tracks
I was originally motivated by the sounds of a boom bap drum kit. I’d been listening to some music and caught this city street vibe. Though starting out heading toward a simple bells and toms sound, I wanted to let the project speak to me as I worked. It’s important to me to allow room for a track to develop organically and show me what it wants to become. Many influencers
were involved in choosing not only the sounds themselves but the organization of the backbeat and mixing. The track had to feel heavy enough to reflect the nature of inner-city street life while lifting a banner that calls to unification.
At 100 bpm I felt that the tempo would be accessible for a wide range of audiences. I preferred slowing it down a bit to reach a more adult audience while leaving room for younger generations to find a groove to dance to. The first 16 measures drive that point home with low mid and high tom usage, triangle, and other pointed sounds to make the track ring. With all of the focus on percussion early in, I wanted to keep the bass track simple, minimal, and out of the way of the future harmony and melody tracks.
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In C minor I chose chords that I felt could transition to parallel and suspended chords that were appealing to my ear. I had a heavy focus on seeking movement, tension, and delayed relief. (Cm7, Bbº, G, Cm7, Eb, Gsus4, F, and Cm.) The second 16 measures in particular make that statement for me. Each melody was crafted to be generally straight forward and offset sonically from both the harmony and bass tracks. I created a motif-based interval melody followed by a slightly different motif-based “on the nose” melody that sticks tightly to the harmony chords. Keeping the second 16 melody tight made room for additional layers of sounds on the synth and sampled audio tracks.
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I kept the possibility of arrangement creation in mind when adding synth and sample tracks. I wanted to make and use sounds that could simply be cut, faded, or panned to introduce different sections of a song. Songs for break dance and other boom bap tracks influenced my sound choices. I’m also pretty into video games, so there’s always a movement is life vibe in my style of production. I picked up a bowl I had cereal in (track 160, first 16), cleared my throat for Covid (track 165), and breathed out the stress of quarantine life (track 160, second 16). I wanted practice with Logic’s ESP synth and used it to create a stack that has some bite on the initial note strike with smooth undertones to compliment the bass, harmony, and melody tracks (track 162).
Light reverb is used on snare, percussion, recorded and sampled audio. Midi delay and a bussed delay are used on the harmony and throat clearing sample respectively. I aimed for just enough to thicken the sounds without making them too prominent in the mix. EQ and compression are used across the board to give each sound their own frequency space, made more apparent by panning. An extra trick was to separate rapid hi hat hits into a track panned away from the original hi hat placement to create movement (track 76). Recorded audio tracks have a gate to reduce background noise. I mixed starting from the kick at around -10dB and worked my way across the board seeking primarily to make every sound clearly audible and blended. I finished with EQ to cut excess highs and lows and compression to glue it all together.