Big ups @1-2 and @blaize. Looking forward to the next one.
No problem.
I used Invenzione per John version 2. This was from the Duck, You Sucker OST.
The vocal bit that I used starts at 58 seconds. The main sample is at 2:15. It’s chopped, pitched, and filtered. And the horn is at 4 minutes.
For this beat I used my Circuit Rhythm for the melodic parts. I prefer the sound of its filters. Plus it has the master filter on top of that. It also has a little side chain effect that makes things easier.
Congrats @Yabba! Haha we talked about this, I guess you’re just too good to dodge the top 3 ;). Thanks for the great theme and hosting this one.
Congrats to @1-2 and @blaize as well, amazing tracks and deserved podium finishes!
I also want to mention @Doug, I love your track and it was my ‘good’ vote. You (and @Yabba as well btw) manage to always make something amazing and end up near the top3, which I truly admire! This one is my personal favorite one you ever made for one of these battles.
Shout out to everyone who submitted a beat, all tracks had something special going, and I was very inspired by listening through the playlist. I did learn a lot again by the way, made my track on the AR, sampled straight from vinyl, and tried to make different sections using songmode. The arpeggiating kind of sound is the famous whistling chopped and tuned.
I feel like the quality of these battles keeps getting better, and I hope I can keep up with all y’all this coming year!
Aside from the shamefully obvious iconic good bad and ugly parts…
jamie foxx being a badass, django unchained
bassline: lifted from ‘vamos a matar companeros’
spitfire from fugees, ‘the score’
endtro: ‘farewell to cheyenne’, with t-pain singing on top from that marvelous tiny desk concert
everything morricone was sampled, lifted, isolated, stretched and/or tuned with Koala from screenrecording of the YT playlist
Tried chopping up the whistle like 10 tries on the OT, nothing i sequence/played worked, it all sounded so much worse than the original thing so i gave up, deleted the project.
After a pause, went back to the iPad. Instead of chopping, just decided to frame that iconic thing, and focus on the arrangement. Ended up doing just that in Koala pretty fast.
But I went with the easiest sample, which is from the eponymous G,B&U theme.
I used this as a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone… learn to chop samples, and to familiarize myself with the SP404 mkII.
So I did the chop chop… then the vinyl retiming and got the chops on with the choir and the reverb tails from the horn section… Plus I took the three note guitar plucks that everyone knows, picked one, and went into the chromatic mode to do some minor scale contrast (I think, theory is not my strong suit, but my ear goes that way alot.)
For the bass, I went with a sample from Stranjah’s Liquid or Gnarly pack.
Now for the drums, I went to the wonderful Paragon Packs from Mike Schultz… I found anything that had a delay, reverb tail that mimicked what Ennio Maricone did with that guitar.
On the back side, I really focused on what the choir did to get the melody, and ignored the horn, but they are hand in hand, so where one went, the other followed.
I really appreciated when someone said my bass sounds massive… I am a bass head… like for REAL…
Goddamn Korg for releasing a minilogue Bass edition with black and red keys and polyphony… (the last thing I need is another effin synth…)
here’s a track rundown. i only really made one full track for this battle. it started as something, i put it down for like a week, and rushed it into being before the deadline.
+++
guitar track: Ennio Morricone - Il tramonto, EQ, portal granular effects (automated to swirl around), glue compressor
drum track: ableton drum rack with one shot kick and snare chopped from “you don’t own me” + a layered one shot “anthem kick” from the kount, EQ, ozone 10 tape crunch, drum buss, glue compressor
background noise track: there’s the sound of footsteps all throughout way back in the mix. the clip came from one of the movie segments. you can barely hear it.
dialog track: intro and other bits come from this The best of Spaghetti Westerns PT1, chopped in audacity, EQ with lows rolled way off, glue compressor
all the above tracks grouped with rc-20 on top for more dirt
then there are like 12 unused tracks i used to audition things, chop stuff for use later in simpler, etc.
Instead of going through soundtracks I watched the movies fistful of dollars and a few dollars more for the first time, grabbing samples along the way. A lot of the music I sampled had movie sounds on top which worked well for some parts and ruined other potential choice samples.
