This is one of my favorites from the RPM Challenge. There were two songs that really stood out for me, and this is one of them. I started with the two hardware synths I bought last year (but hadn’t actually used in a project yet) as my arbitrary constraint, and the result was a squelchy, noisy bit of acid techno.
MIDI? What MIDI?
This song may not been a terribly big stretch for me stylistically, but how it was written and arranged was very different. The main wub wub sound is a Moog Werkstatt, which doesn’t have MIDI or even much of a useful keyboard on it. So I patched the LFO to the envelope and let it wub wub. I used the tap tempo in Live to get the tempo close, hit record, and tweaked the knobs for a good five minutes or so. Warped it to keep it mostly in time, and let it drift out of time where it felt interesting to do so, and then moved on to the rest of the elements.
From there I kept on adding and arranging the rest of the elements to fit around the initial Moog tweaking, building it up until it felt complete. It was written and mostly arranged all one sitting, a first for me. The only thing I went back and added was the tweaky snare sound, to add a little more dynamics to the song. And then I was done!
Effort? What Effort?
Some songs are hard, some are easy. This was the latter, fairly effortless. Even the mix fell into place very quickly. I was tempted to over-mix and really ride the faders to try and keep things as balanced as possible, but some of that unevenness and randomness really added to the organic feel. So I left it sloppy. :-)