there's actually another whole ass "shop" theme i started working, like, i've got the entire draft as an acapella on my phone or something, but that kinda got boring. i honestly just didn't wanna go transcribing a whole ass song like that and said "fuck it let's try something different"
so it turns out, after kind of going through a little bit of an adventure, i discovered some things.
what the fuck is a stem. don't tell me actually
what the fuck is an ableton. actually, i know this.
a lot of the songs i write tend to rely on looped patterns, which by themselves are also the formation of of music, in a way. you gotta change 'em here and there, but for the most part, shit Loops
you can represent identities, themes, yadda by what repeats and what doesn't. if you have a brain you can discern that, it's how language works. but the kicker here is that some music making software specializes in letting you throw down some loops that you like and then letting you fuck around with it in the editor for the Big Loop. that's sort of an extreme short generalization of how ableton works.
write some loops, write those loops to the track editor, continue. have some fun with it.
problem is, i don't use ableton. i think it's either that or fruity loops that people use all the time; fruit loops for studio production, ableton for live performances. i think the idea with ableton is that it lets you write stuff on the fly and lets you cook it live, which is cool and all, but again, i don't use it. 'cuz who the fuck has $600 to drop on software.
the goddamn synths to start with cost like that much. fuck off
though when i watched enough sorta tutorials on how that sort of thing works, when i went to go make it work, i looked; i said, what the hell does my DAW do that's like that? turns out it's right here in renoise. this stupid fucking dinky thing
renoise uses "phrases," dawg.
okay, so what the hell is a phrase, then? why not just cook all that in the pattern editor? well, i think the mindset for something like this (if you're not fucking insane, or happen to have probably done this before) is that you go and make something that's known to repeat for a while into the phrase editor, and things which you know is going to change a lot goes into the pattern editor.
here's an idea of what those two look like, by the way
you can probably tell that there's a big fucking difference between "how my shit is arranged" verse "how my other shit that wont change", and that's sort of peak for this kind of thing. this is, essentially, ableton's loop function. you can write things in here, and if you want some new phrase you want to run, you can! you just have to use a specific command (0Zxx where xx denotes the specific phrase to play in hexadecimal) to trigger a new one. this is, essentially, your snap-to-grid track editor for any other DAW. you can also just add shit straight to the bare metal of the track.
needless to say, by using this, it sort of freed up some of the creative room, because if you decide you wanna run some funky bass or just some chords and you don't wanna be stuck here having to do it in a weird way, you throw it into a pattern, boom. if you look in that image above for the pattern editor, that's actually the entire bass. it's a regular ass chord.
hey so here's a whole ass fixed version of trinkets. may god have mercy on your soul. because drums function like they do in literally any other daw (if your daw doesnt work like this, it's stupid. sorry! steinberg made that rule.) then you can also phrase track it like a stock loop and it just works. it's great. i can write so much shit without having to worry about the actual pattern now. this is kind of just what i needed.
if i remember correctly, the way you do this in like, fasttracker or some shit is by writing your phrases or whatever with an instrument or sample or whatever else it is that you're gonna do, and then you just save that as itself a sample, run it in your tracker, and just sample slice backwards if you need the individual bits, otherwise, just say fuck it we ball you have your thing already and then the track is made
see ya
