Kickin' It Old School...

I apparently decided to spend the entire weekend dealing with various computer problems instead of doing anything productive. On Saturday morning I was just gonna kick out a little jam video, like the couple dozen I’ve done before. Easy peasy, right? Not so much, no. Virtually every piece of soft- and hardware I own decided to fuck off in such a way that troubleshooting was required. (Hell, I even had to flash the OS on the Virus.)

In any event, by 8PM on Sunday, I finally got everything working. At that point I was feeling fairly AAARRGH, so my normal working tempo of 80-100 got doubled, and obviously my back-brain thought it was a good idea to channel mid-career µ-Ziq and Aphex Twin. (As Jamie Zawinski terms it, the “Silica gel, DO NOT EAT” era of electronic music.) So here you go. I resisted two urges: first, I did not use the Amen break, and second, I didn’t name it Hasty Boom Alert With 100% Less Forethought. I’m not looking for praise or anything, but if those two points could receive their due acknowledgement, that’d be cool.

Anyhow, since I did this one with the lights off, not so easy to see what I’m using, so here’s a paragraph for the gear spotters. Sole ’verb is the Eventide Space. The first synth you hear is Phosphor. All the “drums” are actually bits of flotsam and such-like on my back porch, sampled directly in to Maschine as I was learning how it worked. The Maschine 2-buss has Automaton and Replicant on it, controlled via a Korg NanoKontrol.

The bass is coming from a MeeBlip SE; I slapped Filterstation on the outs, and a knob on the Nanokontrol is hitting both filter freqs; the filter topology is the MS20 LP models. As you can plainly see in the video, this is the chain that produces the wobble bass, or as I have now named this sort of manual filter LFO, Crobble bass. The main melody is from the Virus Ti.