Elektronauts Hiphop Beat Battle #16 :Voting and feedback

The Lounge Mission Briefs
#46

Well done everyone!

A few people have asked me questions about my track so I shall provide some info.
It’s this one BTW:

This is the first finished track I’ve ever made on Bitwig rather than the Polyend Tracker which is how all my other tracks have been made. My observation is that it’s better produced, but not as good as a composition compared to my other entries. Hopefully this will improve as I get better at using Bitwig.

I find constraints breed creativity and Tarantino was too broad for me and felt a bit overwhelming so I decided to set myself an additional challenge of choosing only one film and making a song using only samples from that film and not only that, but using samples from songs which play some significant element within the film.

The choice of film was easy as “True Romance” is one of my all time favourite films.

The songs are:
A marimba sample from the main theme “You’re so cool”
The “Orchestra Hit” and “Want your body” are from the scene where Clarence and Drexel face off in the night club
The flanged bass sample is the first hit of the song “Outshine” by Soundgarden run through an Arturia Flanger plugin
The guitar sample is from “In Dreams” by John Waite.
The sample I’m most proud of is from the Flower Duet from the opera Lakmé. It’s probably one of the most beautiful vocal performances of all time so making it so menacing in the B section felt like a real achievement.

In terms of vocal samples they are Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette and Gary Oldman.
Christian Slater’s voice comes out a bit nasal which is why I slowed him down.

There are loads of great samples in the film, but my kids enjoy listening to the tracks I make so I kept to ones that were clean (Which is not easy in a Tarantino film!)

The main sample “French Vanilla Icecream” is from the line “Do I look like a blonde with big tits and an ass that tastes like French vanilla icecream?” which for whatever reason stuck in my head from when I’d watched it many years ago.

Other than those samples all I used were a few beatbox samples from the Bitwig default sample pack and the Oberheim model from V Collection which I thought sounded really good!

Thanks for all the nice comments everyone and as usual the number one comment was “this sounds like… something other than hip hop” :smiley:

One day I will learn how to make tracks that actually sound like hip hop :rofl:

9 Likes
#47

Not that your comment was meant to be taken too seriously, and just my opinion, but some thoughts

Please don’t focus to much on that. I really enjoy your tracks and I’m not sure how others feel but I think you don’t have to fit in a a perfect hiphop shaped box to be in these battles, it’s OK and even sometimes good to keep it loose

Hope I didn’t start that with my comment from your first battle track. I didn’t mean it in any bad way just an observation and I think I even voted it my #1 that round

I think you’ve got a nice signature sound developing. I’ve voted for you multiple times without knowing it was you, this time I had a pretty good guess which track was yours, and it turned out right. I like the style you’ve got going a lot. Experiment and change it up as you see fit, but personaly I think I would rather hear the unique flavor you put on things rather than an emulation rehashing a specific type of sound

6 Likes
#48

Killer idea for mini beat per movie, would have loved to hear how that played out.

The radio tuning still worked out nicely on your track, glad you didn’t discard the concept all together because I think it gave an already great track something extra special. Very nicely done👌

3 Likes
#49

Congrats to the winners! Thanks to the hosts! :slightly_smiling_face:

6 Likes
#50

Congrats to everyone.

For me, the track was entierly made on the Octatrack. Recorded straight from main out.
For the sample, I searched “tarantino soundtrack” on youtube and found a video “The Best Tarantino Movie Tracks”
I scrolled a bit and found this little isolated sample at 26:31 :

Sliced the thing and let’s go.

8 Likes
#51

Yeah, I’m totally cool with it.

I don’t understand hip hop and what I mean by that is that though I like it I don’t have it in my heart and in my spirit and so it doesn’t come out in my music.

I find it kind of funny that I can make a track at the right BPM with the right swing settings and the right kinds of samples for hip hop but it comes out sounding like Fat Boy Slim which is not where my head was at all, but 100% bang on for the type of music that was popular when I was first getting into electronic music and is therefore baked into my DNA.

I’m a n00b with electronic music, but it’s exactly the same with guitar (Which I’m more experienced at) I can only do me I don’t know how to do anything else.

8 Likes
#52

Don’t worry, sound like you want. You are here with other noob. The point of theses battle is just to make music.
The hiphop references of elektronauts is very old school. If you listen modern hiphop made by young ppl it doesn’t sound like our battle at all.

So yeah, continue to work your style and most important, keep enjoying making stuff.

9 Likes
#53

haha… so true, my friend. lots of our stuff leans toward the old school sound, for sure. we do get some more modern sounding tracks in battles, but people here don’t tend to make a lot of gimmicky, lo-fi, 404 effect laden stuff. there’s nothing wrong with these new styles, of course. music evolves; tastes change.

some of us are old farts who appreciate the classic style.

make what sounds good to you. experiment — let the battles serve as practice and opportunities to stretch out a bit.

9 Likes
#54

Good thing the old school is where it’s at.

