Track #30 of Saturday Sounds continues me exploring some timbres and sequencer tricks to blur the lines a little between timbre and rhythm. This one is a little more “present” as a song than the last one, a little closer to the electronic dance stylings I’ve mostly concerned myself with here, but it is also as much an exploration of sound as the last one.

Happy accidents: At around 1:14, you will hear a shift in the beat accent. It almost becomes a shuffle. This wasn’t planned, and it was a result of me originally misplacing the kicks on the timeline there starting on the “and” of the 1 rather than the 1 itself.

I didn’t catch my mistake, and went on to add a couple other things before I played it back. When I did, I thought to myself “this doesn’t sound like what I expected.” It wasn’t quite right, but it wasn’t wrong. Interestingly, my perception was the bass line was wrong, not the kick. So I went back to look at both the kick and the bass together. I started on this musical journey long ago as a rock guitarist and then bassist, so when the bass line feels wrong, I still instinctively look at how it interacts with the kick drum. That’s when I noticed that the kick was “wrong”, but I really liked that slight glitch/syncopation. So I started to fix the bass (so much so that when I first started to write this, I started to talk about how I changed the bass and only now looking back noticed it wasn’t different at all!) to fit, but nothing I did sounded as good as the happy accident. So the original bass part stayed!

I liked it so much, I kept it around at about 3:12 when the verse part is recapitulated. Happy accidents!

I’m now at the 75% mark of my goal. I think while this track and the last one are not “album fodder” tracks, they are important tracks that I needed to make to figure out certain technical aspects of sound design. I go into October with my September mulligan in my pocket, so I have now finally worked ahead.

My big music theory post is almost ready to go live. I hope to post it in the next day or two, but expect revisions as I get feedback.