A Little Bit of Swing.
I’d been working on a track for a while – it was sort of a Pendulum-ish drum-n-bass song, with my usual indian influences.
It wasn’t gelling, though. It sounded a bit pedestrian and derivative, and the army-of-dhols in the intro and fill didn’t match the 2-step beat well.
Sort of by random poking I re-quantized the drum lines with a heavy swung 8th-note groove – nearly an 8th-triplet swing. The end result is almost show-tune-ish.
This worked surprisingly well. The track had groove and the dhols matched the beat nearly perfectly, too. The track was radically different, though – it didn’t have the frentic energy of the original 2-step beat, but I think the tradeoff was worthwhile.
A few tweaks are still needed – some of the sounds don’t quite match up yet and the vocal processing isn’t quite right – but it’s certainly gone from a predictable track to one that’s got a little more originality.
This makes me happy.
