My main background as a musician is as a guitar player and as a producer, which means I am quite experienced in both performance and electronics, however most of my time has been spent interacting with them as sort of separate entities, rather than at the same time.

For this track, I began by laying down a foundation on my Korg Volca Drum and Volca Bass. I chose to use these pieces of gear because they are relatively inexpensive machines with a very small footprint (I was initially attracted to them as they are small enough to fit on a guitar pedalboard), without compromising on lots of important features. The drum machine has a 16 step sequencer, 6 customizable parts built from simple waves and a few effects to choose from, such as a delay or bitcrusher. The bass also has a sequencer, as well as 3 VCOs (Voltage Control Oscillators) to create the sounds that can be individually sequenced and transposed, as well as an LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) that can be assigned to control pitch, cutoff or volume.

I also wanted to add some guitar to the piece, as it would make it sound less rigid and help it to come alive. I sent the guitar through a multiFX pedal, the Zoom G3. The unit is laid out like 3 pedals next to each other, each with 3 dials to control various parameters and some buttons to select different effects, as well as 3 footswitches on the bottom to enable and disable effects. This is similar in parts to how a traditional pedalboard works, and made for an easy workflow to settle into.

To get the effects onto my vocals, I first set up a track in Logic to record the dry signal from my microphone. I set the output on this track to output 3, and then connected output 3 back into the multiFX, which I then sent to Input 2 on my interface. When input monitor was enabled on the tracks in logic, I was then able to hear the effects being applied to my voice in real time.

Some of my biggest pieces of inspiration came from The Chemical Brothers. Their music has been a part of my life in one way or another since before I can remember. My dad would often play tracks around the house or in the car when I was very young, and it would be fair to call them my introduction to electronic music as a whole. The bassline of their track “Hey Boy Hey Girl” from their album “Surrender” was an inspiration for my track, with the constant semiquaver rhythm leaping up and down.

Another piece of gear I used in this project was the Yamaha TG33, which is a combination of an FM synthesis and a “ROMpler” (like a sampler, but without the ability to import or record your own sounds). A lot of the sounds have a very dated feel, as it is only a 12-Bit machine, but I find it to have quite a nostalgic, lo-fi quality to it. I was inspired to use it after hearing the music in the TV series “Twin Peaks”, which prominently features early digital synthesisers and samplers, such as the Yamaha DX7 and Roland D-50. While these sounds do feel very dated, I think that this has a certain character to it, and helps add to the personal nostalgia I wanted to put into the track.

The TG33 is designed to be rack mounted, meaning that it lacks an internal keyboard. I was able to get it working through the 6-Pin MIDI Connection on the back, which connected to my Audio Interface, and connected the audio outs to the jack ports on the interface. The synthesizer is controlled by Logic, and I decided on using the musical typing feature on Logic on an external MIDI track, which sends the MIDI data out through the interface’s MIDI ports, and then the audio signal comes out of the jacks on the synthesizer, back into the main inputs on the interface, and from there, the audio is recorded into Logic.

One of the other pieces of inspiration for this piece came from my life at home. My dad was on the lifeboats, and we had a coastguard radio in our living room. Every now and then, it would pick up transmissions from boats looking for ports, occasional mayday calls and gale warnings, but the most common of all was the Humber Coastguard safety information broadcast announcement, which would play on all stations every few hours. As I was starting to get into music production, I always thought about recording one of the broadcasts, but now I’m away from home, the radio isn’t available to me. Instead, I recorded my best approximation of one of the broadcasts from memory and sent it through a graphic EQ and a distortion pedal on my MultiFX unit to mimic the sound of the radio, alongside a few sentences I translated to the NATO phonetic alphabet to further reinforce the idea of radio-talk. I was also inspired by the Sonic Youth track “Providence” for this, with the track essentially being a recording of a voice mail with some added effects layered atop some ambient piano.

To record the final composition, I plugged everything into my M-Audio M-Track 8 Audio Interface, as this let me capture each instrument in its own channel, allowing me to easily make minor edits and overdubs later on, and easily create a final mix. I also recorded early versions of the composition at several points, including an initial recording on my phone just after writing the bass line, and a test recording for the final composition in its finished state.

The final sound at the end was recorded by sending the output of logic out through an auxiliary output on my interface, and then feeding that back into logic via my MultiFX unit, which creates a feedback loop, and adding some different effects, in particular a fuzz and a self-oscillating flanger, can create some very interesting electronic sounds.

I think a lot went well in this project. The guitar tones especially stand out to me as a positive, as I was able to use effects like a reverse delay and a ring modulator on a guitar, which was a lot of fun and had a very unique sound to it. I also think using the guitar effects on the voice worked very well and I was able to achieve pretty much the exact tone I was looking for.

I also improved a lot in my use of sequencers, as I was very slow at using them towards the start of the project, however after practicing with my volcas, I would now be confident in using them in a live scenario

While there are many things that went well with this project, there are certainly some things I would like to improve upon going forward. With the volcas especially, a lot of the transitions between sections were very slow, and I would like to get quicker and more assertive with this kind of thing, maybe taking out the kick on the drum and lowering the filter on the bass at the same time, and generally better multitasking on the volcas.

Bibliography:

The Chemical Brothers, Hey Boy Hey Girl (1999): https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Aoc2hHVgbcU

Angelo Badlamenti, Laura Palmer’s Theme (Instrumental) (1989): https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=woUt7wPe8Ow

Reverb, Ep. 3: The Synth Sounds of Twin Peaks: Part One – Twin Peaks Main Theme (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3iyo_xiq0g
Sonic Youth, Providence (1988): https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx0UA0SeHPI