Octaeteris

On llllllll.co, the forum generally known as “lines”, users often participate in collaborative musical creation. LCRP (lines community remix project) is such a collaborative project, and generally takes place twice a year (one on each equinox of the year).

I’ve taken part in many of them, and so I did for the last one. You can hear my track here (it’s track #03).

Process notes

When this new LCRP was first announced, I had some exchange with fellow forum user lijnenspel (who also contributed as every something a track to the project – it’s track track #09) and after hearing some of the amazing drum ‘n bass tracks he was making, I thought it would be a good idea to try to work within the bounds of some genre.

I decided that I wanted to do something with a genre I’m not a fan of – trap music – and mainly work with samples of physical objects that were not instruments in a traditional sense, keeping the sound sources purely acoustic in nature. Indeed most of the drum sounds I have used are either snippets of field recordings or noises made by hitting random objects.

As I worked on some of the track ideas, I had to accept a number of compromises. Some of the electric guitar samples were just too tempting and I had to use some more traditional drums along with the bits and pieces I extracted from the field recordings.

I tend to only use small parts from longer samples, individual notes, or hits. I load those into a sampler or Ableton’s Drum Rack, and create completely new material from those. I did use one or two guitar loops as well though.

I started by building a classic trap beat using the more percussive sounds, plus the aforementioned drum sounds. On top of that I stacked various tracks made with guitar sounds, most of them were made using single notes played chromatically inside Ableton Sampler or as one-shots in Drum Rack. A lot of the more rhythmic guitar sounds come from a user who goes under the name eblomquist.

There was a really nice (and clean) bass note among the samples, which I used as the starting point to build the distorted bass lines. The eerie pad sound was made using a long drone-like sample, with some added pitch modulation, filtering and some saturation. The plucked sounds were created by changing the envelope of an e-piano sample.

Not sure the trap origin of the beat can still be heard. But it’s still there, at least structurally. The end result sounds a bit a trap beat gone wrong, turned into a Southern Gothic sort of track, or at least that’s how I like to think of it.
I’ve used a lot of saturation and distortion on the samples because I wanted it to have a very gritty kind of feel.

Halfway into the track, I went back to the drawing board and tried something different. For me that’s often a way to check if I’m still happy with the original idea, or not. Here’s a few of those drafts:

After coming up with some of these, I went back to my original track and started to work on the structure, fine tuned the arrangement, etc.

I’m quite happy with how this turned out. I really love the process of taking somebody else’s sonic material and finding ways to turn that into something different. Often the music emerges in surprising ways from the raw material itself.

Sample credits (lines user names): lijnenspel Vitruvius DoS Struct oliodnb Glitcher Gonecaving vehka hermbot Marrak bharris22 edison myecholalia _mark beto eblomquist mohm edison

#03 #09