This one is great, but i doubt it would fit dnb style track
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So yeah I was track 6, admittedly not a really a bongo driven number lol but in my defence I’ve had a really long lay off from actually finishing anything decent for what seems like forever, had my move a couple of months and had the seed of a tune on there so I took the opportunity and motivation of the battle to actually put something out there, thanks to all of you for the votes, mentions and critique, I’m always open to all of it… congrats to all the the finalist also, it’s weird how you can kinda tell who did what after being here for a while… i see you @proskynesis 
…
So in the spirit of sharing here’s where mine started and as you’ve all had a gander at the end result I’ll spare the repost and just describe some of what was used…
Stems from move: (raw unmixed)
This is a link to the live 12 compatible bundle file, if you want to download it and see what’s what and how far I went before moving to live… @Kuro
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LgzMDpB28JZbEgBunAoKcfR6TDom6bcw
So after I got the set into live although I liked where the track was headed I wasn’t really feeling the stock move pad or the bass part so they got replaced with a pad from the excellent atmospherics engine from falcon and my favourite bass generator which is mark yardleys 808 bass rack, the call stabs aren’t really a stab, it’s a dnb pad from analog lab that has a shortened sustain and heaps of delay I just really like the dissonant tone of it against the mentasm sample…
I only used a couple of snippets of the provided samples as atmospheric elements sprinkled here and there which was a bit cheeky and they were put through N.i. Bite to give them a more metallic sound
The vocals were courtesy of the late great Rutger
Hauer, it’s the excerpt from blade runner where he visit the old fella in the eye workshop, the cyborgs vocal is from a random sample pack.
Mix wise I must admit to being a bit of an amateur, I don’t do any fancy mastering or eq work short of channnel eq to ensure a mud free mix, the only thing I ever put on my master is baby audios taip plug-in, it adds a little saturation and has a great transparent limiter built in to make sure shits loud but not clipping
Most of the delays in the track are stock Ableton, but the rest is just Dubstation 2 from audio damage
Any beat repeat/filter/reverse stuff you hear going on in the main drums is sugar bytes looperator at work, I find programming fills and automating filter sweeps really tedious and looperator makes it easy to get a nice result fast without all the cutting and pasting of audio breaks…
Anyhow that’s just about the size of it so thanks for reading this to the bottom, and for listening…
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Agreed, although I decided against it more because all my recent entries have included a 3:4 section, so I figured it’d be too much of a giveaway that this track is mine. (Though the track I submitted, to my ear, is still chock-a-block full of Duppyisms.)
Not to put you on the spot, but what genre would you put it in, if you had to?
I keep wondering about this, because whenever people ask me what type of music I make, I can never think of a good or particularly descriptive response. Then they get frustrated or think I’m being pretentious.
I’d say something like “Avant garde dance music” but that’s even more pretentious, and it’s not exactly helpful in terms of expressing what it sounds like
Ha, interesting question. Intro is giving me some psychedelic vibe. But i can hear dnb drum structure. Avant garde dance music is actually quite fitting. Really cool tune. Me and my gf just shaked our butts with it 
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Thanks!
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@Symian thanks for sharing your process and the move file, very interesting!
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Not sure if anyone will want the level of detail I’m putting here but here we go…
My track started off as a sketch in the Digitone with kick & snare on one track, subs on another, mids on a third and percussion on the fourth.
I then dropped those into Logic using overbridge but trying to get the samples in it ended up being an absolute monster of a session with every stab split off onto its own channel for ease of mixing.
I used a fair number of provided samples; there is a bongo and a conga loop panned left & right across the main beat, plus a hi hat I made from something on the samples. The distorted vocal hits are heavily processed chops out of the bongo record - manipulated with logic’s pitch correction, vocal transformer and doubled up.
I added a lot of bits and bobs here and there including another kick & snare from Sugarbytes Drumcomputer. I wanted to go for the modern sounding synthy drums rather than old school but this made the percussion quite hard to mix in
Once I had the main body of the track I made the intro - I used a different bongo loop in the intro and the little bitcrushed texture loop in the intro is also from the bongos. The intro has all kinds of stuff, some pads from the RD88, a bit of guitar I played in and some Kontakt libraries.
