New Track: “Sid’s Impeccable Design”

First note about this new track – more details, and sheet music, about to follow!

This is a short track – the idea for which I had yesterday just before going to bed, and which I arranged/tracked/mixed in roughly two hours today – also making this an advance for me in getting short tracks done really fast.

Dominating elements: the two lead sounds and the bass synth are done using the pure6581 VST – in case of the bass synth sent through Line6′s POD Farm for added beef. Drums are mainly one of Battery’s electronic libraries (from the Battery 1 library), with an added punch snare from Waldorf Attack. The bell-like sounds are an FM7 of course, and the arpeggiated thingie is a virtual PPG (by Hermann Seib – search for it, it’s free and great!).

And as I said – more details coming later!

110617 Update: on to the details (note the Eighties’ font colour!)

1.The Music

Sid's Impeccable Design - score

It’s a very simple arrangement – a standard ABA form, or rather ABA’. You get a call-and-response schme by the first lead and the bass (both SID-sounds, with added harmonies done by FM7) over a I-IV-V turnaround in Am, before a drum fill takes us to the B part.

The B part takes us to the parallel F tonic, and has yet another SID lead set against an arpeggiating PPG Wave…and a drum groove fans of my work will be most familiar with: remember The Cosmo Sessions, back from 1999? For the kinda-title track, Welcome Aboard (on the Flying Sausage), I used a sample from the out chorus drum groove from the track What? off Joey Baron’s solo debut Down Home. Much later, I played my track to Blah drummer Phonky Phrance, asking him to replicate that groove – and then extracted that groove in Cubase from a recording of that session – as seen below (see the picture gallery).

We’re taken back to the A part – or rather something similar. This time, the drum groove continues. But now, the call-and-response motivs are not played downbeat as the first time, but rather reshuffled upbeat, before we end into a IV-V-I turnaround, hitting the tonic with a Tierce de Picardie for added cheesyness.

2. The Sound

Signal Flowchart

It’s Eighties time here – more specifically, Commodore 64 time.

We have no less than three SID implementations here (Pure6581 VST) – for both lead sounds and for the punchy bass.

The bass, as said, is a Pure6581 – which goes through Cubase’s EQ, then through a sidechained compressor (triggered by the bass drum), and then through PODFarm – with two channels: a Sunn Coliseum amp and the Justin-Meldal-Johnsen-signature “SubDub” virtual amp – both of them tamed by the Teletronix LA2A compressor.

Both leads are completely unprocessed after the synths – as is the bell-like harmonies in the intro (NI FM7). Same goes for the arpeggiated harmonies in the B part. Here, the chords are sent through Cubase’s Arpache SX, then feeding Hermann Seib’s PPG Wave 2.2 VST – another fantastic freebie!

Finally the drums: let’s start with the very prominent snare. It’s Waldorf’s Attack (an edited verysion of the Newstyle Kit’s main snare), sent through the VintageCompressor and then reverberated by a Roomwork’s Gated Reverb. The rest of the kit? Battery2 has, from the Battery 1 library, a set called “80s Elektro”, and that’s it. The BD, of course, is sent through a Bitcrusher, then trough a VSTDynamics and then trough an EQ. The snare? VSTDynamics, and just a hint of OhmBoyz Delay multiapping – through Bitcrusher, and through a lowpass. Finally, the hihat – just Cubase’s great StudioChrous, with completely whacked out settings.

That’s about it for the processing – and I have to admit, it’s quite a lot. Noteworthy detail here: with the exception of the genre-and-epoque-typical gated reverb on the main snare, no reverb!

Ah, of course, all parts tracked using the Kurzweil K2600XS as a masterkeyboard (with the exception of the drums, which were extracted from Ponky’s groove, and then dynamically treated with the Akai MPD24′s trigger pads).

[Show as slideshow]