This is actually a track I put out back in January, but I hadn’t mastered it. Now it’s mastered and it’s the first thing I’ve put on my soundcloud in over 6 months, so I figured I’d make a bit of a deal out of it.
I’m having trouble with the embed right now, I’ll look into that later but you get the hard link for now.
I do hope you enjoy it, I still do and I’ve been listening to this in some form or another for over a year now. So that’s a good sign.
Heh, that’s awesome. I usually can’t stand my stuff over and over that long. I will say, my favorite part of it is when the distorted bass/lead? comes in at 3 mins. That’s more my style. Overall nice build / progression throughout. Thumbs up.
Nice groove and good positive feeling! Makes my head nod for sure. Sounds good, too, especially arund 0:30 and 2:40 when you can really hear the full beat with snare - nice clear sound. I like it when it gets fuller towards the end, but I think the noisy synth gets a bit strong and piercing at times (around 4:50), that part goes a bit against the overall chill atmosphere imho. Just some ideas: for dance genres, a more pronounced funky, bouncey or sidechained bassline in contrast to the constant playing notes could maybe underline the happy groove and the happy overall feeling a bit more. Also, in house you often have some kind of change or fill-in when the same pattern is played the 4th, 8th and so on time, here it feels a bit like the same arp patterns are playing all the time - if you change the patterns every forth and/or eigth and/or 16th time when playing it might make it feel more organic or engaging. Nice work overall!
Thanks guys. Ultimately, this is a year old track that really only saw the light of day by happy accident. It was a WIP from last march that was basically just the first 2 minutes. I didn’t know what to do with it so I dropped it and worked on other stuff for about 6 months. Came back and forgot that I originally had Diva playing the lead, which is way louder than the m1 patch I ended up using. This is important because I was going to clean out the project and dump all the stuff that I wasn’t using to get it ready to work on again. I copy/pasted my pattern into the Diva channel to see what it was before deleting it and it was routed through the same mixer channel as the m1, so it blew up the saturation stuff I had on there and sounded awesome, like nothing I’d ever done before. So the song more or less became all about making a transition from that m1 sound to the diva sound, and moving all the supporting parts with it to help sell that change in energy. I still haven’t done a studio version of this track tbh, but I think it’s getting time for me to get on that (I kept the original project from before I added everything after the 2 minute mark and some other instruments that didn’t appear in this version).
So anyways, the drums are just a straight 4 bar pattern looped for the first 3 minutes, the bass is similarly simple, the chords and lead are actually about where I wanted them (but couldn’t figure out how to change up in my original version).
If I understand you correctly, in a DAW like Ableton you can easily record the arp pattern as MIDI or convert audio into MIDI and switch the melody up to add some variation, fills, resolving moments and so on - a purely arp-based lead, even if made with the internal arp of a synth, can easily be transformed into a full organic (and even expressive if you add some automation) melody like that while still adhering to the original arp pattern.