Broken Beat | AudioCookbook.org

I’m too busy to produce any new sounds today, so here’s a track off Keston and Westdal’s second release, Truth is Stranger, for your listening pleasure. My best estimation is that we produced this track back in 2004, but the album wasn’t released until we partnered with Unearthed Music in March, 2007. The track’s name, 128 Dirty, is an example of one of those working titles that doesn’t go away. We must have used up all our creativity on producing the track and had nothing left to name the damn thing. You can preview all of the tracks on this album on the releases page at Unearthed Music, or just click on the image or title to go to the page specifically for Truth is Stranger.

128 Dirty

In my last post I explained how I rein in random processing behaviors to get the results I’m after. A good processor for randomizing audio is Ableton Live’s Beat Repeat. Beat Repeat effortlessly duplicates the once tedious process of repeating small chunks of a sample to get stuttering effects, but also has parameters to randomize the repetitions in a variety of ways.

For the Rhodes solo in “Six Weeks” I wanted to scramble my performance in some way to match the “broken” drum programming. Beat Repeat was the ticket, but I couldn’t get a complete take that fit well with the rest of the piece. If you look at the image you can see that the solo is made up of fifteen separate regions of audio. These are all abstracted from specific renders of the performance through Beat Repeat. After rendering the audio several times I selected specific phrases and organized them in a way that enhanced the dynamics of the piece, creating a hybrid. Listen to the solo by itself and then to hear it in context play the full track at 2:54.

Six Weeks (solo) – Hybrid Beat Repeat Solo

Six Weeks (full track) – One Day to Save All Life