XXYYXX - Fields

Drums: 
My initial observations for this track are the very distinctly traps style drums. It's the 808 sound arranged into lots of impossibly fast sub-divisions. My favourite examples of this are when they smash snare strokes together at a fast enough frequency to make their own melodic notes. The application of this drum style on this track has more potential than is used, in my opinion. I would have loved to hear big 1 bar fills 'sliding' through 32nd note and 16th note triplet sub-divisions. The off-beat wood-block samples are quiet interesting though and make a good addition. I'm wearing headphones right now so this might be slightly miss-informed but I think there's an alternating pan in the hi hats, right to left.

Lead synth: 
  • Long, elastic sounding pitch slides. 
  • Fairly sharp waveform (somewhere between triangle and square) - Would that be saw-tooth? 
  • Massive frequency range - plays very far apart notes on keyboard. It ranges from the most piercing high pitch notes to lower range blending with bass. 

Vocal samples: 
  • Really incoherent and repetitive - suits the style well though. It's more about the sound of the voice than the words. I hear, "why did he do" and the occasional "What". 
  • There's a lot of pitch shifting evident. The "why did he do" sounds to be shifted up, the "what" is shifted down. The pitch shifting goes to support the idea that the sound of the vocal is more of a melodic tool than a story telling device. With that, the repetition is fine as it is simply a rhythm like any lead synth. 

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