Thrown for a Loop: My experiences with Waveform 11

The track:

Introductory musings:

I have always been an incessant table percussionist, much to the annoyance of family, friends and exam proctors alike – this is how I decided that my composition’s foundation would lie in a hand-drummed groove that I would record in a stairwell, using my phone’s mic in close proximity. In the intro, this sits on an ethereal four-measure pad sample (played around to attain this sound by adding reverb, more on this later), also to which I added a pitch shift to create a semblance of a chord progression. This is all complemented by an ambient vinyl scratch to contribute to the intro’s texture.

Granted, it’s a peculiar combination that I began with – it took a bit of experimentation to get there. I wanted to build into the piece; this meant beginning with a understated texture, effectively the bare bones of the project. Firstly, I wanted to introduce the chord progression. However, the sample is rather airy to begin with, so it was about striking a delicate balance between complementing the rest of the timbres as well as being full and ethereal enough to indicate the chord progression effectively enough.

Too much reverb/delay seemed to  make it tonally ambiguous and messy; too little made the intro seem too empty. This is why I chose to add reverb with <20% wetness, but also make it sit atop an ambient vinyl sample to “fill up the space”. I simultaneously wanted to retain the airiness of the stairwell space in which I recorded my percussion groove, so simply applied distortion to the percussion line, as well as a reverb-laden snap on the 2 and 4 to marry the natural and electronic sounds. “Quantizing” my recorded sample was a tedious process. Using the timewarp function, I used each transient marker to align the audio with the 120BPM tempo; whilst my recording was generally accurate, I wanted the 3-stroke rolls to be as uniform as possible.

Moreover, in the spirit of “building into the piece”, I applied low-pass automation curves to both the pad and the drums, gradually increasing the frequency threshold to introduce both sounds. I originally thought to simply automate volume (i.e muted to begin with), but found that using the lowpass filter added the necessary complexity to the buildup that volume automation lacked.

Moving into bar 5, our next new element is introduced – Professor Petersen’s voice. I wanted to include a spoken word element to the piece; I tried, to no avail, to use the transient markers in the audio clip to time-warp and have Prof Petersen effectively “rapping”, but found that this added unnatural pauses and stretches in the sample, without retaining the quality of the voice itself. I, however, piggybacked off this result to completely “destroy” the voice altogether. After experimenting with filtering, compression, phasing and bandpassing, I settled on distorting, pitch shifting and reverbing the voice track, giving the impression of a phone line breaking up (the irony of distorting an excerpt from a lecture about audio is not lost on me). Voice was an interesting element to manipulate – splitting and repeating particular parts and pitch shifting individual words allowed me to use it as an instrument, effectively. I also used volume automation to bring life to the more “glitchy” repetitions of particular syllables or tones.

As the voice sample progressed, I wanted to add to the texture to segue into the “hook”/drop more cleanly. This entailed changing the effects on both the percussion and pad (removing the filters from the percussion and adding further reverb to the pad), as well as adding a bassline (I cheated and used MIDI, as I had created a chord progression – a stock sample to underscore the pad that I had already ‘messed with’ would have been very difficult to find). I experimented with different waves, and found that both square and triangular waves were a bit too sharp and aggressive – I didn’t want the bassline to serve a function beyond filling up the lower frequencies and sitting underneath the melody and chord progression, and thus settled on a sine wave. To avoid the bass clashing with the percussion and the drums/lower frequency sounds I would later introduce, I added a low pass filter.

As far as the rhythm of the bassline goes, I experimented with more stabby, uniform rhythms and found that they did not integrate well with what was already a busy combination of sounds. This is how I settled on more of a drone on the root notes of both chords (Dm7, Cm7).

The Hook/Chorus

Moving out of the voice sample, we see more of a conventional “build-up” into the chorus/hook of the piece. I was pretty decided on adding a sweep over 4 measures, and added a bitcrusher to it to sit better on the percussion. This complemented the saxophone sample I added (a snippet from a longer sample from Splice.com) and pitch shifted to suit the original key and chord progression of the piece, which was also bitcrushed. I wanted it to identify the pre-chorus and occupy a lot of space: adding reverb and delay with a large room size made this happen. However given the reed timbre, it was very easy to reach a plugin overkill with the saxophone; having originally phased and compressed the sax as well, I had to strip it down to just reverb and distortion.

