Techno Jam for Hogmanay

Now this is along one - 42 minutes! The first time I've tried to play a whole set this long. If you feel like dancing your way into 2021, this might help! Assuming you like minimalistic 145bpm acid techno that is. Just pretend you're in a basement with 500 sweaty people and no fire exit.

You can hear :
* Noise Engineering Basimilus Iteritas Alter : the kick and nothing else.
* Tiptop Hats909 : the hats!
* The magnificent SSF Entity Percussion : everything else, sometimes assisted by Nano Modules Font and the Sherman Filterbank, and lots of modulation.
* Oh, the pads at the beginning are from an Ensoniq ESQ1, played badly with one hand.

I have a video which I will post once it is done uploading!

10 minutes in, great stuff @the-erc, I'm aiming for this range myself, hoping to get there soon.

Hi The Erc,

Wow, 42 minutes of 500 sweaty people in one basement ;-) For those 42 minutes you have tons of variations, full with high energy, amazing actually to come up with such a long track that never really get bored because you seriously full-packed it with one sonic surprise after the other!

And indeed, those hats are lovely, so jealous :-) !

Thank you very much for sharing this, Happy New Year and kind regards, Garfield.

how did you record it to your daw? sounds amazing!what sequencers did you use? Look forward to the video.

Happy new year everyone! And thanks for the the kind words; glad you enjoyed the music.

@troux - I'm very inspired by MylarMelodies approach. I think the key is to have lots of small pieces which can be combined in different ways.

@sacguy71 : the short description of the recording is that everything goes into a mixer and the stereo out from the mixer goes into the DAW. Afterwards, in Logic, I make it a bit louder but nothing fancy : whatever compressor preset sounds good, then a peak limiter. (Actually I make it a lot louder : the raw recording still has > 10dB of headroom)

The long description of the recording is : I have three audio lines out of the modular (Kick, Synth, Hats) which go into the mixer, as does the keyboard. On mixer sends I have delay, reverb and the Filterbank, each coming back into the mixer on its own channel. The kick gets its bass EQ'd up a bit, and everything else gets a dramatic reduction in the bass band. Kick and hats go to the main mix; everything goes to a bus for some gentle side-chain compression key from the kick. (You can hear this quite clearly on the pads near the start.) That sub-mix rejoins the main mix. While playing I adjust the levels of the delay and the Filterbank, but otherwise don't touch the mixer.

The main sequencer is the Beatstep Pro, although some sequences are generated by Pamela's New Workout. I use an OR Combiner
to direct trigger/gate sequences from various sources to the open hat and the Entity. Triggers for the closed hat and the kick come straight from the BSP. Additional triggers from BSP go to Pique, which is set up as two AR envelopes wiggling parameters of the Entity. The two pitch channels of the BSP go into the switched multiple so they can easily be directed to different places. One velocity channel from the BSP modulates the cut off of Font. Some manual wiggling from the Tetrapad. This probably makes more sense if you look at the rack :)

I feel like I'm only scratching the surface of what this rig can do. I didn't use Disting at all. I didn't use the Doepfer LPG at all. I used a grand total of 4 melodic sequences on the BSP and only 4 drum lines. All the modules keep doing the same job throughout the track, especially the BIA is very under-utilised. The only thing I feel that I might need to take this further is more switches!

@the-erc, thank you for sharing your methods. I have an external K-mix that I need to send to my DAW to record my modulars. Since I have some time off this week, will try that and share. I also have barely scratched the surface of using my modulars but plan to dig deeper this year to record a concept album soundtrack to go with my screenplay/novel/anime concept project. Modular is the perfect platform for that goal.

And here's the video.

I had some camera issues so there is ~10 minute of blackout in the middle. Sorry about that!

@the-erc, nice sounds ace and fun video.

I have some sequencers hopefully arriving next week as my birthday present and another percussion module. Should be fun once I get mine sorted and recorded.

wow 45 minutes of full energy, that's something!

Did you record the sequences in advance or is it all improvised?

@Exposure -- thanks! Mostly of the sequences were prepared in advance so I know I had at least some combinations that would work. The the drum and percussion parts were reprogrammed while playing, not that they are exactly sophisticated! (I only realised after I was done that one of the melody lines is uncomfortably close to Blue Monday....)