I first started with trying to recreate a small section of an aphex twin song called heliospan. I did this because it would help me a understand a little further how he makes his tracks. Some tracks are to the point where you don’t even know where to to start to recreate it, however with heliospan it was easy to get started, and you can hear by ear what’s happening.
This small section was simple to recreate, I obviously haven’t got it spot on, but its good enough to closely resemble it. The melody is simple, the tracks in A sharp major, and the melody follows a simple pentatonic scale, the chords as well are simple, because It’s just 4/4 pattern looped, the percussion however is the hardest, as its a little more complex but still easy enough to understand by ear
This showes me that not every track has to be extremely complicated to be good. A lot of stuff can be simple but affective.
experiment track 1 –
With this I was experimenting with a chord progression, as well as trying out the arpeggiator function on the chip synth OPS7
In the end I didn’t like how this turned out and I then made a more ambient iteration of the progression.
In this I layered the chords and put different effects on each line to make it more ambient and fuller, however I still wasn’t satisfied. I liked the chord progression on its own with varied instrument, but I couldn’t make it fit within a track I wanted.
experiment track 2 –
Again this was another track to experiment with with varying speeds of the arpeggiator. I feel as this sounded and came together a lot better, but still wasn’t good, and the reason for it is that I just don’t like it.
experiment track 3 –
listening to the track “Jynwaythek” I wanted to create something that included more of the sound of the instrument its coming from, for example the hammers hitting the piano strings, I did enjoy this however as it was a lot more soothing to listen too, in the end with this track I couldn’t come up with the different sections or a structure for it
experiment track 4 –
In this one I wanted to try some ambient sound design , I took one of the pallas instruments and put different filters and automations on them, it was a lot more eerie than the other experimental tracks which is good, but at the same time I liked the idea, but when listening to it it didn’t fit what I wanted to do
experiment track 5 –
In this track, I was experimenting with 808 samples and a bass line mainly. I used the lessons I got from ned rush on YouTube to make a random probability kick drums, It worked well and I got a lot of different sounds, all I had to do it click randomise and I’d have a new kick drum rhythm every time. For the bass part, I took inspiration from Aphex twins track “windowlicker”, used a similar sounding instrument and rhythm and it sounded decent.
experiment track 6 –
This was another experimentation with a bass line, I really liked this one, I spent time experimenting with different instrument and effects and settled on this. It was simple , but consisted of some glitchy randomness I added to it through effects.
experiment track 7 –
This is the track which I spent a very long time on, this was going to be the final track, but I couldn’t find myself coming up with any ideas, I made this short section and really enjoyed it, I loved what I’d done with the piano audio, it had some very subtle glitchy ness to it, which I liked, as well the bass part was my favourite thing about the track, it was hard to make the bass part fit, as I’d pitched the piano part up so it was hard to find what key it was really in, even with a key finder attached to it. In the end I couldn’t continue with the track , I’d hit a mental block ,and couldn’t come up with a structure, or even a second part to the track. I knew what I wanted but couldn’t do it