Frenz Fallout
https://soundcloud.com/neurogami/frenz-fallout
I decided to grab two tracks of my own work, one from my first album, and another from my current in-progress album. To make the choosing easier I limited the choice to tracks that had the same BPM. (I had considered the fun of using contrasting BPMs but the I would be ponder over all sorts of other things far too long.)
I opted for “Bad Frenz” from my current album (Dance Noise), and “Fallout Culture” from the album Maximum R&D.
But that track is a bit short (and dense), so I also grabbed “Fallout Culture (Sullen Mutant Mix)” since it was longer and had more variety.
I loaded up the wav files into Reaper and extracted a few sections from each source piece as samples. I loaded these into Renoise. I have been recently working on a Renoise tool called “SwapChop” that helps automate instant volume changes among Renoise note columns. The tool makes it easy to experiment with different values (and hence different rhythmic effects) . It’s used quite a bit on “Bad Frenz”.
So, in Renoise, I had a single track with two note columns, and I entered samples in these columns, which SwapChop then helped cross-mix. There’s only one sample playing at any time. The only effects I used are a small amount of reverb and some compression to help pull it together.
I started off with the idea of gradually morphing from one source song to another, but after a bit I tended to latch onto whatever sounded best. I got, I think, some interesting stuttering beats by place notes off-beat for brief sections while swapping samples back and forth. It’s certainly given me ideas to explore further.
While I had a number of samples that were more melodic (albeit noisy melodic), I found that they didn’t work as well for me as the did samples that were mostly rhythmic or droning.
