I have been fooling a lot with my synths lately. Not being a keyboard player, I have to live along with my limitations and try to work around them. I really enjoy this process and am learning a lot about these wonderful instruments.
This video I made last week shows how I recorded my latest instrumental, Randomizer. It usually starts with a bass sequence on the Moog Grandmother. I then set up a matching beat on the DrumBrute, an 808 style analogue drum machine. Here, I recorded the two simultaneously on two mono tracks. Although I had the main riffs worked out beforehand, the structure of the piece was completely improvised. In this case I only made one small subsequent edit in the drum pattern, just before the bridge. I used the drone function and played around with the filter, the envelope and the sequence itself to add variation to the bass line. Each time I hit a key, the sequence starts again from the beginning. This way, I can vary the melody. That's what you see me doing in the video when I hit the keys seemingly at random. After that, I added a couple of overdubs using my MicroFreak synth: a pad for basic chords and a melody for the choruses. I ran this through my pedal board with the Boss DM-2w analogue delay engaged, making the best of its tendency to self-oscillate to embellish the texture. Finally, I completed the song with a sequence over the droning bass note of the bridge and the outro parts.
I already have a bunch of similar pieces in the bag that I will be publishing on my Soundcloud page. Stay tuned!