Unconstrained

I made this within the constraints of the February 2024 challenge topic on the Deluge (synth) Discord group. “February’s challenge is to NOT use the sequencer for any clip. Record your playing directly into the clip. Try not to use quantization.”
It was an interesting challenge, and I think it’s a good way to go to produce music relatively quickly. This was all done within two days and two recording sessions. I normally start a song with a steady beat to play along with, but this time, I recorded in an improvised arpeggiated clip, then played along to that for the subsequent clips, so it ended up with a much looser, more “humanized” feel.
I started with my Minilogue xd patch “Cosmic Arp”, and that gave it the general feel of space exploration, which I built upon with the other patch selections. I used a Boards of Deluge collection pad, “Sound From Afar”, and a spacey ping-pong delay patch I made on my Typhon and drove with an arp from my Keystep 37. I recorded it all in live, unquantized and unsynced, one synth at a time, or 2-4 percussion samples (clave, wood blocks, conga, timpani), at a time. I recorded the percussion using the live sequencer since that meant I could just have one kit clip instead of having that plus three or four more audio clips, but I didn’t edit the sequences afterwards except to trim a couple beats at the end if I went over.
I recorded and mixed it entirely while wearing headphones, and I think it ended up sounding better on them. I recorded it into Audacity as a stereo mix and added fades at the start and end, normalized it, and compressed it a bit. It ended up pretty dense, almost like a drone, but I think the parts are still differentiated enough that you can pick them all out most of the time.