Working to a client brief

Walking home from work last night, I started humming Portishead’s Glory Box, morphed its slow 4/4 into a 6/8 groove and thought I might have a beat for an animation I’ve been asked to compose for. By the time I’d reached home, I was itching to fire up the MacBook with ideas about removing the bass and snare drum and slowly building the rhythm “back to front”.

The piece (still work in progress) starts with industrial and machine-like claves and guiro pattern, to which I slowly introduce other percussive sounds. The rhythm builds, but the 6/8 time signature (backbeat on the 4th), isn’t properly established until the synth pad enters at bar 21. At this point, the feel changes significantly and the “broken” percussion is resolved with the introduction of bass drum and snare. Then comes a gentle melodic bass line at bar 45 and a distant pitch bend at bar 59. (It was so much easier playing the bass line on the Axiom, though all the drums were still produced in the grid editor – the laptop screen is still my preferred input device for drum programming.)

Built around a classic Em 12 bar turnaround and far more “ambient” than its introduction would suggest, I’m pretty happy with the direction this one is taking – though I’m not convinced it fits the project brief any longer (will need to get the client’s view of that!). If it doesn’t, I don’t mind at all. I think this one is going somewhere.

Tags: 3d dune, 6/8, axiom, bass, client, drums, essential bass, hands kit, haunted, hip hop kit 5, mixdown, percussion, pitch bend, portishead, synth pad