The drums came from the sleepyhead samples from last time (thanks again) and some percussion from the movies. The scratching was from using an lfo in the mpc on a short part from the soundtrack. I should have used elektron here because mpc lfo is weak. I would have liked to use a real turntable if I had one set up but I really wanted some sort of scratching after finding that “without a scratch” dialogue
Since I started on this late, I used a very loose theme of poking a bit of fun with the comments toward the end of the battle thread about what the prize was and what was the point. Chosing some dialogue that fit with that theme and a little tribe and krsone to top it off and tie into that
Also I was looking for the trash beats here but couldn’t find them
I had a different idea for this but knew it would take too much time. Those who said they created multiple beats for this, that’s wild. I’ve only done one per battle, I would love to hear some of your b sides if anyone wants to post them
That scratching sounded so real man, well done! For the next one i’m either setting up my turntables or will be messing around with the OT to model some scratches with the LFO’s / rate parameters, your track inspires me a lot And the ‘real hiphop’ references were a nice touch, picked up on that too…
I experimented one time with this, made some notes;
First made a sample chain of superduckbreaks scratch sentence. Sliced it and put it under the fader for selection.
Baby scratch on any sound:
Create a plays-free pattern of 8 steps. Two slide trigs on 1 and 5, that slide the rate full up and full down. To initiate the scratch just ‘free-trigger’ the pattern. free -> direct + hold worked best
Could use bpm to increase/decrease the speed of the scratch.
Then you can make variations of techniques (stabs, transformers etc) using an lfo (synced to the pattern) on the amp volume with a square wave to cut, kind like you would with your fader.
You could make other patterns that let the sample play after scratching it instead of continuously pulling forward/backward.
As I said this was only experiment, but can’t wait to try to put it in action for the next one. If it fails, will have to dust off my SL’s…
I was 21. As y’all mentioned, it was a bit of a hodge poge/abstract/interlude. I was partially channeling The Avalanches on this one, with the cramming in of (too many?) samples. I think I might scale back since that seems to usually sound better. Keep it simple. Anyways…
How I Did It:
DT was used for arranging. Holy moly I love song mode! This was partly what tipped me over the edge to get one. I’m not one for live performance so much so this was such a help in laying out the song.
I used samples from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and A Few Dollars More. I also grabbed a vocal piece from “The Ecstasy of Gold” which has that amazing operatic build in it.
Used drums from SampleScience Da Vinyl pack and also from the ZeroG Disc 1(?) “pack”
For the drum arrangement, I was going for a loose/Dilla feel, which I’m actually mostly happy with. The hats are quantized on beat, the snare is quantized but I shifted the micro-timing so it has that “rolling” feel, and the kick is played in unquantized.
Still getting used to “chopping” on the DT so it sounded somewhat rough. Was mainly experimenting with chopping, time stretching (shoutout to @Doug for the tutorial on how to easily timestretch on the DT!), and granular effects. Hence the weird radio surfing/experimental sound.
There are some good bits in there but overall I’m not completely happy with the arrangement. I left that until the last minute so, oh well. I think I might go back and redo the arrangement with the more coherent pieces.
Mixing and mastering was done in Ableton, with just Tape Mello-fi and stock Wide & Warm for getting that nice cassette sound.
Thanks all for the CC, it helps me get better! Really enjoyed listening to everyone’s tracks. This is an awesome mixtape, keep up the good work y’all.
The whole track was done on a Polyend Tracker including sampling through the line in from Spotify.
The bulk of the samples were from the soundtrack to “Run man Run” slowed down to 90bpm (Hence the female vocals sounding male). I chose it because it has a very weird acapella bit in the middle which I thought would be fun.
There are a couple of Spanish guitar samples (IIRC from Tradimento Primo) heavily slowed down in the breakdown section and a whistle from Cavalcta
The drums are from the free Computer Music Afrobeat sample pack + a bass synth sample from the PT built in sample content (I think it’s an ARP)
Usually I just bounce to stereo out of the PT, but I decided to bounce to stems and import into Bitwig this time mostly because I’d just bought the Baby Audio all plugins pack.
I didn’t do a lot other than put Super VHS on the orchestral samples to make them a bit wobbly and smash the drum bus to pieces with IHNY2 (Quite a few people said how brutal the drums were so that’s a recommendation for Baby Audio). I replaced the PT FX channel with Spaced Out which I’m not yet totally convinced by and then stuck the whole thing through Soundgoodizer (hence my thread about not knowing how to properly master tracks).
I’ve since come up with a better mix using a proper compression and mastering chain, but that was too late to submit.
It was a real honour to be on a playlist with such amazing tracks and I was delighted to pick up a few votes in such a strong field.
And the ‘real hiphop’ references were a nice touch, picked up on that too…
