SmashBack

Feeling fired-up after an electric time at the Animal Aid Christmas Fair in London last weekend, I decided to finish and upload the last of my free tracks to SoundCloud asap to keep the ball rolling before the big tunes come out on vinyl and digital download!

This one is another experiment with groove. This time, the whole track follows the rhythm of a freely oscillating synth (which you can hear at the start). It was written at around 120bpm but the tempo sounds more like 170bpm because the synth oscillates near to a 15/16 time signature. The track ends with a straight 120bpm-ish section.

This track marks the start of things to come. Every track from now is written at around 165/170bpm. Jungle/Drum and Bass.

To start the bass rolling, there will be a FREE TRACK called 'ALMONDS' released on the SmashBack SoundCloud page on Monday 20th October 2014.

The story goes....

I was playing with the Drum Machine V1.3 Android app on my old HTC One S phone and came across something interesting: error!! I programmed a recognizable 808 beat into the step sequencer and the HTC phone struggled to play the pattern back at a consistent 120bpm tempo. The beat stretched in and out of time as the phone's CPU tried to cope with it.

It sounded wonderful. A real breath of fresh air. The accidentally-created grooves sounded more 'human' than the most organic sounding, confidently loose session drummer or any Ableton groove pool template I have come across. Every bar sounded different. I would compare the off-grid sound to the scattered electronic breaks heard intermittently on Electro tracks like Pack Jam and King of the Beats, or throughout Bambaataa's Planet Rock.

My new track 'Almonds' was built around a recording (via a Zoom H1) of a step sequenced 808 pattern I created on the Drum Machine V1.3 Android app. I picked out my favourite one-bar loop from the recording and used Ableton's 'Convert Drums To New MIDI Track' to create a MIDI clip featuring MIDI notes of the timings of each drum hit (the audio of the original recording was not used in the track). I then copied and pasted the new MIDI clip to every sound in the track and quantized every note of each sound to the grid inside the MIDI clip (deactivating the notes of the grid). When you hear the track, you might not initially notice that the beats are out-of-time, but I would recommend spinning this one back if you're mixing Almonds into another beat.

As much as technology moves 'forward', the capitalist practice of forcing a consumer to buy the next model up because what they already have is inferior still exists. We think we are finally moving towards a 'perfect' state at any given moment, but we never quite get there. We are only human: we, and our world, are imperfect. I would definitely recommend what I have been doing to any musician who wishes to step away from the 'perfection' ideal that exists (most notably) in music production. Step away from multi-band sidechaining the mid of the attack transient of your all-pass filtered trumpet sample recorded in 64-bit up Mount Everest and, for a laugh, fuck around with a free drum machine phone app on your old Android phone and enjoy the imperfections. It did me the world of good!

DJ Hype - 'Roll The Beats' Remix

The track that started it all for me.