Elektronauts Hip Hop Battle #20 - Voting

time to go to the music store :joy: -
and for the record, if the winner decides to make a kazoo themed challenge i’m in.

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Thanks for hosting @Unifono
And we’ll done everyone I’m humbled again because I preferred loads to mine.
Maybe @flippantminister can host this time round if he wishes.

And here’s one of the most popular kazoo lead-line tracks ever just for the hell of it

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Congratulations @Yabba, @flippantminister, and @Unifono! Well deserved.

And what an excellent group of beats in general! All the strings, horns, and high tension really brought out the heat, not a bad beat in the bunch. Thank you @Unifono for hosting, and for the Bond theme. Thank you everyone who gave me feedback on mine!

My beat was #13, put together on my M8 with minor post-processing in Audacity.
Sources:
“Doggone” by Love (drum break), submitted by Doug
“The Man with the Golden Gun” by Lulu and John Berry (vocals and main loop), submitted by eerieacid
“Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” by John Berry (horns), submitted by Unifono
“Live and Let Die” by Paul McCartney (bass), submitted by LyingDalai
“Battle at Piz Gloria” by John Berry (extra strings), submitted by Maisin

Indulgent Postmortem

This beat started with just throwing the repitched Lulu vocal over the Love break. My wife immediately perked her ears up, so I knew I had something. Once I’d settled on using the full 2-bar vocal loop, I made it a goal not to overcomplicate my chops and layers like I usually do.

–The drum loop I mostly left alone except for the extra snare hits on the second bar and changing the start point on the fourth bar
–Bassline was an attempt to add some groove to the original Golden Gun bass, plus an extra sub-bass on strong notes for filling. I stemmed out Live and Let Live to get the bass sound, but the stem splitter lost a lot of the transient. I was able to build a new transient with one of M8’s drum envelopes, but it’s definitely not the Macca punch I wanted. Also timing gets a little baggy.
–The horn lines are my favorite part of the beat, and the bits I did the most “composition” on. The ping pong delay in the intro was done manually, with two tracks trading hits
–The Piz Gloria strings were a happy accident. Repitch + microtiming the start trigger, and they just worked
–The other high-strings near the end are just the main loop an octave up with a volume trem, plus a subtle dub delay added in Audacity to smooth it out. This doesn’t quite work to my ears, but I didn’t have a better idea before deadline
–I used a notch filter to remove some SRR aliasing noise around 12.5k in the horns and the vocals
–I used Ozone Elements for mastering, for maybe the last time. I don’t know if it’s a problem with Ozone or with me (a missed setting? not enough high-end? snare too loud? etc) but my beat is once again noticeably quieter than the others. I’ve downloaded Youlean and will be trying to master manually next battle.

Also, if you have an M8 (hardware or headless) and want a bundle of this beat, PM me.

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Wanted to channel my inner villain with nr 11…

Started this beat in early morning of the original deadline with Koala on the iPad mini while I was staying over with family. When I got home in the afternoon, I recorded the entire thing into the SP404 mk2, applied one of the default lo-fi settings, and did the fingerdrumming on top of in two passes. Sent it in, even forgot to add a bassline. :joy:

Anyway still happy how it turned out!

Sources:
Horns -> Chopped from goldfinger theme song
Piano -> Chopped Macca, Live & Let Die
Drum break -> Gators - Get up
Vocal bits: Grace Jones as May Day HD A View To A Kill (1985)
And ofcourse Paul mccartney as his distorted self

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Mine was made from the Clyde Stubberfield drumbreak chopped into kick hat snare and processed.
The intro was made from the For Your eyes only soundtrack which was going to be my beat originally but I didn’t know where else to go with it so I used it as an intro.
Main was from Lulu- Man with the golden gun, I replayed famous bond descending notes on korg gadget using a piano and a string.
I filtered the main part in Ableton because I like how the filter sounds and sequenced it all in Digitakt

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Track 15: I used the samples @sleepside shared and the break from that crazy track @Doug shared. I messed around with normalizing the samples before bringing them into the OT but that didn’t work and yeah the kick turned into a fart. Won’t do that again

It was just a one take performance on the Octatrack. Had the vocals on slot mode and worked those scenes.

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I was Track 12

All done on Bitwig with the default sampler
I made the string part by chopping the Goldfinger strings and added a sample of Lulu from Man with the Golden Gun via Altar Boy and the Break from Gunsmith Cats

I then went on holiday and suffered a big musical motivation drought and decided I didn’t like it and not to continue with it.

I decided to pick it up again when the deadline got extended. I added some extra drums from Sonic charge Microtonic and some bass from Sublab, but then ran out of time so it’s not really finished.
The drum breaks aren’t in time and don’t properly come back on the beat which I didn’t have time to fix and I intended to add a whole bunch more vocal samples etc.
However I decided to submit it anyway as I like being involved with the battles.
As a result I was unsurprised not to get any votes, but was stoked with the 3 HMs that I got.

I think there was the bones of a good track in there, but it needed another couple of sessions to get it cooking.

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Cheers to everyone.
I used the drum break from Etta James, and the Moonracker “Laser” theme.
Kept it real simple, and just sliced and diced.
Then played the slices back to a click track. Adjusted a few transient envelopes to give some of the drum hits a little bit of diversity and a loose feeling. The kazoo, alas, was all a sham.
Good job peoples.

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Not next time, i just got this from the store…

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Oh it’s on.

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That one is amazing!

It’s got that American Folk music thing.
I might for reals pick one of these up. Can use it with other stuff as well.

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Oh wow! What a surprise! Glad you all dug my beat.

I made it on the Octatrack(mkI). Base was a snippet of the Skyfall theme, the rhythm came from the Rory-O & Chuck Colbert track. Reinforced with a kick sample, and some bass sample I came across somewhere(likely Legowelt). The dialogue was mostly from License to Kill, I think the “pay attention” bit came from a View to a Kill. I REALLY wanted to use that Pentagram break, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for that someday down the road.

This was a really great battle, all the submissions ruled. Congrats to the others, and thanks again.

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@flippantminister Well done fella great beat, are you ok to host and come up with a concept for #21 or we can throw it open for someone else if you prefer

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I’d love to host! I’ll hit you up in PM about it.

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Mine was the 3 using Skyfall and Nancy Sinatra + one of the drum break provided.
Using OT MK1

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Congratulations to the winners! All great efforts and that was amongst a great bunch of tracks overall. I was delighted this time to get some great feedback and place for a few folks. I’ve also really enjoyed reading about how people created their tracks, always illuminating.

My track was done on the Digitakt, jammed into Live via Overbridge and then slightly chopped up and re-arranged there. My samples were mostly from You Only Live Twice tracks that were published but I think along with some stabs from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The break was sampled from the Love track posted by Doug and I combined with a few one shot drum hits. Other than that the only thing I added were some plucked string melodies I did with Fors Pluck.

Looking forward to the next round!

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Same here🤘

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I mentioned by PM to @flippantminister
a day or two ago that it would be good to get a new one set up for the weekend and he was gonna get back to me later that day but I’ve not heard back as yet, I know life gets in the way sometimes so hopefully he’s all good and I’m sure we’ll hear something soon.

I do like the idea of getting em set up quite quickly after the previous one has finished but with a long submission time so there’s no rush to finish

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Next battle is posted here-

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