Weekly Recap #3

• The Bach portraits are complete!
• Slipways for Pico-8 has been released!
• Tutorial #30 has been published!

(I’m still trying to find the best way to present WIPs. Suggestions are always appreciated! I may start recording ALL of my composition sessions to create more interesting videos. This way you can actually see and hear these compositions develop. We’ll see!)

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Untitled (0:00)

Weirdness warning!

Over the last year I’ve been obsessively consuming all sorts of Ableton tutorials – mostly those from Mr. Bill and Tom Cosm. It’s been a long-term goal of mine to become an Ableton wizard like these guys. This composition is kind of an accumulation of everything I’ve learned from them up to this point.

One of the main differences between electronic composition and traditional composition (like writing at the piano) is sound design in the workflow. My approach for this composition was to try and not using any of my background in harmony/melody, and focus instead on creating interesting sounds. 

Most of the sounds, besides the drum sounds, were created using a combination of Analog, Saturator and sample warping.

Unnamed Cells (0:49)

(Yes, the title comes from Agar.io) 

Another tune from the archives. It’s like a combination of Matts & Morgan Band + Journey from Reedham. The introduction is written in 9/4. (4/4 + 5/4)

The hi-hat though, is in 2/4, so it makes for a more interesting, longer phrase of 18/4. 

If you'd like to hear the acoustic version of this, my trio recorded it on our latest record.

Shepard Tone in Pico-8 (1:55)

I worked on this for a few hours this week, and I THINK this is the only way to do it in Pico-8. A Shepard Tone is an aural illusion of sound that seems to be infinitely ascending (or descending).  I may do a tutorial on this eventually - it was really difficult to figure out the best way to do this in Pico-8.  

I also have some more ideas on how to combine this with harmony to create infinitely long chord sequences. Stay tuned!

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Thanks for reading!