the MKII is a total departure of my ultra-spoiled prior experience with tools like the MPC Live 2 and FL Studio. When you have a piano roll and feature-rich automation tools, anything and everything can be as ephemeral as you want it. Don't like that MIDI note or its length? Drag it elsewhere, or longer, or shorter. Want the automation to kick in 1/16 earlier? Just fix it. I can't believe I even wrote "feature-rich automation" in the same fucking sentence as "MPC Live 2" (still luv u tho boo xo <3), but compared to the MKII... it is. Recording tracks from the MKII feels so... final. If you fuck up, you nuke the whole thing and start over. It's an experience that's entirely new to me and while I get super apprehensive even thinking about it, I'm trying to embrace it. People have been playing instruments and beating on DJ gear and samplers in live environments since long before I was born (instruments) or at least since I was in diapers (more modern electronic gear). What makes me better than them? Literally nothing. No, I'm serious, they all probably make better music than I could ever imagine.

That Billie Holiday joint I did for STBB943 was done all  live - I was twisting knobs and switching out FX while also trying to keep track of which sequence was playing and where I was in the sequence so I can trigger the next one. I wanted a bit of an easier time this go around, so I could maybe focus more on the live FX, so I decided to try out the Pattern Chain feature for the first time. After checking the manual, it was  pretty straightforward to set up a new chain  and then plug in the sequences in the order you wanted  to play them. I fired up FL Studio so I could record, set up my mixer slot, armed it for recording, etc, and started a couple of dry runs to get a feel for where I might want to use which FX modules and how far I wanted to crank the knobs. What the manual doesn't tell you, though, is that when you hit the [VALUE] button to, say, switch between CTRL1-3 and  CTRL4-6 so you can get at that Catch knob in the Cassette module, the button will ALSO set whatever pattern you have selected in the chain to be your next one, throwing everything out of whack. A couple dry runs became several, and then several  more, as I worked through both the minor snags of using Pattern Chaining, and then worked through the pain of being utter shit at doing anything live.

What ended up coming out in the end was, admittedly, a bit messy - which I'm starting to consider my signature style - but also, frankly, kind of catchy. I genuinely dig it for the most part and, more importantly, this was another pretty valuable learning experience and my second "completed" (I still cringe using that word because nothing ever feels truly finished to me) beat on the MKII.