Mea culpa
This one was hiding in plain sight. Mea culpa is minimalist techno built on two pillars: a neat, driving bass motif and a bed of unusual percussion made from field recordings (river, fire, footsteps, assorted foley) chopped into micro-loops and processed. The groove should have been obvious—but my low end wasn’t. I had a four-on-the-floor kick, a second off-beat kick, and the remaining 16ths filled with sub. I hadn’t separated their frequencies or envelopes, so the bass got swallowed and the delicate percussion disappeared into mud. Fresh ears, simple fix: sort the lows and everything else breathes.
I carved roles: kick owned ~50–70 Hz with a short tail; sub lived a touch lower with a longer decay but sidechained to both kicks; the bass motif moved above them (think 90–120 Hz fundamentals with harmonics lifted around 200–400 Hz). I aligned phase, kept anything below ~120 Hz mono, used dynamic EQ to duck low-mid build-ups on bass when the off-beat kick hit, and added a multiband sidechain so only the bass’s lows yielded—mids stayed musical.
With the floor clear, the percussion could shine. Workflow highlights:
Micro-loops in Simpler (Loop on, tiny lengths, slight fade) for continuous textures; random start modulation for variation.
Warping & grain: Texture/Repitch for character, light jitter to avoid static repeats.
Transient shaping (Drum Buss/Transient) to pop the front of footsteps and soften fire crackle.
Spectral slots: HPF anything non-percussive; let the “river” own a narrow band in the high mids; keep fire in upper fizz.
Motion without clutter: slow Autopan on atmos, faster asymmetrical Auto Pan on ticks; Autofilter with tiny envelope or LFO for air.
Resonance as colour: Corpus/Resonators tuned to key for metallic hints—wet low, mix automated in phrases.
Width discipline: utility width <100% on lows; stereo only above ~250–300 Hz.
The bass motif worked but risked monotony, so I reprogrammed it in Dyad: subtle FM index movement, velocity-to-filter to humanise accents, occasional note substitutions/ghost-note anticipations, and tiny decay variations to shift where it sits against the kick.
Lesson: Get the lows right and the groove takes care of itself.