My song was made from a bunch of old and abandoned projects.
Everything was recorded & performed live in 1 take on the Analog Rytm and SP-404ii, with the AR sending clock and transport to the SP404 and both going direct into an SSL12.
The bones of it are a SY-Chip song I wrote on the Analog Rytm and forgot about, and most of the samples are left over from previous 'nauts challenges that were hanging out in an unused SP-404 project.
SP-404 II: Bongos, upright bass, piano, and vocal samples
All the bongo samples were chopped & live-recorded as patterns on the SP, with minimal processing.
Each pad had a longish bongo sample taken raw from the LP, all repitched and set to mute each other. I played along live with the AR until I got a pattern that felt good. Then I copied it a bunch of times and used TR-REC/Microscope to remove/repitch different hits in each pattern for variations.
These deletions, along with speeding or slowing the tempo, meant different amounts of each pad would play out before the next one cut it off. It made the bongo patterns unpredictable and sort of unwieldy, but in a way I liked.
The piano jazz bits are from “'Round Midnight” by Thelonious Monk, left over from the Blue Note Hip Hop Battle, which I wanted to take part in but didn’t finish anything in time. Some pattern changes would let these long samples play out; others had “silent” trigs on the first step, with the sample’s volume/speed set to 1/lowest, to emulate a sudden mute.
Upright bass samples are the ones I use a lot, from “Uh, Zoom Zip” by Soul Coughing
Vocal samples were taken from the “Let’s Play Bongos” LP, as well as from the Twilight Zone episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit.” There’s probably some music from the episode in there, too, since I didn’t bother isolating anything or doing any resampling.
All the SP404 pads, with the exception of some vocal samples, were played via the patterns rather than live triggers, to free my hands up to manipulate effects during tracking—rapidly switching between Filter+Drive/Stopper/DJ Looper and others on FX Bus 1, all feeding into BPM delay on FX Bus 2.
Analog Rytm I: Everything else
Synths:
—BD1: Sy Chip set to +SQR wave, panning via LFO for that intro ping-pong synth line
—SD2: Sy Chip again, set to .TRI for the arpeggios
—BT5 playing the bass line
Drums:
—BD Silky
—SD Natural
—HH Basic (x2)
—CY Ride
—CY Classic
Samples:
—Samples/drones/noise from Crematorium Sounds
—Pitched vinyl surface noise from the “Bongos” LP
—Some Bobby McFerrin breaths taken from “Circlesongs”
—Extremely slowed down “Sweet Pea” break for even more atmospheric noise & drones
—“Monster Man” break during bridge.
Performance/Mastering:
Like I said, I performed and recorded everything live in 1 take, with no editing after the fact, other than overdubbing some extra Twilight Zone vox.
Not because I’m a purist or anything; I’m just too lazy to edit stuff, which always feels like “work” to me. I’d rather just practice and practice until I capture a good take, even though I know editing multiple takes together would be much faster and easier in the long run.
I used Song Mode on the AR and 4 different pattern chains on the SP. Getting them to match up was a bit of a nightmare and involved a lot of math.
Finally, I applied some EQ (ReaEQ) and compression (ReaXcomp) on each channel in Reaper and added a limiter (MGA JS Limiter) on the master to bring up the final mix, tame the cymbals bit, and get rid of some muddiness.