Don't Enjoy the Silence

Arpeggios Everywhere

In this track I learned how to use MIDI arpeggios and I love them.  Using arpeggios let me focus on the overall melody then later tweak how it "grooved".  In general, when applied to a synth, they immediately conjure up 80s electronic music for me though they are much more broadly used.  However, that feeling I got stuck around and I tried to make a purely electronica-style song though not necessarily 80s in nature.

Applying a MIDI arpeggio in Logic Pro is relatively straightforward but what took me a while to understand was how to have it traverse several notes and not just repeat the one being played.  Eventually I realized it would iterate through the notes being played simultaneously so long as the arpeggio pattern was not forcing the root note to be played (indicated by the triple-note – or whatever that is called – beneath the sequence number).

Armed with this, I decided to use a MIDI chord trigger that would play the sus 4, 7, and 9 of the note being played, and put that through the arpeggio.  Now I could play just one note and have it spawn several interesting patterns depending on the arpeggio settings.  I played with this for a very long time.

Cleaning Vocal Samples Again

I've covered this in other song write-ups but, again, I took some nasty audio clips to use as vocal samples and cleaned them up as best I could.  I tried a trial version of some software called UNFILTER which is purportedly made to do things like this.  However, the results I got were not as good as I'd have hoped for commercial software.  Instead, I ended up using Logic's stem splitter which did a remarkably good job extracting the (spoken) voice from all the noise and barely coherent background music.

Samples Used

Recorded myself:

• Me clapping

Vocals:

• A 1997 BBC interview with Thomas Bangalter (lost the source link)

From landr.com:

• CHT Aurora Crash