Benjamin Santiago's AKA$HIC RECORDINGS

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.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.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.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.

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.008, The Right Kind of Tweed

The main impetus behind this beat was just to do an odd time signature that was basically truncating a 4/4 beat. This was what came out. I started with the guitar and built the drums/bass/keyboard parts around that. The drums are doing a thing where I take two different drum sets and split them left and right (in this case they aren’t hard panned). The bass part is my impression of The Whisper Song.

The name of the song is from an interview with Frank Zappa (sadly it was really close to his death), where he talked about meeting Nicholas Sloniminsky and how he was exactly what Zappa expected, part of it being that he had “The right kind of tweed…rumpled…worn for a thousand years.” Once I added the non palm-muted guitar it sounded like an old dude from the 19th Century rollin’ deep on his bicycle with the big wheel in the front, hence the tweed/old composer dude connection.

This beat was made with synths internal to Ableton Live except for the guitar, which was done with Guitar Rig. 

Ya heard?

beat of the week no.006, Hard Body

Pretty happy with this one. Originally wanted to do a more static Kraftwerk-style thing, but ended up with something that sounded like a really bad, newer NIN song. Didn’t really think about where it came from too much, just kind of let it happen.

This beat was made with Ableton Live with samples and synths internal to it. The guitar sounds were made with Native Instruments Guitar Rig.

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.