Mix wise I chucked Waves NLS on everything, theres distortion everywhere and clippers and limiters before everything hits the master. I also used Neutron, particularly for dynamic EQ rather than straight sidechaining so it didn’t pump too much, then there is more clipping and Ozone on the master. To get the sub hitting on small speakers it’s also parallel processed with a guitar amp sim for the distorted layer
Part of my goal for this one was to see how hard I could push the loudness before it got too muddled. I got up to -6LUFS but then pulled it back to about -8 with 0.5dB of headroom when I exported
Session looked like this in the end
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Jesus. That’s crazy, hats off.
I was track 9 aka the quiet one. Mine was really just a quick pattern I threw together on the Sonicware Lofi 12 XT with no additional mixing/mastering because I didn’t have any Overbridge device plugged in and I was going on vacation anyway. I think it could benefit from re-recording, changing up the levels, adding some variation, and actual post-processing, but it’s still not going to be anywhere near the crazy levels of effort some of y’all put in.
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Mine was track 5. All made on an op-z and mc101 recorded as a stereo mix out from op-z as a live take.
The synth sounds (bass, chords, arp and pad) come from mc101,m. It is sequenced by the op-z, which also does drums and bongo/vocal samples. The only synth sounds coming from the op-z is a an infrequent bass note and the chord track going into a slow delay, for a bit of background texture.
Due to limited time it is basically one pattern and definitely lacking some transitional energy and variation.
I recorded the stereo out into audacity, pumped the volume by what is missing, added a limiter to reduce by 3db and then amplified again. I have absolutely know idea what I’m doing in this aspect so I’d love to know more about approaches to post production with just a stereo out recorded.
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I made Track 11 (the goofy one), all in Ableton.
I started by sorting through the bongo sample pool, tagging sounds that might be useful or interesting. I settled on a handful that seemed to be in the same key and groove, then warped the samples to work. (Some of those bongo hits are way off tempo!)
I don’t really do a lot of DnB, so I wasn’t sure how to organize the song, but I settled on using the vocal samples to narrate a progression:
- bongos today are not just limited to bongo music (cue drum chops)
- let’s add an instrument that really changes things up (Reese bass + FX)
- break it down, Johnny! (breakdown and buildup)
The percussion comes in three layers: a bongo loop, chopped & spliced; an Amen break, also sliced; and a two-step beat banged out on an Ableton drum kit.
The acoustic bass was a happy accident: I tried converting my piano loop to MIDI, but the poor quality of the vinyl led to these fun, stuttering skips. I had to quantize them just a little bit. The Reese bass is also the same 4-note riff, but slowed down.
Three instances of Arturia’s EFX Motions are doing a lot of the heavy lifting on this track. I find drawing curves in Motions kind of a chore, so I just drew the automation in Ableton, focusing on making transitions.
On my master track, I kept it really simple: a room reverb, a glue compressor, and LTL’s Silver Bullet pre-amp/compressor/EQ/end-of-chain-end-level-boss.
Overall, it was seven tracks, a couple of mix buses, and some send effects I forgot to delete. I had a lot of fun working within the limitations of the challenge, though I’ll be glad if I don’t hear any bongos for a long time.
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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.
8 Likes
I don’t believe anyone can learn from my workflow but I have learned a lot from your comments and your posts. 
What did I do?
I have tried to stick with Ableton Live and stock plugins as much as possible. For the bongos I used the warp markers and tried to get a matching rhythm to the beat. This could be improved next time. I used the vocal sample from the CD and put it on the Sampler Device, pitched it a little bit.
The pads, the bass sound and also the arp sound were created with Wavetable.
For the arrangement, I used my Launchpad X to start and mute my clips that I played in before as kind of a live performance. Afterwards I did some automation (volume or filter cutoff) or deleted some parts. Mixing was done with EQ8 (Yes, I forgot to filter the low end of the bongos… 
).
For the “mastering” I used Ozone 11 Elements with the EDM-Preset. I think it was too loud - I even felt a bit embarrassed. Next time I will focus more on mixing and less on limiting and compressing…
All in all it was a great experience and it made me finish something. Thank you @KingDuppy for organizing the battle.
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