Benjamin Santiago's AKA$HIC RECORDINGS

beat of the week no.027. Cinq Alive

The name of this beat comes from the fact that it is in 5/4. Nothing too crazy, but I generally think in odd time signatures. The actual phrase is from a skit on SNL where southern ladies ask for Five Alive in France (I can’t find it on youtube, but Wikipedia confirms it exists).

I originally wanted to do a drum sound made from the instrument in Live called Tension (which simulates stringed instruments), but later just added some more regular drums into the mix. 

This beat was made with Ableton Live and Native Instruments Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.025. Crystal Healer

The name of this one is because it sounds a little cheese to me, but not in a bad or ironic way. I think it is mainly the delayed 808. It just sounds like a dude who is into crystals trying to be relevant. In particular, I remember hearing at one point that on one of Yes’ latter tours Jon Anderson reserved a special tent that was full of crystals and he could absorb their energy.

The guitar part came from another one that had the same chords but a different feel. That one sounded more like a Dave Matthews Band song (Satellite). The one present here is more of a bad Allan Holdsworth impression. The lead part I am actually pretty proud of, it was a different line, that I cute up into little bits, and triggered the parts individually (kind of in an MPC style). The sound I got is from taking a reverb turning up the decay/time of the reverb and then placing it in front of the amp and a distortion pedal (in this case it was Guitar Rig’s facsimile of a ProCo Rat).

This beat was made with Ableton Live and Native Instruments Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.024.Saturday Night Stay-cation

The name of this beat comes from a purposeless mixing of the title of the game Saturday Night Slammasters…and just the word staycation. No real meaning there. Saturday Night Slammasters (if you haven’t heard of it, it is a Capcom wrestling-based fighting game, that features Mike Haggar, who you probably know from Final Fight) was always funny to me because of how thinly veiled the homoeroticism is, even in the title. It just sounds like a bunch of buff dudes in a scary basement getting oiled up and doing poppers. The Japanese version is even worse, it is called Muscle Bomber - The Body Explosion. I find stay-cation funny because when the economy was worse they kept floating this word around to make the economic collapse cute or something.

I put two funny things together.

The music just uses the vocal sample I’ve been using a lot recently. The only thing that may stand out is that I tried to make the reverb on the drums a little more nuanced to help the drums sound a bit more real. 

This beat was made with Ableton Live.

beat of the week no.22. (F)LOWBEE

The name of this track is just a (dumb) play on words. In an effort to play guitar parts in a lower register without getting a baritone, 7 or 8 String guitar, I just tune the low E string down to B. This creates a fortuitous situation if you are playing in a B-related key (In this case B Minor…I guess relative to D, but there isn’t much else going on so it doesn’t really matter). Another thing I have been doing is randomizing several parts to create more dynamic sequences out of simpler sets of parts. Here I basically take a relatively simple drum track, duplicate and freeze it and then use the resulting audio file to warp it and create a bunch fills/noise. These are randomly launched and gives the feeling like there is much more going on.

This beat was created with Ableton Live and Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.021. Monte Cristo

A Monte Cristo (sandwich) is too much. It represents crossing the border into excess. It is also delicious. Lately I’ve been experimenting a lot with double tracking the guitars and drums and it has been a pain to actually mix it together in a way that doesn’t sound like d00d00. It also tends to hinder me a bit with the very rare awkwardness of switching between composing and arranging in Ableton Live (if you’re familiar with Live, what I mean is that I will often start writing something, be satisfied and make a second or third part. I then have to arrange them together and I might create a basic arrangement. If I go in and add another part that maybe requires a slight variation I will often have to go back and change the arrangement, which is not a terrible hassle but a little counter intuitive at times)

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do is to take one phrase and then just alter the voices performing the melody and background. This is kind of what Zappa does in Peaches en Regalia, which is probably where I got the idea. I also wanted to have the different parts a little more refined since there would not be a “B part” that had different chords or a significantly different dynamic. I did this by making a few variations on the melody and drum parts and then had them be randomly selected in Live.

This beat was made in Ableton Live with the synths and samples internal to it and Native Instruments’ awesome VST plugin Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.019. Little Umbrellas

Not too much of a story, this one just evolved out of sitting down and setting aside time to work on some music. I kind of am addicted to the dumb little “doggy bark” sampler instrument I made. I also am getting pretty accustomed to the instruments in Live. The analog one is quite robust.