No discredit to styles evolving and changing, but im not sure that this time of ultra accessibility has brought huge leaps in creativity in more mainstream leaning styles of music. Maybe I haven’t dug deep enough but on a surface level there seems to be more homogenized formulas for making the sound of a certain genre. If for example this was a trap beat battle I would personally be less interested but also assume we would hear a lot of the same ‘808’ bass with fast repeating hihat trills with triplet rap over the top for example. That genre seems more about the rapping from what i gather. Maybe I am way off but being open to anything hiphop leaning with a heavy emphasis on old school (sampling creativity) gives us a nice variety and keeps things going and keeps it interesting

Or I have no idea at all because maybe I am just old…
School

8 Likes
#55

I like the Tarantino movies because they appease to my inner teenager. The violence, the cursing, the sexual charge in the movies, i just wanted to do something to capture that. Watching kill bill, the ‘My name is Buck and i’m here to f*k’ resonated the most with this :laughing:

From there i found and freely associated (Strawberry letter 23 reminded me of i wanna sex u up, nouvelle vague too drunk to f* speaks for itself etc) the other samples around the idea. Most of it was strung together by ear in koala using resampling.

Only the scratch was modeled and recorded on the octatrack, just because i said i would beforehand.

It’s a weird concoction, and musically way too disconnected to be even considered a beat, but i had fun making it and i smile when i listen back, so i decided not to overthink and just turn it in😋

I appreciate the nice words you could find for something rather unconventional, gracias!

And most of all, congrats to all the winners, well deserved!

5 Likes
#56

track notes

i only worked on one track this time, no multiple takes or different ideas, mostly due to time. first step was to check lists of all the songs appearing in tarantino films. thankfully, film nerds have done this already.

all this was done in ableton again. one day, i’ll update my digitakt to get song mode and explore. this was not the time.

there are 6 tracks plus a few more unused that had other chops i was noodling with. all 6 main tracks are grouped with rc-20 on top for more grit.

track 1 is always drums. for this, i went with a 4 bar loop of brian bennett’s “drums in transit.” effects rack includes utility (unused but always there), eq eight with the lows rolled off around 30 hz, tape mello-fi’s drum warmer preset, and drum buss with a little drive and a little more “boom.”

track 2 is bass from spitfire’s free LABS series. the warm amped bass guitar is nice. tweaked some settings in there to get roughly a nice round tone, and the rack includes utility (bass mono below 120 hz), eq 8 with bass rolled off below 30hz again, tape mello-fi’s “warm analog,” and glue compressor side chained to the kick around 80 hz with a 6db threshold. i do this all the time, varying the attack, threshold, and makeup for effect.

track 3 is guitar chops in simpler from “alacran y pistolero.” these are chopped, adjusted, and sequenced on the grid for 2 bars… nothing fancy, but it sounded okay to me at the time. rack is utility, eq eight with a little mid bump and bass rolled off, and glue compressor sidechaining the kick again but with a 12 db threshold and some makeup dialed in.

track 4 looks unused. i had it somewhere but took it out. it was chops in simpler of the vocals from esquivel’s “harlem nocturne.” this channel’s rack is the same as the others.

track 5 is the flute chops in simpler from zamfir’s “the lonely shepherd.” only difference on this track is tape mello-fi’s lo-fi hi-pass setting. it’s a 4 bar loop played in roughly.

track 6 has dialogue from jackie brown for the intro, middle, and outro. eq eight rolls everything off steeply below 200 hz.

master channel has ozone 10, bx_masterdesk true peak, spectrum analyzer, and you lean loudness meter. i used the hip-hop preset in ozone and tweaked it a little. it looked a little hot going into bx_masterdesk, so the gain is actually bumped down there. i probably should’ve handled that differently.

one of the unused tracks has chops from patsy cline’s “back in baby’s arms,” which i tried really hard to make work. it’s kinda goofy but has potential. will keep this in the back pocket.

les baxter’s “hogin’ machine” almost made the cut for the break and some other stuff, but i got distracted. it’s been used by tons of people though.

and that, my friends, is how that particular sausage was made.

nice work, everyone!

5 Likes
#57

Can’t believe that this beautiful congregation occurred, flourished, and flew under my radar. You all did an amazing job on your tracks! There is literally a solid album present right here, where is @WUTANG?

:beers:

5 Likes
#58

Congrats to the winners, great job guys!

Also thanks to @blaize and @1-2 for hosting, the theme you came up with was dope!

6 Likes
#59

Thanks mate i appreciate that.
I noticed while skimming through the movies there’s a lot of radio intros in Tarantino films.

I believe there’s a radio tuning effect that tunes into Kool and the Gangs Jungle boogie near the start of pulp fiction, then you have the radio intros to K Billy’s super sounds of the 70s from Reservoir dogs.
there’s also the radio intro to California dreaming from Once upon a time in Hollywood which I ended up using for the intro and my main beat.

So linking all those bits was what I was aiming for originally.

3 Likes
#60

So, If everyone is ok with it, I would be happy to host the next one. I already got some ideas, will try to set it up next week.

If anyone could help me to figure out how to upload all the stuff to SoundCloud, that would be greatly appreciated :blush:

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#61

I’ll be happy to help with some advice for that Jed.
When you’ve set up the next one I’ll DM you

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#62

I’m ok with that. I can help you with soundcloud upload.

3 Likes
#63

Great guys! Thanks :blush:

#64

This playlist is dope guys!
Again I’m frustrated that I didn’t participate with you.
My resolution for the new year: not to miss a single battle!

5 Likes
#65

Here we go!

1 Like