agh, i forgot yesterday was the 20th! still, i will post; turning in late is part of my school experience anyhow
i also took a roundabout interpretation of “back to school”, and tried to see if i could make the stuff i “wished i could” in my high school mashcore days - clicky cutty plinkyplonk nonsense ""“idm”"" - but with the adult knowledge that most of that stuff was keymashing+randomization rather than Boy Genius Intricate Sequencing. (sorry if I just told you santa isn’t real.) unfortunately not even this was enough to get me to Finish A Song, so i instead have some sketches that i glued together:
these are all ableton live 11, and dependent on devices in live.
the first bit is experimenting with random MIDI, via the, uh, “Random” MIDI effect. the chords are manually programmed, but have a 10% chance of playing a random note in the octave above it, which is then fed into a Scale device set to the key of the song. The drums are an 808 kit doing normal techno stuff, and a 606 kit with the same Random device and a stack of Beat Repeats, whose trigger/proc/whatever chance I am playing with while recording the master, plus some really goofy frequency shifter nonsense that makes the kick sound like a microwaved Genesis game. so I get infinite funny drum patterns for only four bars of programming!
the second clip involves heavy abuse of the stock Max for Live LFOs. like, literally twelve of them just on the drum kit, moving synth+fx parameters around (the drums are made with the stock Max drumsynths, too). the drums are run through a vocoder, delays, distortions, which are all constantly moving in a way that passes as deliberate. the pattern is just standard MPC hip-hop bullshit, as are the rest of the sounds: raw samples of jungle records and a rhodes jazz song stretched and modulated mostly at random. if I open this project file and let it sit idle it consumes 25% of my CPU.
third one is mostly the same tech as #2 but focusing on an extremely old, pre-drumrack sampler called Impulse. It has funny real-time stretching and some weird filters and distortion. I don’t think it worked out as well as the other two, but I made it. maybe you should listen to the Herb LF tune I sampled for it instead lol
leah ahh, this is nice! i agree w the stuff about the bass but the breakdowny bit with the duplicated vocals and the square synth is really cute. month or three of focus on this palette and you could probably get a record out of it tbqh - but i won’t pretend i know enough about This Stuff to get into granular critique
cass love these textures; i think it worked out better than you realize. if you want to iterate on this it might be worth referencing dub techno production techniques. those guys have mastered getting huge emotional range out of One chord and Textures. usb mics are a fucking STRUGGLE, though, yeah; i did one track trying it with the PS3 Rock Band mic (lol) years ago and between the delay, actual shape of the sound, and not actually knowing how to anything with my voice I was having to do seven punch-ins for every single line and ~ 30 plugins in one chain and it sucked. but I know people who got years of albums out of it, so it might be worth sticking with it.
kamillebiden classes paid off. the halftime switch works SO much better with the heavy transients. it’s 100% worth the work to get the kit split into different channels, though; imo* the kick needs a bit longer of an attack than the snare, and the cymbals get a bit buried underneath both when the compressor thinks they’re the tail of the more percussive bits. but I know that’s super annoying to set up in those drum kit type plugins so I don’t blame you for not doing it in something low-stakes like this (note your DAW probably has some method setting up a template with things pre-routed; likely you’ll only have to do it once). sounds way better either way
*I am not a rock engineer or really listener even so salt this to taste