Sketch #001: Downside

To get myself composing regularly again, I’m going to be posting musical sketches to my blog. For each sketch, I’ll share the prompt I started from, what tools I used, and my process. While these sketches won’t be complete pieces, I hope you’ll enjoy listening to some of them.

Prompt: Downtempo, Digitakt II only, factory samples only

Process:
For this first sketch, I wanted to write something downtempo and atmospheric on my Digitakt II. To avoid getting bogged down, I decided to also restrict myself to only using the factory samples.

To start, I flagged about 15 samples that I liked and started to look for interesting combinations. I quickly found myself drawn to the two chords that repeat throughout. I noticed they had a subtle internal rhythm, and picked the 72bpm tempo to complement that. The melody that plays over top of those chords is a slice-and-shuffle of a short phrase, played in two different octaves, with some panning to give it motion.

From there, I built out the ambient introduction, layering three different noise samples with various modulations to create an atmosphere that could plausibly be a real space, while still being a bit ambiguous. At the end of the first day, I could feel the temptation to go really elaborate on the ambient segment, so I forced myself to leave it and move on.

The heavy beat section came last. The Digitakt factory samples don’t include a guitar chord, but using another sample and liberally applying filtering, overdrive, and chorus gave me something passable. (If I wanted to turn this sketch into a complete piece, one of the first things I’d do is replace the synth bass and the “guitar” with the real things.)

I gave the drums a blown-out sound, so the beat would have a nice weight at the slow tempo. The rough-sounding synth that plays in the last few bars is another heavily overdriven sample.

At this point, the piece was moving from something ambient and texture-ish into something melodic. The Digitakt II is great for rhythm and textures, but harder to use for melodies because of how its interface is optimized. I found myself struggling with the synth part, not really liking any of the lines I’d written.

I didn’t want to drop the heavy section and turn the piece into purely an ambient exploration, nor did I want to break my constraints by layering other instruments over the Digitakt tracks, so I decided it was time to move on.

In total I worked on this for two days; for a good portion of that I had my nose in the Digitakt manual re-learning the interface and learning some new tricks. I consider this sketch a success for the Digitakt skill-sharpening alone, but I’m pretty happy with the vibe of the piece as well.