At the moment i am listening to and making a lot of tracks with a lot of influence coming from 90s hard house and classic trance tracks so the projects released under Soul Mass Transit System’s “Fritz Schnackenpfefferhausen” alias are a huge inspiration at the moment.

The first thing I want to work on is making a bassline as I always find this takes the longest for me, I knew I wanted to make the bassline to be in the style of a classic house organ and then played at 135 bpm+ with a 4 to the floor speed garage drum pattern.

KEY ELEMENTS

The main components I definitely want to put in the final track are

• Organ bassline
• vocal chop
• sirens
• boomy fx
• ragga samples
• crowd FX
• hard house / speed garage 4 to the floor drums

This is the demo version I made so I could lay down the foundations of my ideas and the key elements of the track I want to make. I made it in Ableton and just used it as a way to sketch out my ideas

version 1

This initial version is extremely basic and the only real substance there is the bassline. there is no flow and the build-up is very sloppy but I was happy with the direction this was taking

version 2

This second iteration has a lot more going on and the build-up is significantly more interesting. still a long way off from the final product as I feel it needs some potential vocal chops and the crowd fx commonly heard in hard house tracks

Contemporary issues in sound art blog post 5 – Building the track

sound design

For the organ sound I want to make the bassline out of I took a sample from the Korg M1 bass and have processed it in Ableton running it through many plugins and audio effects to bring the dry sample to life.

korg m1 sample

The processing chain

• Saturator
• Delay
• Reverb
• EQ
• Compressor
• Limiter

The main plugins really doing most of the work here are the EQ and the compressor

With the EQ i rolled off a significant amount of the high end because i wanted to give the sound a more bass focused punch rather than a high end pluck. And with the compressor i have sidechained it to the kick drum and have lowered the threshold and the ratio and this is what gives the bassline that sort of breathing effect.

Final bassline

VOCAL CHOPS

I found this sample on Splice, which I was looking for. It has the exact old-school house feel and is very loopable making it perfect for I wanted it for

I took this sample, made some chops and made a loop, i then ran it through a processing chain consisting of

• compressor (sidechained to the kick)
• eq to take out the harsher high end frequencies
• reverb

DRUMS

In Speed Garage production, it’s very commonplace to use edit versions of loops that are often sampled from pre-existing tracks and then add layers to beef up the drums

My drum group consists of a few loops which I have used eq to cut all low frequencies out so my kick drum can punch through. i have then layered this with extra claps and have added some reversed drum hits at the end of every 4 bars to keep the energy going throughout the track

my drum processing is very straight forward

• glue compressor
• utility to reduce gain
• eq
• drum buss

EFFECTS

Effects play an extremely important part in making the track transition smoothly between different breakdowns and build ups.

Many of the effects I have used come from old jungle and reggae sample packs that are often old sample cd’s that are then digitised

These packs contain hundreds of different ragga fx and are a staple heard in nearly every speed production, as well as this is also fairly basic risers, uplifters down lifters, gunshots and massive room/reverb kicks that really help to transition between sections

I have used a lot of M/S EQ techniques to take to lows of a lot of the fx in the centre of the mix and allowed them to sit more on the sides so they do not clash with the bass frequencies coming from the bass and kick drum.

Contemporary issues in sound art blog post 5 – Arrangement

The vast majority of tracks like this being produced today have an extremely similar arrangement and this is because the intros and outros to these tracks are specifically designed for a DJ to be able to mix into.

This often means there will be a 16 – 32 bar long intro just with a stripped-down drum loop with more effects, vocals and possibly a harder kick drum coming in as it approaches the breakdown. similarly, for the outro there will often be a 16 – 32 bar long outro with elements of the track fading out with just drums left to be heard.

The arrangement for the track is this

• 16 bar drum intro
• 8 bar breakdown
• 8 bar build up
• 32 bar drop
• 16 bar breakdown
• 16 bar build up
• 32 bar drop
• 16 bar outro

The track runs at 139 bpm for 4 minutes and 22 seconds

Contemporary issues in sound art blog post 6 – Final track and reflection

With this project, I do not want to get into the areas of mixing and mastering too deeply as I think mixing and mastering is a whole different project.

In terms of mixing, I have done some very basic and essential techniques such as putting select low-end frequencies and using various M/S eq techniques to try and put things where I need them in the stereo field. As well as this having various buses and groups inside of Ableton to be able to control different parameters of groups of sounds such as having a drum group

Final track

This is my final exported arrangement from Ableton, please note that I had to significantly reduce the file size to be able to upload it to Moodle so this may have impacted the quality of the audio

Reflection

Overall I am very happy with the final outcome of the track. I am glad that I eventually decided to scrap the original projects as I think the scope for making something like this is much wider and offered me much more freedom than making a remix of a pre-existing track.

Hard House-inspired speed Garage is definitely something I want to dive deeper into in my productions as I think I was able to accurately recreate certain elements of Fritz Schnackenpfefferhausen’s (AKA Soul mass transit system) “WURST01” EP