Cadd9 (Cycle 66.6)
I wanted to celebrate the birth of OneChord.click by creating my first ambient / drone track using a single chord as inspiration.
It’s a dark, ominous track that has a pulsing bass that threatens to destroy everything!
If you have been following my recent posts, you’ll know that I wrote a small (under 512kB) web page that would generate a single chord a day to inspire me to pick up the guitar.
Well, I recently added the ability to export the chord as a MIDI file, making it easy to import it into your favourite DAW. That gave me the idea to see if I could make a track using only notes from a random chord - Cadd9.
Like an engine coming to life after centuries beneath lava, rock and ocean, this track awakens to bring chaos and fear to the world.
The bass on this track was so intense I reckon most of the kit in my studio needs tightening up after playing this a few times.
Side note: The track was out on Bandcamp way before all other platforms this time round, because of SoundCloud’s release policy of “Any text in the artwork needs to match the information at product level”.
It took SoundCloud support 10 days to reply to my explanation that the letters and numbers were part of a chord diagram, and that removing them would mask the purpose of the track.
Given that the response was basically, tough! I was not willing to wait another 10 or 20 days in order to defend my creative license (I suspected AI image injection played a role here). So I compromised and reluctantly replaced the notes and numbers with drops of blood instead.
A reminder that part of me was lost to bureaucracy (or probably AI) on this occasion.
So if you (buy ❤️) or listen to this track on any other platform than Bandcamp, you might spot the censored cover image and smile knowing you are among the select few who understand the story behind it.
Gear Used
Hardware
- Gibson SG Junior VC
Software
- Ableton Live 12
- SonicCharge Synplant
- Arturia Analog Lab
- Newfangled Audio Generate
- Uhe Zebra Legacy