How I Did It
Tools I Used
Ableton (7), Stylus RMX, Recycle, DirectWave, WAVES
Samples I Used
Commercial loop/sound font libs for some of the beats, strings, flutes and acoustic bass.
Trifonic for synth, atmosphere and beat fills.
Original Samples
Strat through Cry Baby
Process
I REXified the Trifonic samples as well as a drum beat and acoustic bass slide from a commercial library.
I fed those into Stylus RMX and worked on the groove for a while, using 'chaos' for inspiration.
Working iteratively between Live and RMX I worked out a groove by combining 4 percussive tracks
- a Trifonic beat with the lows looped off and most of the kick slices removed
- a Trifonic loop that had synth swells and percussion
- a commercial beat will all the snare slices removed
- an RMX snappy snare
For the bass part I had to do some re-pitching and I eq'd and compressed it to smithereens so it didn't sound quite so double-bassy. I played the slices on keyboard for about 16 bars and recorded that into Live where I then chopped that up to better match the other things going on.
The strings and flutes were played through DirectWave where I could control the glissandos. The strings could sound way better but I'm happy with the flutes (even though they don't sound like flutes)
The vocals are in 3/4, the track isn't so there was some chopping and aligning to do there.
Recorded the wha gtr last.
oldDog's piano intro was uploaded today and it was a lot of fun to drop that in as a break to throw things off.
After some cleanup on breaks I ran the final mix through WAVES imager and L2.
Other Notes
There's no way I could have done this in Ableton 6, it seems they have re-written the render engine and I'm pretty happy with it.
Yea, I probably could have done something more harmonically interesting, I meant to. But the groove just felt right and I didn't want to jam a series of chord changes in "just because."
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