One of my favorite things about this track is the morph from the hum to a rhythmic/pitched pattern.
There’s a scene in ‘Book of Sarth’ where the office workers are coming out of a daze, they are transitioning back in to reality, and the hum transforming really ended up matching this perfectly. (I don’t know which idea came first.)
Here’s how I did it:
I start with a recording of typical 60 cycle hum. This was pretty straightforward, I probably just messed with a 1/4” cable partially plugged into my Marshall amp, or something similar.
I wanted to see if I could transform that sound into something.
I started playback and threw various Ableton plug-ins on the track.
I tried a Delay, an EQ, a compressor … and they all stayed, but what made the melody was the frequency shifter plug-in. I saw a preset called ‘Space Birds’ and with it on the track, I immediately got a cool melody.
It’s a pitch shifter with a random waveform modulating the pitch.
It’s moving at a speed of one quarter note, or so it says, but I hear it as sixteenths (the file is at 88.00 BPM so …) I think maybe that has to do with the width control.
Then it’s just a matter of automating the wet/dry control to ‘morph’ the track from plain hum to the melody.
One of the great things about Ableton is the plugins, no matter what type, usually have some kind of wet/dry or ‘percent’ control. This allow for a lot of cool morphs and transitions, I’ll go deeper down that road in the next post.
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The other thing I love about this track is the drum sounds during this hum/intro section. There is the extremely clear track and a more … gnarly track. Here they are combined, but I put a bit of strong panning so you can more easily differentiate the two parts
Here’s just the 606 (clear) loop:
And here is the sampled club kit with brushes:
And then the dramatic, almost military hits that come in and out have the gnarliness much more evident.
This was a happy accident. The original piece (called Onamanopeia April Foolz) was an instrumental done at 176.10 BPM. At the time I was having issues with cpu power in that particular file, so I ‘froze’ a couple of the drum tracks.
For whatever reason, when I started working on the hum piece, I halved the BPM to 88, and I forgot to unfreeze those two tracks.
This meant that the beats played at the much slower tempo, but one track was just slowed via midi, maintaining the very clear pristine quality, and the other was audio-stretched, making it very gnarly. This was particularly awesome because it was an exaggeration of what I was going for. I often have two (or more) drum kits on a track, one pristine, one dirty. This was just more so.
If you want to hear the entire track on Spotify, including it’s connection to the vocal track ‘Blacklist’ here it is:
More about happy accidents and automated effect controls to morph sources in future posts. I hope you enjoy!
— Sarth
