There’s a loong story behind this one. I was in a cafe a couple of weeks ago when the 1976 disco hit ‘You To Me Are Everything’ by The Real Thing came on the sound system. Not a track I was really aware of before, but… I instantly became completely obsessed with it. So, next: I was thinking about the drum part on the plane to the ICLC conference in Madrid, and decided to see if I could figure out a new way to livecode drums in SuperCollider that would let me easily program in that kind of disco beat. By the time we’d landed I had something working.
Saturday rolls around, now on way /back/ from Madrid, remember about the disquiet junto. Quickly download a bunch of tracks to listen to on the plane home. Find ‘Première étape — Trio Initiate (disquiet0367)’ by mateo, which is just two chords all the way through. Thinks: is there any way in the world I might be able to sync my SuperCollider drum machine to that? Feels like a very hard problem indeed but… turns out that my first guess of a tempo of 120 is exactly right. So… there you go.
Couple of things: the disco beat didn’t really work, so something a bit simpler. Structurally, eight bar sections with a random fill at the end of each one. The original track had lots of variation in the timbre of the chords throughout. I’ve tried to match that in a subtle way with some gradually changing fx on each of the kick, snare and hat. Structurally a bit of a problem, as the original track is one bar shorter than an even number of 8 bar sections, so there are extra chords at the end.
The SuperCollider code, or at least part of it, is here:
Of course, the whole thing about this is that it is a stupidly complicated way to go about something that would be trivial to accomplish in a DAW. Once again then, an exercise in learning how to do stuff the hard way.