With the “beat” temporarily cutting out, I felt that bar 17 was a good time to move into something of a hook. The word that came to mind for me was “big”. I wanted the texture to feel fuller, I wanted the section as a whole to feel less ethereal and more punchy, and occupy more space.

First up, achieving punchy drums: I sifted through the bass drum samples in the SSLIB library, and in the process realize that I didn’t want a tuned 808 bass drum as I’d already effectively created a sub bass. However, each of the more abbreviated, compact sounding kicks didn’t seem to “hit”, or fill up the low frequencies like I wanted them too. This is where I decided to layer a low pass filtered 808 kick with a high pass filtered, reverbed natural kick, giving the impression of an organic kick sound whilst filling up the space. This was definitely an arduous process, as multi-tracking a kick can create serious clashes. They initially did not sit atop the sub bass cleanly at all, and I had to fiddle with volume settings to have them sit underneath the mix effectively.

I kept the 808 theme by taking a snare and hat one-shot from the Apple sample library and creating a standard 4/4 drum pattern with little flourishes on the hats. I wanted to make the snare heavy, dominating the 2 and 4 of each measure. Adding reverb and layering it atop the reverb-heavy snap allowed this to happen. However, when looping that drum pattern, I found that the hats were dominating the high frequencies a bit too much; I foresaw that this would likely clash with the lead, so added a bandpass filter to keep the hi-hats in the pocket I wanted it to remain in.

Similarly I wanted the synths on the hook to be considerably larger. To retain the same chord progression, I decided to reverse the original pad sample – this was a lucky break, as the pulse of the original sample seemed to come out a lot more; this created a clear 4/4 sense to the synth pad, essentially allowing it to double as a surrogate lead. I removed the filters from the original sample and added reverb, making it easier for the chords to fill out our mid-frequencies.

Arguably my favorite part of the hook (and certainly the most tedious), is the pitch-shifted church organ sample, to which I added delay, a phaser and a multiband compressor. This altered the sound enough to make it a synth lead, not really discernible from its original organ form. I was looking for something that would add melodic complexity to the project, and it was a much better alternative to the repetitive, percussive synth leads that I was finding in other sample libraries.

Post-chorus

This dovetails back out into something of a bridge with the distorted sweep. I wanted a sense of structure similar to conventional electronic music – this meant interpolating the intro/buildup as a post-chorus or bridge. Here we see the return of my recorded sample in its bitcrushed and low-passed form. This is, of course, only an eight-bar section. The sweep in the latter half brings us towards the second chorus. From here on out, my thinking is fairly self-explanatory.

Second hook 

The second iteration of my hook is largely derivative of the first. It’s largely an interpolation or a direct copy-paste of the majority of the elements used in the first hook. The notable differences, however, lie in the little rhythmic irregularities at the beginning of both 4-bar phrases. I patterned the bass drums as a little syncopation, to break away from the relative monotony of hearing the same thing twice. I wanted to play around with changing the melody, but found this counterintuitive as the lead melody had already sort of established itself as a motif in the first hook. Also worth mentioning is a one-shot blip that I pitch shifted according to the fifth of both root notes and repeated to serve as a percussive device and keep the beat moving. Lastly, I retained the reversed pad sample and organ leads, moving into the outro with the textbook sweep.

Outro

I wanted to do something slightly different with the outro, as opposed to a standard repetition of the intro. As such, after playing around with various automations and new plug-ins, I opted to pitch shift most bare elements of the intro down an octave, simultaneously ramping up the low pass filtering to allow the track to essentially fizzle out, using the automation curves on both the percussion samples and synth pad. This occurs gradually over eight bars atop the vinyl crackle. For me, this was the bookend that I wanted to end the track with.

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