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Premise

I wanted to try out an idea I’d had for quickly making drum beat patterns. Abelton has a nifty “Convert Drums to new MIDI Track” tool. So I recorded a clip of me beatboxing a drum beat into my microphone, then used the tool to transform it into MIDI. Low and behold it worked nearly perfectly. Quantizing it, and modifying in some Trap-y style hihat patterns I had a cool beat. From there, I fiddled with some chords in Captain Chords (my favorite little music theory helper plugin!) until I found something I liked then the rest just kind of fell into place over the course of week of fiddling with the track for a couple hours each night.

Sound Design

Chords

The main musical element of the track is the chord progression that I wrote to layer over the simple 808/kick/hat/snare drum pattern that I started with. Inspired after I started playing with a midi pitch device and clip automating the 808 pitch to give it some variance. After writing the chord progression, I tweaked the clip automation of the 808’s pitch to give a good mesh with the music.

• D Minor
• A Minor (1st inversion)
• G Major (1st inversion)
• A Major (1st inversion)
• D Minor
• F Major (1st inversion)
• A Major (1st inversion)
• D Minor

Despite sharing the same end chord, the opening of each 4 bar verse sounds different from the closing previous 4 bars thanks to the bassline borrowing a note from each chord at 2 octaves lower.

For the opening bar of each 4 bar pattern, the highest note is borrowed and dropped 2 octaves, while the 4th bar, the lowest note is borrowed and dropped 2 octaves. For the full 8-bar progression, despite being the same chord for the 1st and 8th bar (which meet up for the next loop), sound like different chords entirely.

Synth Stabs

The main 4/4 pattern chord stabs were achieved with a layer of 2 Serum instances, modified Chello and Eiano synth presets that I took to town adjusting the attack/decay and some filtering to turn into a “swelling” stab.

Another voicing trick for the “chorus” bars I employed was I expanding the notes from a simple triad voicing to 7th voicing with a stacked triad, then I duplicated and re-stacked the chord shifted an entire octave up, leading to massive 12-note chord stabs with a range of 4 octaves. It was imperative to freeze these tracks to audio because with Serum even at medium quality… 140+ polyphony got a little CPU-abusive.

Chiptunes Melody

Accompanying those stabs in the chorus section were the 8th note 4/4 pattern stab triads with a square-wave “video-game” square wave synth sound where each 1/4 stab was comprised of the main chord progression but with alternating inversions of the low and high note shifted up or down an octave to give a “up down up down” bounce. Interjected were extensions of the high-note of each triad to a full 1/4 note and an extra 1/4 note between the chord stabs that fell outside of the triad to form a an overarching melody. Probably the most fun piece of midi I’ve ever had the pleasure of making thus far.

Symphony Strings

I decided to write a symphonic interlude melody to give a rest in the middle of the track. Taking 5 samples from Ableton’s “orchestral strings” pack, I pieced together an accompanying melody of a once-per-bar 8th note chord stabs (same chord progression as the rest of the track) with 8th note melody leading into each successive chord stab on the 1st whole note of each bar.

Chosen were Staccato Violin & Viola sections; Pizzicato Violin & Viola sections; and a Double Bass section.

I voiced the Staccato Violin section melody 1 octave higher than their accompanying chord stabs. The Staccato Viola section melody is intermixed at the same octave as their chord stabs. The octaves were mirrored with the melodies of the Pizzicato Violin and Violas, but notably the chord stabs of the first 3 bars were removed from the Pizzicato sections. The Double Bass played the same melody as the Pizzicato section, but 2 octaves lower (for obvious reasons :P)

I originally intended to overlay the symphony elements as part of the Chorus bars since their melody was intentionally meshed with the main chord progression, but those sections were a bit too crowded already so I opted to leave the full 5 instrument section as a stand-alone interlude/bridge section. As a compromise to my wishes, went back and layered only the Staccato Violin/Viola sections over the outtro verse.