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Well, that month went by a little too quickly...
I had this fantastic plan of spending every day of my week-long Christmas holiday in the studio, hammering out new techno. That failed, almost completely - I doubt I spent more than 10 hours total in the studio. At least I got a bunch of new basslines written.
I'm exploring a new route for bass... before, I was always sequencing my basslines using MIDI on the MPC1000, driving my Waldorf Pulse Plus. The Pulse plugged into the mixer, which had one channel of my DBX166XL compressor inserted into that channel's insert jack, and the kick was sidechained into the DBX, so the bassline ducked out of the way to allow the kick through.
Now, since I've faded the mixer and replaced it with a laptop running Plogue Bidule, I've decided to also fade the Pulse, and replace it with sampled bassline loops (sampled from the Pulse). The tricky bit I've been playing with is sampling the loops as one and a half bars, instead of just one bar... one beat before the bar, one beat after the bar. Whenever Akai releases the new OS, which supposedly allows setting the start and endpoints of a sample loop using the MPC's "q-link" sliders, I should be able to dial the bassline and kick in to get a supremely tight low end. :) I tried playing with software compression, but just wasn't able to find any software compressors that had the options and good sound of my DBX, so my bass and kick compression is staying hardware. I'd like to try switching it out for a Drawmer or something, we'll see in a few months.
Seven new basslines written, all stompy as fuck. I'm still nowhere *near* being able to play a set, and it's almost February... combined with the fact that GI Jody and I are putting together a massive techno party on February 18th, I don't foresee myself being able to play live until at least March, maybe later. :(
Oh well, this time off is good; it gives me a chance to rethink my sound, regroup and move forward with the techno... I can't keep playing the same songs over and over!
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