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NATIVE SKETCHES

07 // Silk Road Assassins

For a lot of the percussion we used little snippets from the Evolve Mutations Kontakt library. The sounds have really nice movement in them which is something we always try and work into our tracks. We also used some of the spookier sounds to set the tone of the track, and this informed some later decisions. The chords that come in later on are an Absynth preset that we messed with a little bit, and the choir sound is also another preset from Razor.

The kick and snare were made with Polyplex which is a new approach to working with drums for us. It’s lot more engaging than scrolling through samples, and it’s fun to tweak and randomize stuff. The built-in effects make getting unique drum sounds really easy. The rest of the percussion is from Battery 4 – as with Polyplex, the built-in effects are very easy to use. We used the VC 160 compressor on a return, which made the drums a lot meaner.

The distorted melodic sound that comes in and out throughout the track is resampled from an Absynth patch, and then twisted with some of FM8’s built-in effects to fit the vibe of the track. We also used FM8 to make the simple Reese bassline in the buildup.

Native Instruments products used: EVOLVE MUTATIONS, ABSYNTH 5, RAZOR, BATTERY 4, POLYPLEX, VC 160, FM8

Biography

UK act Silk Road Assassins makes music that blurs the borders of video game soundtracks, science fiction, and anime. The trio consists of Chemist, Lovedr0id, and Tom E. Vercetti, who met while studying music technology and composition. Their debut, Reflection Spaces, came out in 2016 on Planet Mu and offers up slow, atmospheric tracks with mournful synth melodies and heavy bass tones.