Under The Hood... "Third Rail"

Track breakdown of "Third Rail" with a download of the Ableton Session, and an ambient version.

Infra has been out for a year. The record came together in fragments from 2017 til late 2023. I switched up my production process a bunch over those years, from working mostly in-the-box to almost entirely outside of it. Analogue summing helped glue the recordings that varied in fidelity and technique. Most of the projects show each stage of the process, like Third Rail.

***btw I restocked Infra tapes on bandcamp - get em while they’re around.

Third Rail

made: 2023 | released: January 2024 | label: Verdicchio Music Publishing

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Synths

I shot myself in the foot from the get go – I recorded the main pad and rhodes melody as an ambient piece, summed together as a live take, without recording each part separately… and no click. You can listen to that full take here. I recorded it one afternoon, thinking it was just a throw away. Then I rediscovered the demo months later, and decided to turn it into a housey thing. The pads were on grid, as it was quantized midi that triggered a patch on the Waldorf Micro Q, but the rhodes wasn’t, so I decided to use those bits as an intro and breakdown, then gated/chopped the pad on it’s own to work with a beat.

Rhythm Section

I built the core of the beat with ableton’s drum rack, sequencing one shots, with very minimal processing (some buss compression/parallel saturation). Both the bassline and additional hihat were made with the SH101, using some noise + filter + EQ, while the vocal blips are chops from a vocal recording I sang through the space echo. I didn’t do much processing in the box on these elements, but I’ve provided the analogue sum I did of the rhythm buss, which likely applied parallel saturation via the Yamaha MT4X 4 track, eq, and buss compression.

Lead Lines

The lead melody was written and recorded through a patch on the Prophet 6 and a bell like patch on the JV1080. Both were tracked through the space echo and Midiverb 2, then compressed together in-the-box to sound like they came from one synth. The atonal lead synth in the second section was the SH101 tracked through a fairfield ring mod, space echo (panned L) and Vestax DDG-1 (panned R), which gave it the ping-pong effect and gritty texture.

Additional Processing

In the project file I included the parallel busses I ran through hardware, which ended up being the final mixdown. So, if you solo those 3 analogue buss channels, you’ll hear the final mix, which can be compared to the in-the-box processing of the other groups. The main benefit of the outboard processing was the extra glue, which drove the groove and made all a bit more exciting.

Project File

lemme know if you’ve got any questions :)

p