Amit Schreiber's Blog | הבלוג של עמית שרייבר
This one took quite a long time and didn’t come out as well as I would have liked. Mainly I wanted it to be more energetic. I’m glad I finished it, though. It contains more melody and beat variations than the other tracks I made so far, and coping with dissatisfaction made me work harder to make it decent.
I used two samples of the PO-14 and this computer beep sample.
For this track I used this brass cut sample.
I wanted to use a trumpet sound and I also wanted to create a track with a higher BPM, so I started out with 160. Unsurprisingly this led me to create some sort of a techno track, but when I got halfway through the track changed into something slower (120 BPM) and different-sounding altogether. The mashup is kind of rough, but as usual – I like it :)
For this track I used:
In this short track I use a single bassline while switching the beat. There is no main melody, but I like the result.
Here are some loops created on the PO33:
And these are 32 step loops:
I really like this one. It samples a sound from the PO-14 and uses it as a bassline. In addition, I used this church bell sample and I think it works well. In this clip you can hear the melody playing twice. The second time I added a bit of swing.
My newest Pocket Operator is one from the latest metal series – the PO-33 K.O! The nice thing about this one is that it’s has a sampler – you can record sounds (either melodic or drums) and use them for your loops.
For this first attempt, which I admit isn’t that great, I used a very short sample from the beginning of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” for the main sound. You wouldn’t know it from listening to the sample because I totally trimmed and distorted it, which is not really how you’re supposed to sample. But I just wanted to see how it goes.
The Pocket Operators have 16 steps per pattern (which I, for some strange reason, call a loop). Now that I have a little more experience with the POs I tried creating loops that combine two patterns to get 32 steps per loop. They’re not the greatest, but they’re fine for first attempts:
Here’s a minimalistic PO-20 32-step pattern. I really wanted to expand this with more sounds, but couldn’t figure it out:
And here’s a P-14 one:
Sometimes, when creating a loop, the end result may sound good only during creation. On a second listen (or after) it might sound like a big mess. I realized that it may be important to include the steps it took to get to the final product just so that the ears can make sense of all the sounds playing together. Here’s an example. The last step of the loop progression is so noisy that without the steps to get there it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense:
And here are more PO-20 loops I recorded: