The Making of: Six Minute

I chose to crack open Six Minute since the production style contrasts with my first 'making of' article. This track is not melody driven, so it needs to be approached in a more traditional electronic dance style.



Six Minute

Arpeggiator

The arpeggiator is the main driving force in the verse sections of Six Minute. I use my favorite synth , 'Synth One'.


>>download synth 1 from KVR audio

A lot of synths being developed are getting really out of hand. They're almost total production environments in their own rite, sequencers, built in efx racks, crazy shit. I do use some of these crazy guys from time to time, but for me the most important thing about a synth is how well you can control it. Every time I use synth 1, I never use any presets, I immediately start programming, and I can get exactly the sound I want, the interface is simple and intuitive, and has only what I need. Plus, I think it sounds great. ( did I mention it's free? )


Let's have a listen to the arpeggiator:


If you listen closely, you'll hear some audible 'ducking' on the 1 and the 2. Sounds like the first note is being missed.

Rather than use a sidechain compressor, I prefer to do this manually with Ableton's 'unlink envelope' feature:



Let's listen to the same arpeggiator along with the kick drum:


Okay, so the kick is super clear in the mix. Well, that's because it's not really having to 'mix' , it's playing over nothing. Using unlock envelope, you can tighten it up so it's almost unnoticeable.


I change the arp pattern slightly through the song.

Firstly, I don't use a MIDI arpeggiator before the synth, I just draw in notes and run a really tight loop. Secondly, I use a long envelope to let the sound evolve over time, so it doesn't get too boring. In this case, I put a high pass and do an envelope in the timeline, but you can also use the LFO that comes with the synth.
Both of these things give me total control , so I'm not slave to a preset arp pattern, or an LFO's cycle.

Sample Yourself

I've got like hundreds of tracks from over the years, just kind of laying around. Every once in a while just for kicks I'll take a sound from an old track and just audition it with whatever I'm working on. Since I'm me, and tend to make similiar stuff as me, often times little magical things will happen, the sounds just work.

A sample from an old track I made:


Never throw anything out. Sometimes your old weird stuff from 5 years ago can be just the juice you need.

Sampling is always a bitch though, biggest issue is that things are usually offkey. Every sample I use I always put a tuner, which sometimes works to help me transpose the sample much faster.



>>download G-Tune from KVR audio

Computer Voice

I love Computer Voice. I prefer it over vocoding, although sometimes running a computer voice through a vocoder can be cool to.

I made this sound with the speech engine in Fruity Loops:





I cut up the sample and put each syllable into Impulse. Just to show how you can sequence it I made this pattern:


Hear the pattern of 'elektrik!':


I transpose the syllables in Impulse, so you can get the voice to sing. There other ways to do this, but for rythm I like having each syllable on it's own. I did distort the shit out of this , basically it's unrecognizable from the original output of Fruity Loops.

The same speech engine which is run inside of Fruity Loops is actually made by a third party company, Soft Voice Incorporated.

A lot of these companies let you do live preview on their websites, so you can just use Audio Hijack or something while you're online, you don't really need to run the software locally.

I think their engine sounds pretty good:
sample voice

The Chorus

chorus comes in at like 0:20


I'm very proud of the chorus, the chorus was made by playing synths then rendering the audio ,cutting, pasting, rendering it out again, then chopping again, etc. This is fun, but it's kind of painful, I think I spent like 3 days just messing with the chorus, like just budging these tiny lil' slices around forever.

Definitely I would say it's the sculpting approach. It is a good way to get your melody beyond your own ability to play , or write out the MIDI notes. But , it's sketchy, I remember on that third day almost trashing this, like 'how long am I going to tweak this for?'. I've had many tracks that just never made it past this phase.

That's About It

There's like 5 million other things going on this track, but I just wanted to focus on some practical things about it. Ducking manually is really cool, I always do that, and also that synth and tuner are great, I use them in every single one of my tracks. Thanks for reading!