I’m ready to cast votes if we’re still doing it. Or can just offer praise to all tracks if that is more the vibe 
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Oh, yeah, I haven’t voted either, I completely forgot what I posted as the deadline. Been a little distracted here. I’ll get my choices in today.
Shig says they’re abstaining from voting, so once you & @dhunterrr get your votes in, I’ll post the ranking.
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Ok. Voting was especially hard this time and I will write a more detailed analysis afterwards. All in all I think it was a great idea to sample Greensleeves records (thank you @KingDuppy for hosting this battle and also for the idea) and I was amazed how all of you nailed the topic. It was really fun listening to this playlist.
#1: Track 2
#2: Track 5
#3: Track 3
HM: all the other tracks (not including my own 
)
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My first few listens of the playlist were purely for pleasure and backdrop to the day! Great challenge and thanks for putting together the playlist @KingDuppy @alexleigh83. So then I had to give it all a few much more detailed listens…
#1: Track 7 - adore the sounds—gritty but also clean! Please share a detailed breakdown of the bass patch.
#2: Track 5 - takes me back to my days at Movement and Bar Rumba!
#3: Track 2 - there is a lot texture in here that rewards multiple listens.
All the other tracks are absolute bangers and I’d spray the points everywhere if I could!
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Okay, I guess that leaves me.
First, I just want to say that every track made me smile and has moments of brilliance.
My #1 is Track 5. When I first heard this song, I literally couldn’t stop smiling. The guitar sample is so well placed and the whole vibe just hit me perfectly.
My #2 is Track 1, for the drum programming. So clean and smooth. A great way to kick things off. I usually like to put the first track I receive in the opening spot as a perk for getting it in first (hint hint for future battles), but this would’ve been the lead track no matter what.
#3 was a really touch choice. I think it has to go to Track #2. Again, the drums are just programmed so well, such a great balance between swung, straight, programmed and human elements. I really respect how minimal the arrangement is, without feeling sparse—I can never impose that kind of discipline on myself.
HT to Track #7, which just bared got edged out of placing for me. Fun, sunny vibe and great use of vocal samples. I put this one at the end of the playlist because I love the way it interplays with the vocals in Tracks 1 &2 which kicked us off. A gift of a finishing track.
Alright, time to tally the totals, which I’m notoriously bad at. Watch this space!
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Hey @shigginpit are you sure you don’t want to vote, because we seem to be at a tie right now so you could be the deciding factor!!!
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Thank you @alexleigh83 for mastering everything.
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I see the names have been posted so I’ll go. Track 2 was mine, I used vocals from Eek-a-mouse and Yellowman. I was getting too tired to match the Eek vocals to the tempo so that’s why they are like that but honestly that kinda worked! There was also a guitar sample I pulled from one of the songs to make the dub chord stab. the main drum breaks I chopped up was from…Splice, new integration into Ableton is great don’t be a hater! As for the synths I used only one plugin: Pigments! Take that Florian Pilz aka @shigginpit! you can finish a track with “Serum for art school kids”
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Nice production work.
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yeah I know who you aren’t, it was really just bait for a thread bump!
spent the last 2 weeks excited for my bad grandpa joke…
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I would have too much difficulty even ordering these tracks because there’s nothing wrong with any of them. They are all superb and all shine for different reasons.
If I had to pick an interim favorite, I like the sample choice and the originality of track 6. I like that it never feels repetitive and sounds unique in both the playlist and the genre.
I don’t really have a vote though because everyone deserves to win.
This was a real source of frustration and frownie faces for me so I gave up on judging.
Just does not seem fair to not celebrate them all.
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Okay, well with the final votes in, we end up with a very strange but perhaps extremely fitting result…
CHAMPION TITLE
is a TIE between @malus_mons
and @surfacescan
for track 2, “Coming To My Sensi” and track 5, “Body Move”
with 9 points each!
2nd Place
is, um… ALSO a TIE between @Catastrophone
and your friendly neighborhood @KingDuppy
for track 1, “Burn Up The Herbs”
and track 6, “Cause of Malfunction Unknown”
with 8 points each!
