Found the Grafenwalder spot.. [some techy stuff]

I woke up this morning(?) at around 1am as I couldn't get any sleep. Then I had some coffee and a cigarette and decided to open my laptop to check what's going on here and whatnot. I was quite worried how people would react to the commercial release of my game Tales of Akash 9 (there's still a patch/addon in the works) but I haven't gotten around to actually fixing the bugs.

After doing quite a lot of coding work I decided to reward myself and goof around in my sequencer for a good measure. I did scrape together some tracks and my last post included a few of them. I've been utilising this arrangement idea I came up with while making some singles out of boredom.

Ableton Live 9 Intro arrangement view of a recent track

So here's what my so-called brilliant idea looks like in a sequencer. Basically it's the ultimate dancefloor/techstep/neurofunk drum'n'bass arrangement utilising 87bpm tempo, first off there's (usually) three 8-bar loops with the introduced (often monotonous) bassline in the final section. Layered is a drum loop which is sampled, often it is combined with a drum rack that uses the quite familiar breakbeat pattern.

Then there's the breakdown section which consists of an evolving pad over two 8-bar sections, and a 303 which' cutoff frequency is varied over time for a sort of rising effect creating anticipation. The plugin I'm using is the TAL-Bassline which is free btw. The breakdown into the roller loop transition is done by freezing the end of the section and adding a 909 clap with a very long reverb tail.

The part that I like and also hate the most, is the breakdown loop; sort of a pre-chorus drop to set the mood, and I usually like to edit the drum loop into something you'd usually hear in skullstep. This is usually achieved with some (more or less) clever chopping and saturation. I usually bounce these parts first to get in the groove.

More about the chopping; it usually utilises a rather unconventional way in which the breakbeat groove is built from parts of the loop, not by using individual drum hits (I think people back in the day did this with the Amen break). This is to create a sort of "rolling" effect. Colloquially tracks produced this way are called Amen rollers.

Then there's the explosion effect which (I guess) people hate the most, as it makes it sound sort of commercialized and cheesy. One could use an air horn too I think but I've never tried it so I can't tell. The main drop is basically the intro drums with the main bassline and on top of it there's a techy filter-modulated Reese synth for which I use the NI Massive (albeit in demo mode so there isn't much time to tweak it) with an added EQ and Chorus. Maybe this makes the tracks sound so "punk" because they're done quick and dirty.

The main drums are usually a bit different in the sense that there are buildups and pieces of the breakdown roller loop added in, as well as some percussion like shakers and whatnot. If I could I would publish a template but it requires some aforementioned 3rd party plugins and that's not what people want to do (especially when starting out), so I'm trying to explain it more in-depth in this article.

Maybe people will start calling it skulltech or something because it essentially combines the best parts of those genres, maybe it's just another oddity that will never make it to the top, who knows. It's been very fun making tracks this way though. Or it could be blogstep too, as this is pretty much the only marketing channel for my music.

About the mixdown, I usually put some tape saturation on the drum and the lead bus. The sub/bass channel usually has some sort of glide/portamento and compression along with distortion, it's an Ableton stock plugin after all so there isn't much to it. After all, I can usually put together a track in about 3 hours of production and arrangement.

So here's the first of the two. It's got the same structure as in the one pictured. Then there's the second track which I finished this morning (couldn't sleep, it's been a nuisance and I'm starting to suspect it's due to tinnitus).

This one I'm very much partial to. The cover art looks awesome too. This is the one pictured in the DAW arrangement view screenshot, although you can't really hear much of it due to the audio being a preview or a clip of the original song.

Anyway, I hope you got the joke in the post title, just came up with it while returning a beer can to the store.

-ef