Elektronauts Hiphop Beat Battle #16 :Voting and feedback

[1-2]

Working on getting the results up soon.

Slight delay with the forum being unresponsive. After messages not going through, site not loading and finally getting on and writing a long post only to get logged out and not letting me back in I think this will finally work

I’ll go ahead and put up my track notes for now

1. This track is just straight up fun right from the start. Really like the synth bass and choppy vocal bits that come in towards the end

2. So chill. Beautiful and simple. Dig this laid back vibe. The plucky sounding part adds a nice touch

3. This track is pretty chilled out too, but with some real strong hooks on sample choices. Would have liked to hear a little more of this short track. Its great

4. Alright. Some real good humor going on here mixed with some dj style sample drops
   I enjoyed this oddball track

5. Groovin, catchy, great strings and excellent chops here. Definitely the kind of track I would want to hear some rhymes on top. Pretty sweet.

6. Dub bassline killed it! Piano chops brought a nice element. Minimalistic track that I really liked but would like to see it a fleshed out more and maybe a little longer. I think a little dialogue or extra sample layer on top could have made this shine, but the core ideas of this one really drew me in

7. Cool dark sound going here, so sweet the way the dialogue built up to the beat really kicking in, scratches, rev drums, and the unpredictable snares added to the groove perfectly

8. Where to start. Conceptual, hard hitting, memorable, rolling perc sound - so good!
   2 part groove as others have mentioned - and yes the first part was great, as said to be preferred on other votes, but I’ve got to mention the second part $ it really brought the funk. Wish I could hear where this track went next if we didn’t have the time limit

9. This track felt more drum focused but oh those drums were slammin, plus a sweet rough tone on the sparse samples. Now that I know this track was done by rpg, the humorous quote at the end reminded me of the Karen track you made for the goodfellas battle I think that was you right

10. Brought the weirdness with this one. Nice fx on the samples loved the dialogue choice here and the the guitar sample was choice

1st. #8
2 . #7
3 #1

Hm. This part is difficult just like voting for top 3 as many tracks could have easily made the top of the list.

#3, #5, # 6 (seriously that bassline)

I better stop there because I will want to add 4 and 2 and… pretty soon I am just posting the whole list.

Top notch all alround

[1-2]

Calculations are in.

Top votes and winner @Yabba withe excellent track #8

2nd place
is a tie between #3 @blaize and my track, #11

3rd place and our possible next battle host goes to @Jedilicious track#10

Some quick stats:

@Jedilicious

Holy shit. For me personally, this will be an extremely difficult vote

@monquixote

Superb set of beats. There were about 3 or 4 other tracks that I could easily put on the winners list.

Agreed and it really shows when calculating the votes. I love it!

Four different people received multiple first place votes

Every entry had either a vote or Honorable mention and ten out of the eleven tracks had votes in the top 3

Very impressive

@Unifono and @Symian tied for the next spot. Both only 1 pt behind 3rd place

Real quality all around here. So happy to be a part of this and everyone should keep doing what they’re doing because we clearly got so many awsome tracks out of this

Deciding who hosts the next battle, I have a hunch that yabba may not want to this round, I figure I shouldn’t two times in a row so if blaize does not want to host the next one either then it would be @Jedilicious

Whoever takes it, I’ll be looking foreward to see what you come up with

Pop lock and props to the beat drops, it’s time for

The reveal:
01: monquixote
02: Sleepyhead
03: blaize
04: flipinfantile
05: Unifono
06: Leptic
07: Symian
08: Yabba
09: rockpapergoat
10: jedilicious
11: 1-2

[Symian]

Congrats @Yabba and the same goes for all the other entries, it’s tough thing for many to expose their creations to the critique of others and we all do it once a month for shits and giggles… you guys rock…

[Jedilicious]

@Jedilicious

I am very curious about who made what beat. Statistically number 8 should be yabba, as that has been my number one pick almost everytime

I knew it!

Warning: Long post incoming

Congrats @Yabba, @blaize and @1-2 amazing beats.

I have to admit that I am truly baffled by ending up in the top three. @Sleepyhead & @Blaize thank you so much for your votes! That really means a lot to me, especially since I admire both your skills and it confirms that I am at least learning a bit every time I participate (or just listen for that matter).

It would be an honor to host the next battle, but I could definitely use some help as I have no clue how to upload stuff to the elektronauts radio etc. I would also be down for a co-hosting option if either one of you is up for that.

Also, it might be a while with Christmas break coming up and me starting a new job right after that (not to speak of the continuous flow of all kinds of flu/colds my kids bring in). But I am very happy to do that as long as everyone is ok with it taking a while.