3rd place
goes to @dhunterrr
for track 3, “One Green Pattern Live Dub”
with 7 points!
Thanks so much to everyone for participating and listening! Please feel free to keep this thread going with your (constructive!) feedback, track breakdowns, struggles, goals, alternate takes, abandoned sketches, and whatnot.
-KD
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I’ll snap the prize CD in twain and send one half to Malus and one half to Surface.
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we can wear them around our necks like beat battle besties!
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Thanks for hosting this battle @KingDuppy - to be honest, you are the reason I participated this time and made my first jungle track. I got to know you through the Hip Hop Dub battle. And so when you posted this battle - I took it as an invitation to finally make a jungle track - what better way than to honour Greensleeves. I probably approached it like I do making a hip hop track.
I made the whole thing on my Digitakt
- The guitar hook jumped out at me from the Augustus Pablo song and I nudged it around a bit so that it flowed as a two bar riff.
- I grabbed a bass sample, filtered it out using the digitakt filters and programmed what I thought sounded like some complimentary notes. I was inspired by Dj Marky from Movement
- I punched in my best attempt at a DnB drum pattern (pretty basic!)
- The real fun in this was to take Yelllowman’s anthem “Nobody moves, mobody gets hurt” and reedit it so it was about moving your body.
- I popped a few “risers” samples into the Digitakt and programmed them to the “Fill” feature of the Digitakt so I could perform the track and release it when it felt right.
- The amen break chops are alot of fun! I want to get better at those. I can’t believe what @Catastrophone could do with his track (can you teach me a few a few things!?)
- then I just had fun dancing around
Bigup to @alexleigh83 for helping make us sound so good. I know one of the things I really need to work on is mixing, choosing samples that don’t compete for frequencies and then some mastering.
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Yours was my favorite track, and I knew it was yours as soon as I heard it! I kept listening to figure out why your track had everything a DnB/Jungle track is supposed to have but sounded different, almost like a new genre. I came to the conclusion that the bassline you used is on “The One” as all rnb/funk basslines (and by nature hip hop) is. But Reggae is all about the “The One Drop” which is where you accent the 3rd beat of a measure. This another place where you can hear the West Indian roots of Jungle because the beat is also accented on the 3rd. its fast but our internal metronome hears it at half-time down around 75-85 bpm which is also the tempo of most reggae and hip hop! Soo naturally the reggea/Dub style basslines (which are usually playing the lead melody of the song, not the root note of the chords) fit so well at these fast tempos
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Mine was track 3. Surprised to get any votes as I felt all the other tracks were so good! Appreciate all the positivity in this challenge.
Mine was all made on an op-z and a zoom ms-70.
I sampled a whole load from the posted tracks. Not sure which because I did it all in one go using black hole to sample into audacity. I got weird synth noises, a bassline which I sliced up and resequenced, and the melodica intro to a track.
On another piece of gear I acquired second hand, the previous owner left a sliced up version of the amen break so I gratefully loaded that into the op-z for the filtered drums. I spent way too much time on getting that pad sound right! I tried to go with a harder sound than I normally make.
I only had time to make one pattern, so it’s pretty simple, but had fun with sending samples into the ms-70 with a tape echo effect, spring reverb, and phaser, with some light filter movement on reentry to the op-z.
It’s a one take performance stereo recorded, where I’m mainly managing the tape echo intensity, mute states and drum filter. The fx seem a bit loud in the mix to me, but can’t separate them so it is what it is. Good learning for the next time.
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@malus_mons - I am so glad that my track hit for you! I have always loved making beats alongside you and am in awe of how seamlessly you blend across musical styles, production techniques and live sounding instrumentation. Thanks for the tip on the difference playing bass on the one as opposed to the one drop. It makes sense. I know what you mean about the bass in reggae often being the melody - I had never made that connection to other styles of music from jungle, to miami bass to dubstep - thanks for reminding me.
