NATIVE SKETCHES

I started with the beat, using two instances of Absynth to make the kick and snare sounds. I took the Boomass kick preset, swapped the waveform of the second oscillator, and then played around with the filters a bit. For the snare, I used the 808 snare 2 preset, swapped the Osc B and Osc C waveforms to fractured noise, and automated the ADSR. I found a nice mallet sound in Reaktor Prism, took a couple of the resonant frequencies out and played around with the FX until I had something I liked.

I added another mallet from Razor, and that’s also where the bass comes from. I chose the Sgt Tanker preset, which I manipulated by adding some drive, a lot of dirt, and changing the cutoff. The weird bubbly kind of percussion also comes from Sgt Tanker – I took the bass out until it almost sounded like a snare.

I added two FM8s to the break part – one to accentuate some high notes of melody, and for the other I tweaked the effects on the Clay preset until it sounded like an 8 bit sample and then automated the psyche delay, peak EQ and talk wah. The Gastank preset from Razor added some weight to the bass. I changed the envelopes, limiter, reverb and added dissonance, which I also automated. For the ending, I added some Rise & Hit and then put what was going to be the end part at the start and vice versa. I always make different versions of ideas, this one is version four.