A little dance track made in just two days

Darkside · Post by **Darkside** » Thu Oct 06, 2016 9:37 am

Hi synth freak brothers and sisters! Let me present to you just a little hardstyle/trance/EDM or what ever you dare to call it - a tune made in two days. It's based on an old melody of mine that has bugged me for ages. So last sunday I was jamming with a friend and as I played it on Alesis Micron, I gave this synth to him, he just told me to do something with it. I went home and started working. R3 is on the bass, other melodic stuff comes from M-audio Venom and all the percussions and sfx are from my huge sample library on the hard drive on the computer. But the main lead, that's the thing: a simple and known trick to use a keyboard channel of the Microsampler with an empty sample and output the notes to the microkorg instead. This way it's possible to manipulate the sound during playback and not get stuck to just a static and unchangeable samples so I used the mod wheel to move the cutoff on that supersawish lead. I used the filter of the Microsampler's effects to fade the kick and the bass in a couple of places. The results are startlingly modern sounding and came a bit as a shock to myself as it's not my usual style. I actually wasn't even sure about uploading this track, but that same good friend convinced me enough to do it. So after all these explanations here it goes:

https://soundcloud.com/drxid/dark1

I'm sorry if my long and detailed explanations are bothering, but that's just the way my mind works "asperger's tendencies?" and I actually expect the same from others having to remind myself all the time, that people think and behave differently and are not all like me. So check out the track and leave your comments and feedback as usual. Have a nice rave!

Telengard · Post by **Telengard** » Thu Oct 06, 2016 12:52 pm

Sounds pretty cool! You got a bunch of stuff genre-wise. You could probably make two or three songs out of parts of the one. I like, though!

eowyn · Post by **eowyn** » Thu Oct 06, 2016 6:00 pm

wow, that's a great example of what the microsampler can do. your explanation of your arrangement is also very welcomed! I was using the microsampler just as a soundfont tool until now not as an arrangement workstation. I recently was thinking about buying an octatrack but perhaps I should stick to my microsampler and explore the possibilities more. Thanks for your track - very inspiring!

Darkside · Post by **Darkside** » Thu Oct 06, 2016 7:08 pm

That's the thing: this little sampler is on one hand very basic and on the other hand it's limitations make it sutch an inspireing tool to use. When I purchased mine in 2010, I thought it would be just a suppliment of grooves and loops, but it turned out to be so much more and brought my music making farther away from the computer based setup which is in my case only a good thing as working with hardware is somehow more real for me. May-be it's also down to the fact that when working on a computer I have to rely on screanreader and keyboard navigation while on the hardware I can just reach out and grab a needed control or press a button. Yes, there are menus, but I have fortunately a good afinity with those so no need to hire a sighted assistant to read the display all the time. Sometimes it can get a little anoying to find certain options, but it never gets in the way too much. Over these years I have tried to show, that Microsampler is not a toy, you just have to approach it correctly to get good results. I'm still happy to be going strong on that one and inspire other users so big thank you for correctly getting my point. Of course music as the final product is still the most important thing in all this, but I can clearly see my point being proven well.