Transcendo

Transcendo!

QD130 – Transcendo! – Static SD version

No times on my hands, but still an urge to get creative, every now and then.

My Native Instrument hardware has been momentarily shelved and is collecting dust, to free up space on my working desks, so I am short in options to get musical …. but then I remember that DeadMau5, in his master class, was saying that he was composing his music loops only with the mouse and the keyboard … so why not me too!

I flick up Ableton Live and I start fiddling with the extensive collection of plugins and sound loops I have harvested over the past few months. As I browse through the MixedInKey Captain Plugins collection, I am prompted to upgrade to their new EPIC release: Interesting … what’s new?

Captain Plugins Epic – Welcome

That’s exactly what I need actually, the perfect way to compose a musical phrase in record time, including base chords, a bass line, a beat, and even a melody on top should I want one. But first things first, it all begins with a chord progression, as musical theory teaches us. For that I refer ourselves to the following useful links:

Keeping things simple stupid, I go for the ultra-classic progression I-vi-IV-V, but instead of the canonical C Major to start, I shift my scale to G Minor. And it goes like this.

Even better with Dark Cellos from my Nexus libraries…

Now, on these notes, the rest just takes minutes! I am in the mood for something Transy, and I start with a distorted bass on a future rave rythm, out of the box in Captain Deep:

Time to add some trans pads on it: I clone another Captain Chord track with a suitable Nexus sample: TG:Interrogate
I need more bass and a beat, which is exactly what I get by adding another Captain Deep and a Captain Beat tracks, with an old school rave groove:

I conclude the piece by adding another layer of vibrant pads, and a proper techno beat on top.

The final piece of 8-10 bars is simply obtained by a classic crescendo, introducing each track one after the other. To make things smarter, I create variation phrases and loops in Live. Eventually, I also decide to add a melodic phrase with Captain Melody, using a Serum Synth ( SY Angry Organ).

For good measure, I use the track as the source of a Whitecap visualisation, enjoy!

https://youtu.be/8JRxqYRs1Xo