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.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.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.009. Hand Emerging from the Rubble

Wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with this one. I had a completely different idea and it became this. I had an idea while I was walking but lost it and hoped it would come back. No dice. The name doesn’t have any real meaning except a lot of post rock-ish stuff sounds to me like stuff rising. Like a Shredder’s hand out of the rubble.

This beat was made with Ableton Live and Guitar Rig. yup.

beat of the week no. 007, Dog Trapped in a Hot Car

This is the final beat of April! I started making this one with the guitar part that ends the current incarnation of the track. It sounded very Radiohead-y OK Computer era (particularly Let Down one of my favorites from that album). I tried to fight the impulse to make it more “Radiohead-y” and also tried to produce something quickly without over analyzing it.

The track name comes from the Radiohead song All I Need from In Rainbows. 

This beat was made with the synthesizers of Ableton Live for all the sounds that are not guitars, and Guitar Rig in VST form to create the guitar sounds.

(Please stay tuned, project files/stems/better album art coming soon)

beat of the week no.005, Winmark

Not much to say about where I got the idea for this one. I was just walking and got the idea for the guitar part that ends the song and built the rest around it. Not really too enthused about the distortion level on the main melody, but like the rhythm of it. There’s also something to be desired about all the “let one thing play by itself and then go into a new part” things I did. 

This was done in Abelton Live using synths internal to Abelton Live, Tapeworm, and Guitar Rig.

beat of the week no.004, Urf Werk

This one is clearly inspired by Earth. I’ve been listening to a lot of their latter stuff and initially had a different intention with this track, but just let it ride when it started coming out. Nothing really intellectualized beyond that.

This beat was made using synths and samples native to Ableton Live, except for the Tapeworm VST (which is free) and Guitar Rig (which is not free)