Under The Hood... "Fog Wall"

Track breakdown of "Fog Wall" with a download of the Ableton Session.

Like a lot of the dance records I’ve released recently, Fog Wall had been sat on for a while. I made the first draft in 2019, with the intention of it being an intro for a live show I was touring in 2020. You can hear an early version of it kicking off this recording from my set at Pitch Music & Arts in Australia in March, 2020. Touring halted after this, and I canned it. I cracked it open again 3 years later and fleshed it out.

*I made this one in Ableton 11, so the project file will work with both 11 and 12.

Fog Wall

made: 2019-2023 | released: May 2023 | label: Verdicchio Music Publishing

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Synths

The intro stabs are sampled chops from a 7 minute recording I did on an organ at a friend’s studio. You can hear the whole thing here. I arranged the chops with a sampler, and made the ADSR similar for each chop, so it sounds like a unified synth running through a filter/EQ/comp/chorus/etc. The intro bass was sequenced with midi, sent to the prophet 6, recorded parallel (dry/reverb/chorus), and bussed together in Ableton. The live filter automation I tracked it helped it breath. At the time of the initial session and live set prep I owned a deepmind 12D, because I wanted a synth that could travel well and sound similar to the prophet 6. While it did travel well, it didn’t sound like the prophet – it had its own flavour. I used it to make the lush chord swells throughout the track. I liked the detuning and pan spread on this patch, and used it on a lot of recordings back then, but sold the synth when touring stopped in 2020. The vocal synth swells are quintessential JV1080 fodder, tracked parallel through some delay, with very minimal post prod. For the lead melody I habitually reached for the SH101. Back then I was gating the synth with a tom hit from the TR606, writing the notes with the onboard sequencer, and recording long takes with filter/pitch bend automation. When I revisited the track in 2023, I knew I had to take it out of its “intro” state. There was never a moment where the tune felt like it had landed and grooved, so I wrote one last part with the prophet – the second bassline.

Drums

The percussion was made almost entirely in-the-box, aside from one off beat open hihat I sequence on the MPC2000XL and tracked through reverb. The rest of it was assembled in ableton’s drum rack, with some one shots and the “logic 16 swing 55”. I would typically commit to 2 instances of the groove on each midi sequence, so it would be extra swung – I’m sure I did that with this one. The extra shakers are loops I ran through various effect chains. The final rhythmic element was made with the same organ recording I used for the intro stabs. I time stretched with the “beat” algorithm and looped very short sections to make what sounds like a loopy synth sequence. They mostly sit in the background, but added some depth in the end.

Processing

When I revisited this session I initially thought it sounded too in-the-box. I split up the channels, bussed them into groups – Chords, Melody, Drum/Bass – and summed them together through a hardware mix buss chain: elysia xfilter, neve 542, wes audio dione. I also ran some effect sends parallel to the summing (Alesis midiverb II, Vestax DDG-1), that I then mixed low on the final pre-master bounce. Nik Kozub mastered the track, so there is no master chain on this project file.

Project File (Ableton 11 & 12 compatible)