I know there are quite a few folks on Elektronauts as in to IDM and ambient techno as I am. A few of us even follow each other on social media. I’m envisioning this thread as a good resource for hearing different sounds, influencing each other, learning, and otherwise sharing. A place to gather for those electronic music fans and creators who like melody, chord progressions, and atmosphere that kind of stands in direct opposition to the darker and more minimal strains of techno that have dominated in recent years, especially out of Berlin.
So, if you’ve got tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Instagram, wherever—share them!
I considered starting things off by posting a demo of my most recent song (which I will do), but I think it’s best if someone else gets the the ball rolling.
As noted above, this is a demo. And one of the things I do with demos, mostly to get feedback, is post them to Instagram. I do this to play with limitations, so I record a sort of condensed version of a demo and then combine it with a video, whether it’s my own clips or found footage. Anyway, this is my most recent track, recorded yesterday. Written completely on my Digitakt.
The synth sequences are partly from the analog four, other parts are from the modular system of a friend.
It’s quite interesting how far the A4 can compete with the complexity of the sounds that come from the modular - pretty impressing. The arpeggiator of the thing is a beast, and the conditional trigs really brings the subtle changes that make the difference - love it!
Video is from last year. I’m about to finish this piece these days in ableton. At the current version of the track a groovy drumbreak and strings enter at the finale Still like this minimalistic version as well.
Synths were all from a nord rack 2x. Only the bass is from monark.
Scenes are really the killer feature of the Octatrack. But it’s hard to explain how I mixed things up with them. I just kind of start playing with them to get some feels for how to change the material and how they might work well together. But you can do such wild transformations with them and with how you blend them using the slider.
So sometimes its just kindof doing a break: mute all the synthy samples, enhance the drum samples effect settings, use that as kindof a ‘fourth bar’ thing that is under my control. I think I do that with scenes a bit - something to change the sounds during the last bar before doing a pattern change. I do it with scenes instead of parameter locks so it’s more performance driven: i know when I’m about to change patterns, let me cut things here.
Other times it’s about just wildly transforming sounds quickly and making that performable - I just know when I want the scene that drops a couple of the drums and changes the comb filter effect parameters on the Volca FM sample and reverses that sample to make it super alien, and then quickly jump back to the ‘main’ sound.
There’s a rainy weekend ahead!
Still like this minimalistic version as well.