This track has been a bit of a labor of love… haha. I decided to jump into the next challenge for Electro Funk, and was listening to a lot of tracks from the era. Been a lot of discussion again, and I think it was the third page I dropped a number of YouTube videos, most of which are in the right style.
So where to start? Well… I created a track, and then promptly lost it. I was sending an SD card to my brother in law to check some things out, and I forgot to make a backup of the project files… and whoops, I had left the project file on the SD card that I sent him. This set me back quite a bit. I hemmed and hawed quite a bit, but ended up deciding to just restart the track from everything that I had learned.
The first track had the following values:
- Keep it to mono synth only
- Emulate drum machine sounds
- Go vocoder crazy
- Very limited effects
The track was pretty good! I ended up recording several takes through some guitar pedals to see if I could add any sound to it. Unfortunately… I also forgot to save the project… *ugh*. So guess what… the only version of the song that I have is the processed tracks, that are a bit muddy. I have uploaded one of the takes, just for comparison. It sounds rough around the edges... but I'm the bozo that didn't save the project.
From loosing the project file, I seriously considered just bailing on the challenge, but figured I should take another stab at it. Through getting things kicked off I had learned a bit about the style, and figured I could give it a passable, if potentially only fair shake.
To work on starting over on the track I figured I’d throw everything away and go fresh. I immediately decided I’d rather go for a more rock drum sound instead of focussing on drum machine style sounds. I felt a bit more connected to the sounds in the genre that used real drums, that was my reasoning, so I went with it.
Next up, I worked on getting an 808 bass line going. This was something that I hadn’t done in the first iteration of the track, as instead I had tried to build out my own bass sound that I thought could compete. Maybe it could have, but the track I posted above you can hear, it is a bit muddy. This new track the 808 cut through a lot better. One thing that helped with the sound was turning off timing correct for almost all of the sounds. It was a bit of a struggle at first to get the drums, keys, and everything to gel, but it gives so much of a better sound. The swing may feel subtle in some ways, but at least for me, it totally works.
From here, I just messed with a few sequences to get some sounds going so I could flip through my Moog Voyager and find some great mono synth sounds. For both tracks, the focus was on keeping the synths monophonic, but in this new track I figured I’d stretch into using analog guitar pedals for effects. This added a lot more variety to the sounds on offer, without really having to do too much. Since I was focussed more the second pass through on being efficient, I really just used the Looper on my AKAI MPC Live mk2, and this gave me plenty of two, four, and eight bar loops that were very workable. On the other hand, I didn’t spend any time on building out key groups or drum kits, so… *shrug* save yourself time now, pay for it later in the future if you want the sound again?
Originally the new track was going to be called Funky Alligator, and was to be instructions for how to make the drink “Funky Alligator”… I figured it was cornball enough for lyrics that it could be fun and catchy, but driving the audio through a vocoder kept crushing it into just unintelligible enough that it wasn’t worth it. I probably needed another hour or two so I could get enough takes to have it be “okay”. Fortunately my brother in law came through with sending me back just enough of the original project that I could at least recover the lyrics. They were practically a drop in replacement, and honestly, still sounded fine by my ears… and just needed some mixing to get it to sit well with the rest of the track.
Conclussions…
Well I’m not totally sure I nailed the electro sound. I feel like I hit the synth sound, but possibly went a bit too far with the number of sounds and some of the guitar effects are a little too much more than I heard on most of the tracks. The vocoder sound is also not really an authentic vocoder, and is instead a PO-35. Does this matter? I’m not sure, it’s in the right ballpark, but I’m not sure it is a home run.
For the next challenge, assuming I jump head first into it, I might take this a step further and intentionally work on two different tracks so I can pull out the best of both worlds again. Honestly, it didn’t feel like as much a waste of time at the end as I would have thought, and really helped me get out of my own head space and consider quite a few factors differently.
All told, this was all put together with an AKAI MPC Live mk2, a Moog Voyager as the king, a PO-35 for vocals, and a mess of Chase Bliss guitar pedals to add effects. I did very light mixing duty in Ableton Live, just enough to track things in and out a bit better, but there aren’t any effects, chopping tricks, or anything else to speak of. This fact is definitely getting me to think that the Akai Force might actually be something I could jump more into for working on tracks if I wanted to go that route for audio work. We shall see.
Holy crap l didn't know this many people entered the challenge. Diiizzaaamm 
I need those fast style keys at those quick tempos.