In listening to your track, it seems the bass and the beat is also “on the one” - is that true? Maybe you can explain…
I was at a jungle gig the other night and the music never sounded better! The old days of everything on vinyl and being made on old drum machines and samplers is cool - but the fidelity of the new jungle tracks being made and the crazy sound systems to match is beautiful experience. Everything sounded so crisp and the new producers are really taking things to another level. Tim Reaper, 4Am Kru and others.
Anyone have any favourite new jungle artists?
For those interested, I enjoyed this little piece on the “new” jungle resurgence movement out of the UK: youtube.com/watch?v=cTtN77OK3Bw&feature=youtu.be
Mine was Track 6, the Twilight Zone one.
The music is all one performance on the Digitakt and Monologue, with the TV & movie samples overdubbed with an SP404. You can tell it’s me playing it live because the fills all come in too early.
The breaks are Ike & Tina—Cussin,’ Cryin’, and Carryin’ On, which I think I used before, and The New Mastersounds—All We Can Do. Both are from RMR’s “All The Breaks” .zip, which is a titanic collection of breaks.
I’ve loved Greensleeves records since I was a teenager, so part of this challenge was purely selfish—I wanted to hear how people with more experience and talent than me would approach this source material. So thank you all for playing along, it was sick!
When I started I really wanted to sample Ganja Smuggling, but the stuff I made with it just wasn’t fast or energetic enough. So I went with John Holt for the chord progression (I think it’s still Roots Radics either way).
I also really wanted to work in some Diwali samples. I filtered them aggressively as hell so they wouldn’t take over the whole spectrum—that’s the tambouriney percussion figure.
I wanted the song to start as its own thing and then sort of resolve itself into the original hook, so I started by building a melody on Police in Helicopter, where I wanted everything to end up, and worked my way backwards to the beginning of the song, about 8 patterns in all. Does that make any sense?
I blew a lot of time tweaking it in song mode (I’m still not done) but once I had something decent I made a scratch track to do all the Twilight Zone vocals over, so that when I tracked the final music take I’d be able to hear more or less where the vox come in to do performance stuff in counterpoint to them.
I also wanted some kind of segue into the coda where the song kind of pulls itself inside out and degloves itself, the way it feels when you’re dryheaving eggnog and yellow bile on Christmas Morning. I’m pretty happy with the sound design on that, not usually my strong suit.
Anyway, I guess in the end I just I wanted to make a track about finding myself stranded on the dunes of 2026 with no sense of where I am, how I got here, or what to do now. Every New Year’s Eve, WPIX11 has a 24-hour Twilight Zone marathon that stuffs up my DVR, and every New Year’s Day I mess around with different samples from it. This time I used I Shot An Arrow Into The Air. There’s also some clips of Son of the Invisible Man in there (“he’s quite normal again, now”).
All the other samples are from @Jeanne’s Hex Cells pack, an all time favorite that’s chock-full of useful material.
In the end, there were too many filter sweeps and knob tweaks to do on the Monologue on top of all the performance tweaking to do on the DT to nail it all in one take, so I asked my wife to be my second set of hands. We recorded it live with me on the DT and her playing the Monologue.
Anyway, it was so wonderful to walk around town my Christmas morning accompanied by a sudden snow and this weird little Greensleeves playlist I’d somehow willed into existence. It was an incredibly sweet birthday present. Thank you all, so much for making it possible.
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
4 Likes
My track was Track 4:
I used Ableton Move to start the track off, using a percussion sample and some vocals, sampling from phone to Move. In this first session I came up with the pads, the lead sound, the bass sound and a first drum track. Later I switched to Ableton Live for further arrangement and seqencing.
The musical vocal part, which comes in in the second part of the track is from Mad Antz. But this sample I had to import in Ableton and I used the new stem separation tool. I had to make it fit by force (using warp markers) but it sounded ok to me at the end.
For the drums I mixed programmed drums with some chopped breaks.
To be really honest with you, I was a bit disappointed not getting more points (which is okay). My explanation is (and you can add on this): I could have incorporated more sounds from Greensleeves, the track is kind of long/too long or has too many parts/elements. I’m not fishing for compliments here (not at all), but I appreciate you feedback (especially things to improve next time).
1 Like