So Spitfire Audio released a new instrument
for their LABS library (which is totally free, and has a TON of amazing instruments), a bass guitar, which I downloaded last night. I was just playing around with it, and wrote out a 5 bar bass line, which is the first half of the bass part pictured below. I turned up the attack a bit too, so it almost swells in, though with the other instruments its not super obvious, but does make the attack feel a lot softer, which I think worked out with the other layers of bass sounds that come in later. Track 4 is another LABS instrument, the electric piano, which is one I haven't used much in the past, if at all. It provides the chords pictured below. I really like this progression, and think that writing it around the bass line turned out to be a good choice. The changes in the middle of bars give it an off-kilter feeling, but without the weirdness of an odd meter. Tracks 5 and 6 are both kick drums, with 5 adding a 909 kick and Track 6 a kick from that Steven Slate Drums demo I've used a few times. Initially I just had the Slate acoustic kick sound, but the 909 helped to make it feel like it feel with the more electronic stuff happening around it.
Track 4 (Chords on Top in Pink) and Track 3 (Bass Line Below, Blue & Green)
Listen to Lab It here...
Track 7 was recorded from another LABS instrument,
the percussion set, which is actually in Track 2, though its muted here. I put a crazy Portal effect on it, and chopped it up a little, which gives us that weird, distorted rhythmic pattern that is underneath much of the song. Track 8 is another bass part, which uses a ROLI sound from the 'Mutated Bass' soundpack. This adds those distorted synthy bass swells, which I sort of was just messing around with, but wound up liking it adding a different, but related bass part. Track 9 is another LABS instrument (I know, its a lot, but I felt like I was on a roll with choosing good sounds, haha), and adds the line pictured to the left here, using one of the Modular Piano sounds. Track 9 is an 808, from an instrument called '808 Warfare'. I've had it since I first got on Ableton, as my friend gave me a copy amongst various samples and plug-ins to get me started, but I honestly had never used it until recently, as I had COMPLETELY forgotten about. One day I was looking through demos I had that could run in Kontakt, and this was in there. It has some awesome 808 sounds, so I'll try and incorporate more in the future. Track 11 is a little audio clip used to move us out of the break and at the end of the song. Finally, we have Track 11, which is a hi-hat pattern from my demo of Nerve from Xfer, which has the Valhalla Supermassive Reverb/Delay on it. I automated the Supermassive warp setting, which creates the interesting timbre of the hats.
