For this assignment I decided to take inspiration from Kiasmos. Leaning into the organic house sound. Drawing from both the inspiration I gained in the lectures throughout the course of the year and my pre existing knowledge in this area of production, I wanted to create a natural sound. I wanted this track to feel as natural as possible, so I used some very minimal processing. I was very subtle with my EQ and compression and gained most of my character from the reverb I used across the drums and piano.
The piano was taken from a studio recording of a song I’m producing for a friend of mine. I chopped it up accordingly and slowed it down to 110 bpm. Before the piano starts, you hear the pianist moving around and adjusting themselves. I think this really puts the listener in that space and makes it sound really authentic. This is something I strive for when making music like this because with the majority of main stream house music, I feel it is very tacky and over processed, therefore lacking feeling and emotion. House music is famously repetitive too, as it is mostly played in clubs and by DJ’s, I usually take issue with this as I like the fact songs go places and develop. This being said, I slightly leant into the repetitiveness of the genre as I felt this is what this particular track needed. At time you can hear the pedals on the piano, which further illustrates the organic sound. The chords create a nice melodic colour which further takes this track away from the main stream house genre.
Before deciding to use this piano sample, I started by programming the drums of the main section in. Just a simple 4 to the floor, accompanied by a nice rim with a little chime on top. These drums further emphasise the organic house sound as usually in house music you hear a super fat kick and over compressed clap but I wanted to create more of a laid back sounding groove. The kick and snare samples I used were all from my own studio recordings over the past year, dragged each individual sound and manipulating it slightly in order to take it from a ‘polished studio recording’ to samples which could be used in a song of this genre. The hats and shaker were both splice sounds and already sounded clean so not much processing was needed other than setting levels and panning.
In order to maintain a clean sound, I EQ’d my reverb to take low end out, this ensures the reverb isn’t interfering with the bass, kick or the lows in the piano.
For the bass sound, I used Logic Pro’s “Retro Synth” preset “classic analog bass” I often use this bass sound for music like this because it is easy to get it sounding fat and clean. All I needed to do was put it in mono, do some subtle EQ boosts and some light compression to squash it slightly.
The main Kiasmos track I took inspiration from was “Looped” This is where I got the idea for the rim as a snare, the shaker accent and the super natural sounding piano. I also enjoyed Kiasmos’ use of strings and extra synth parts; this is what lead me to add MIDI strings of my own and the arpeggiator you hear in the ‘choruses’.
Aside from taking inspiration from Kiasmos, I also took some inspiration from Burial. Especially tracks like “Archangel” and “Nova”. These tracks were giving me inspiration for my drum sounds from a mix perspective. Especially the soft but also thumpy kick sound in “Nova”.
Overall, I think I captured the organic house sound well. This is down to a mixture of the sounds and textures I used but also the slightly unorthodox arrangement of the track itself. Going forward, when making more music like this I would love to incorporate more foley sounds. Really eventuating the organic sound of the genre. This assignment has also led me to the idea of working more on this style of music as I feel it is a great skill to be able to make computer based music sound authentic and human like. I feel inspired to continue working within this genre and incorporate more of my own studio recordings into my compositions.