I called it Little Umbrellas after the little paper things they usually serve with drinks. THAS WHAT IT SOUN LIKE.

This beat was made with Ableton Live and using synths internal to it.

Beat of the week no.018. Mysterious Passageway.

Just wanted to do another guitar-heavy beat this week and keep the actual music simple. The only thing not guitar is the bass line which is done with Operator, Ableton’s FM synthesizer.

The beat just sounded mysterious dude. 

This beat was made with Ableton Live and used Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig for the guitar sounds.

beat of the week no.017. Battle Squadron

Wanted to do some more guitar-centric beats this week, and work with that weird god-like voice sample I had last week. I like how it loops at different times depending on the pitch. Used the Harmonic Synthesizer in Guitar Rig to do that heavy bass sound in this. 

The title of this beat comes from the Sega Genesis game of the same name. Something about the voice sample I am using reminded me of the sounds used for one of the weapons in that game.

beat of the week no.016. Intrastellar

This was another beat that was based on a melody that came to me while I was walking. It was kind of a bitch to make in Ableton Live because it is 3 measures of 4 and then one measure of five (and there is no sense of “17-ness” so I didn’t give it an odd time signature). I added one more note to the measure of 5 and then made it in 6/4, which I guess is kind of interesting.

The title is mainly a dumb play on words, but comes from Isao Tomita, who is probably best known for his version of Debussy’s Arabesque no.1, as it was used for the theme song for Star Gazers which I saw on public television as a kid. My dad was also into Tomita and I remember his version of Holst’s The Planets as well. I bring this up because I was kind of trying to imitate his ethereal synth voices. However, I also think it is kind of ingrained into my approach to additive synthesizers (ie Moog-like ones). The same way I’m usually trying to imitate Sega Genesis sound effects when I play with an FM synthesizer (the Genesis sound chip was made by Yamaha, it was similar to the one at the heart of the DX7, a very iconic FM synth).

This beat was made with Ableton Live and guitar processing in Native Instruments’ awesome, but unfortunately named program Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.015, Beware of Daschund.

This beat was derived from a melody I had while taking a walk. I tried to build around it but found it kind of lame. The only way I found it acceptable was to add the dumb vocal sample and retriggering each part in a staccato fashion.

The vocal sample sounds like a dog, at least in the first part…to me anyway hence the title.

This beat was made with the synths and samples available in Abelton Live. The only other unusual thing I did was process the bass and main melody synthesizer through Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.014. Abandoned in the ROM

This beat used the same chord organ for the background chords, then I built the melody and bass line to go with it. The drums were meant to be like one of those cheesy organs that has drum accompaniment. You’ve probably found one being thrown away in your town and tried to rescue it from oblivion.

Since the melody sounded kind of Gameboy-esque to me I picked a video game related title. Sometimes when people snoop around the ROM chips that video game cartridges were burned onto, they find unused graphics (the easiest to detect). I chose the title imagining the song was from an unused bonus stage or something in a Wario Land or Wario Land-like game.

This beat was composed exclusively with Ableton Live.

beat of the week no.013. Sad Baguette

My guitar is currently in need of repairs so I initially wanted to see what I could do without it (and no audio recording). I stumbled on the piano sounding part from freezing and warping an existing arpeggio (for the uninitiated, you can change the timing of an audio file in Ableton Live using the Warp tool/option). I played two warped pieces together and downpitched them to get that rhythmic interplay. Then I thought of the melody and played it using this chord organ I got from mah boy Max. Then did some dumb vocals on top of that.

It sounds like a sad baguette, hopefully I don’t need to explain this.

This beat was made using Ableton Live exclusively.

beat of the week no.012. The Palace Gates. 

My main starting point for this guy was just to do percussion that wasn’t based entirely on an existing drum kit in Ableton Live. The beat just kind of evolved from there and is somewhat standard fare as far as what I’ve been doing lately (high arpeggiator, downtuned really distorted guitar, little if any chord progression).

My main impetus for the name was that the beat ended up sounding like something that might appear in an illfated post-Jake Gyllenhaal incarnation of Prince of Persia (game or movie).

This beat was created with Ableton live for all the synthesizer and percussion sounds and used Guitar Rig (in VST form) for all the guitar sounds.