BM3 Battle #05 – Retro Electro (Entries by 11 Feb)
BM3 Battle #05 – Retro Electro
(Entries by 11 Feb)
Get your 808s and vocoders ready… this month the battle goes Electro! I want to hear the best robot funk (or modern electro revival) you can throw down in BM3 v3.0.9.
Rules:
1. Original tracks only please (no remixes)
2. Soundpack and commercial samples permitted (eg 808 drum packs, scratch samples), but no individual sample can be longer than 2 seconds (this permits drum hits and instrument samples, but limits the use of borrowed vocals, breakbeats, music loops etc).
3. BPM range: 100-140bpm
4. Extra credit 1 - adding your own voice (vocoded or straight-up)
5. Extra credit 2 - sounding like an authentic 80’s electro hip hop track (think Soulsonic Force, Hashim, etc)
p.s. If you can't manage a full track, I am happy to also receive your 8-/16-bar beats and grooves - just please try to submit something!
Inspiration..
https://open.spotify.com/user/verseando/playlist/3NTTkTMP10EHijZvGjWX6W
Note- As the host of this battle I won’t be able to receive votes… but I will be submitting a track!
Good luck!
Comments
@5pinlink - please sticky this thread for me. Cheers!
Very exciting.
Hell yes.
Regarding samples. Source can't be longer than 2 sec? Or use in the track can't be longer than 2 sec? Can I cut up the long samples?
I'm simply trying to discourage borrowing large sections from other tracks, but otherwise quite relaxed about how you do it.
Rozeta has an 808 timing mode that is based on Egyptian lovers patterns
Edited your main post to tag it 'Battle' for the tag cloud
Was it our white lines discourse that put you on this @tk32? Haha I'm so looking forward to this
There were several factors that made me pick this theme. I'm just glad you guys are on board at this early stage...
Here's a bit of nonsense from one of my albums in 99/00, the scratching is crap cause i was going through a powercuts phase lol, but the backing track is pretty cool.
Love it @5pinlink! I'm going to enjoy your SC channel.
@5pinlink
)
Thanks for opening up the vaults and really getting us in the mood for this battle (or should I say "flexin' yer noodle"
Hope you got clearance on all those samples.
I'm in the UK dude, we don't have to clear up to 5.6 seconds
Everybody else around the world is banned from listening to any music i make EVER.
That being said, nearly every early electro tune copies a previous tune anyway, so i don't give a s**t
Forgot to mention...
I am also looking for a volunteer here who could help us create a DJ mix with all submitted entries.
Might be a fun idea to put out a BM3 Electro battle mixtape?
+1
Hey-oh!!!!!
This is going to be amazing -- Really, really loving this battle idea, @tk32 !!
I am going to try and finally use the built-in-vocoder on my Novation UltraNova for this.
Everybody: get your break-dancing shoes on and get ready to pop it and lock it !
We gon' do 'dis, yo!
@tk32 Should I participate even if Im not that good at this. Lol.
@mefisme ??? Yes you should participate.
@mefisme - 100%, yes!
Whoop!
@mefisme
The battle rules change every month, so some may suit your 'style' better than others - but I sincerely urge everyone to give it a try each month.
The aim is to encourage every one of us into growing as producers by continually trying new ways of creating music — creativity through imposed restrictions — and of course, having fun!
Finally, if you're concerned about making a whole track, you could just make a beat showcase, with a series of different 8-/16- bar electro beats
For anyone who might be struggling to know where to start, here's a Miami Bass rhythm tutorial from Attack magazine which should help you get the right idea:
https://www.attackmagazine.com/technique/beat-dissected/miami-bass/
https://hiphopmakers.com/free-808-drum-kit-227-samples
http://www.musicradar.com/news/sampleradar-378-free-808-drum-samples
https://cymatics.fm/blog/trap-samplepack-808-samples/
BTW - your battle entry doesn't have to use the 808
Thanks for the resources, @tk32
Going to be checking these out fo sho'
@tk32 thanks. I personally just didn’t know what’s considered retro electro. I’ve been doing some listening to modern electro. It’s all about the vintage drums for sure and that sunset feel it seems. I’ll try to get creative. Should be fun.
If you’re like me, you might have been looking for a good vocoder solution on the iPad that works with BM3. After doing some searching, I found that people praise VoxSyn from VirSyn as being the best, so after watching some videos I decided to pick it up. It was not the most obvious thing to set up in BM3, for me at least, so I thought I’d share how I’m doing it. You can make recordings from the app in many ways, but I didn’t want to record the output, I wanted to record dry vocals and then process them with the app, with the ability to make changes to the effect later. I suggest using the first entry in the IAA list, as the second entry behaves differently with midi, somehow. It seems to always take midi in from the track it’s loaded into, even audio tracks, which I could not make sense of.
Please forgive the way the audio acts up in the screen recording. That’s iOS’s fault, as it gets dumb when switching around apps.
Unfortunately it doesn’t save state and you have to remap midi when you use it again, but it isn’t that big of a headache. Be sure to resample the output into another audio track
really hope they make this one an AUv3.
@ronji my friend, you are killing it with these video tuts - it's also cool to finally hear your voice
I'm about to pick up VoxSyn too - I have laid down a few Electro beats, and need to add some vocals now
Since I'm hosting this battle and have nothing to win (and therefore nothing to lose!) I might consider posting some clips of my track in progress.
btw - it's great to have you on board with this battle
Thanks, @tk32! I’ve always been a huge fan of vocoders and talkboxes and old school electro hip hop.
I’m looking forward to seeing your progress videos as well as your finished product!
OK, so here's some work in progress – more Electro revival than early Hip Hop. It's very rough at this stage, and will be changing lots over the next week or two (if not replaced with a new track entirely!)
Remember, I am entering the battle purely for fun, and as I'm the host I can't receive any votes
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