Now, for a change I made some notes on my track:

Track breakdown

Ok, as soon as I saw the theme of this battle I knew exactly what sample I wanted to use for my main sample.

Cancion del Mariache by Antonia Banderas from the movie Desperado. I always was 100% sure it was a Tarantino movie and I started working with the sample.

A couple of days later, I told a friend about the battle and then he told me that its not a Tarantino movie!

Completely bummed out, I googled it and then indeed found out that it wasn’t. BUT; Tarantino is in the movie (and it’s one of my favorite scenes, just google Desperado Tarantino Joke)! So I figured I could use it anyway

Ok, now for more structured notes:

• I started by chopping up and pitching down the main sample.

• Than I played in a drum pattern on the push 2, stock drums from Ableton. These drums are playing heavily filtered throughout the track, with the exception of processed 808 kick. Also some RC-20 and sidechain compression applied

• I played the melodic chops on top of it, and processed them with Arturia Fragments. This was the main idea. I used both processed and unprocessed chops.

• Then I made the second layer of drums that come in after the “please continue” sample (pulp fiction obviously) Also stock Ableton drumrack. Beefed up with some Ableton saturation and RC-20

• A couple of days later, I wanted to spice it up a bit. Due to this battle, i was on a Tarantino movie spree. As I watched Inglorious Bastards, I heard the “bear Jew” scene and knew I wanted to use it (i hope I didn’t offend anyone, I am Jewish myself and thought it would be ok) So I played around with the timing and also used the baseball bat sound from the scene throughout the track as an extra percussive element.

• Finally, I added a tuned/pitched sample from the Django soundtrack (the spooky sound) and used gatelab gate sequencer for some movement and rc-20 for some extra color

There were a lot of funny/great samples I did not use in the end. I would have loved to integrate some more pulp fiction dialogue (e.g Vinny talking about Amsterdam and it’s beers, and mayonaise on fries)

And here are my notes for the other tracks:

Track 1: love that phaser like sound on the drums, also great mixing of dialogue. Especially love the “like a ninja” mangling. Great B section with that growling bass.

Track 2: love the plucky sound coming in at 0:50

Track 3: love the Japanese samples and the filtered drums

Track 4: nice mashup style mix, was waiting for drums, but I guess that was the point. Loved the “you’ve got a song” part.

Track 5: Great harmonics, samples and arrangement working together to create an epic feeling. This was very close to my number one pick. The thing that made me go for the other track was that the highend felt a little crowded to my ears. This probably my problem though, as my ears are very sensitive to that (probably because of an overload of the high pitched sounds my children produce all day…

Track 6: sound of the piano gave me MOP firing squad vibes. And those rumbling drums, damn!

Track 7: spooky vibes, nice scratching sounds!

Track 8: winner for me. This is not just a great beat, but a great track overall. The way the different sections flow into each other, the sample selection, The radio transitions and all of hat topped off with some great Tarantino inspired vocals. Worthy of a release. Also love the bassline that comes in later.

Track 9: love the layering and timing of the drums. And they are punchy! The flute sample was great (a bit loud for my taste). The swoosh sounds also really adds to the energy. And the stuttering drums with that funny sample at the end. Love it. (Third)

Track 11: great intro. Great mixing of musical elements and dialogue. Scratches sound layered on top were a great touch.

[Yabba]

Thanks everyone who listened and nice work again every-one of you.

My original plan, because I’ve now got to grips with Digitakt songmode, was to make loads of mini beats with each main Tarantino movie in chronological order and link them with the radio tuning.
I quickly realised I wasn’t going to have enough time to do that after making three little beats so I scrapped one beat and just used something from his first and last movie instead and made the one I preferred longer.

As for the lyric samples containing the name Tarantino I just searched “Tarantino” on genius and found song lyrics that contained that word and selected two I felt were most useable.

If @Jedilicious is happy to host the next one I’m more than happy with that

[monquixote]

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”

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

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

@monquixote

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

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

@monquixote

number one comment was “this sounds like… something other than hip hop”

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

[1-2]

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👌

[Unifono]

Congrats to the winners! Thanks to the hosts!

[blaize]

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 :

The Best Tarantino Movie Tracks

Sliced the thing and let’s go.

[monquixote]

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.

[blaize]

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.

[rockpapergoat]

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.

[1-2]

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

[flipinfantile]

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

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!

[rockpapergoat]

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!

[aarb420]

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?

[Sleepyhead]

Congrats to the winners, great job guys!

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

[Yabba]

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.

[Jedilicious]

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