#202 - 30th October 2024 - EP Track #1 Otherside
This track was born as a direct result of the Expressive E Osmose arriving at my door step.
That thing and its sound engine offer a stream of inspiration. It‘s so easy to create interesting textures and tones and make them sound very organic and expressive as well!
So essentially everything minus the drums is the Osmose. The middle part with the whack reversed and pitched vocal layer was made with the MI Beads eurorack module.
Drums on the other hand were coming from a Splice sample, were chopped and partially replaced by other drums. Although I think the replacement came only later, in the version I adapted for Alex.
This early demo also has rap vocals that happened to fit extremely well in some parts and were not so great in others.
Alex was quite fast in coming up with a vocal line for the verse. The chorus took us 2-3 iterations. But what really took the longest was creating the mood and feel to spit out the lines. She is no rapper. So naturally, she had to learn and get into the right feeling for how long notes should be held, were and when to change rhythm etc.
In hindsight, the drums are probably a little over compressed and the vocals‘ sibilant treatment isn’t great. But that is an ongoing theme that I generally struggled with in vocal production with Alex‘ voice.
An anecdote: we played the track at a demo listening session in Munich and got a strange reception. The jury could neither say what to improve or do differently nor what was good. They simply said that it would sound very international, not necessarily for the German market. Okay?! Whatever that means…