Week 6 of 52: "QUIXCORE" w/ Jared Shaw
You never know what the inspiration will be that launches you into a creative rampage…
… for Jared and me on a casual meet-up in June, it was a pristinely new QUIX sample pack and a voice memo Jared took while I was opening up my DAW (heard below):
I lived on Patchen Ave. close to the border of Bed-Stuy and Bushwick and Jared came over to hangout. Not only is he a good friend of mine for years but he’s my go-to percussionist for any project, but today we were just chilling until the inevitable happened… we started playing with sounds.
Jared had a little rhythm in his mind so as I was opening my DAW, he was taking a voice recording. We didn’t think it would actually be used in the song so you can hear me talking in the background and even heard the little “blip” that FL studio makes right when you open it up.
From there we ventured to Splice where we found that one of my favorite producers, QUIX, had recently dropped a sample pack! We went through it and were hooked by the hard hitting, aggressive sounds so we ran with them but that was only the beginning!
Next we found a really interesting combo of an 808 and synth bass which became the bass for the song and added more movement/texture by played around with my own personal loops, handheld percussion, and recording/using FX on drums:
Jared and I were really just having fun trying to see where we could take the song so first we played with recording what we had so far and halving the time (then adding djembe played by Jared and some other samples):
Then we happened across a really tasty saxophone loop on splice and even though it was out of left-field, something drew us to work with it and just see what could happen… a lot ended up happening. Here is the transition between the half-time section and the brass section:
… and here is the brass section WITHOUT the Splice sax loop:
AND THEN MY FAVORITE PART! I’m not quite sure how this idea came about but it’s my favorite part just because of the pitch-bend and “umm” sample I had made months before. This was the transition back to the more aggressive trappy section and the brass never comes back. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Some thoughts:
Action creates inspiration. Jared and I had absolutely no idea or direction when we met up to make music but as we started to just play with stuff, the inspiration came. Don’t wait on inspiration, jumpstart it with action!
Create movement that surprises the listener. Music is a constant balance of living up to listeners expectations and subverting them; too much upholding expectations and a song is boring, too much subverting expectations too much and the song is too confusing. A nice change up, groove switch, style switch, or even genre switch can really add impact to your music.
Don’t overthink. If you enjoy something, believe in it because someone else will enjoy it too! You can’t constantly be trying to find out how to make a song “better” because 1) “better” is subjective, and 2) having an overcomplicated track can be just as bad as a boring one, but if you think about all this you may never put ANYTHING out, so just follow your instincts. Follow what you enjoy!