Lemmings

I had a very simple goal for this track: 10 minutes of four-on-the-floor kick.

Outside of that, anything goes. Have fun, don’t worry about where it’s going, etc.

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I wanted to get Markus to play violin over the chords. He got excited and had the idea to try and write a 4 part “string quartet” section.

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At some point I became obsessed with electronic kick drums. There’s a lot of mystique surrounding them them. Every producer seems to have a personal recipes on how to build the perfect thumping kick.

I started analyzing them to see what they are made out of. The top two visualizations are from tracks I find the kick pleasing in, the bottom two are from logic’s default kit:

Here is what this particular kick I built for lemmings looks like:

Interesting how much thicker I wanted this kick. After seeing these visualizations I tried to make the kick sharper, like those other kicks above. But it didn’t sound as good.

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Other interesting things about this track:

1. There is a sampled In-n-out restaurant scene from so-cal (This is the guy calling the numbers “Fifty one pleaaaaase” and so on.)

2. There’s a sampled bus ride on my favorite bus in Vienna (13a) with the lady announcer calling out the next station in German

3. A lot of the synth parts are played live on the Juno or Prophet and not programmed

Here is what the clapping section looked like to sculpt.