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A SLUDGE GOA MANIFESTO - Psy & Alternative Genre Approach with Swan Meat

Added 2022-07-07 18:00:06 +0000 UTC

A SLUDGE GOA MANIFESTO

Psy & Alternative Genre Approach with Swan Meat

In this Lux Cache tutorial, we invited maximalist club producer & performer Swan Meat to explore her new genre experiments in ‘sludge goa’, her techniques in creating rich movement in software instruments and deconstructing the standout moments from her ‘BLOOD SUPERNOVA’ EP.

This article is available as a Patreon text post or a preferred viewing .pdf document. We ask you kindly to not share Lux Cache content outside of the Patreon, our contributors rely on your donations. All preview sounds/clips mentioned in this tutorial can be found in this accompanying Google Drive folder.

A ‘Swan Meat formatted’ .pdf document, containing Swan Meat’s original words and presentation design of this article, is available as an attachment on the Lux Cache Patreon.

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A lot of people ask me what “sludge goa” and “sludgetrance” mean, which makes sense, because they are silly terminology. Of course. Reba’s being funny online, she’s dabbing on psytrance bros, she’s memeing, she’s playing ironic cover for her actually very deep, undying love for triplet bass and squelchy FM sound effects. If ever one of these thoughts has popped & fizzled shooting-star-like in your mind, you wouldn’t be wrong, though the latter assumption is probably the truest. I really, really love this kind of music.
I hate rules, and I hate capital-G Genres, and over the course of 2020/1, as I found myself burrowing deeper & deeper into the labyrinth of YouTube psy production tutorials, I found myself getting frustrated w/ the obsessions this community seemed to hold: exacting, neurotic obsession with kick-bass alignment (it’s important but do I really want to watch 2 hours of someone shaping their transients in Kick 2?); despite the pretentious strain of the majority of tutorials I wandered into, the usage of the same, trope-y sound effects & patches; the paint-by-numbers, almost modular way these tracks were arranged, etc.
I’d always scattered little goa tropes t/out my music: this song has a little psy outro, so do tracks like SUCKLING and SWAN’S LAMENT. However, when I wrote SLUDGE, I found myself diving headfirst into the ~*harder*~ wing of the psy spectrum, and on my latest EP, BLOOD SUPERNOVA, I decided to take the ideas I was toying with on songs like SLUDGE and PSYCHOPATH to their illogical extreme, particularly on the record’s title track, which I’m going to dive into here. “Ok, but what is sludge goa?!” But since I’ve been put on the spot, I’ll say this much: sludge goa– or sludgetrance– means maintaining fealty to a kit of genre tropes while turning them on their head, taking a usually minimal genre & making it maximal, and toying with arrangement so that each element of your tracks blurs into a thick, gooey sonic sludge. It’s challenging for me to write a production tutorial, because usually I produce in a weird daze, shooting back cans of Monster Energy, pacing around my birdcage apartment, freezing and unfreezing and resampling and flattening because my laptop is an ancient artifact, fragile as a faberge egg (you’ll see I ended up making this track in Live 9, lmao). However, I parsed through my BLOOD SUPERNOVA project file and extracted what are probably the five most important things to “know” about how I make music, and I hope these tips are helpful to you in some way. If they aren’t, I am sorry.

KEEPING YOUR ANCHOR SIMPLE & STEADY

Here’s a screenshot excerpting the main “BASS” group in BLOOD SUPERNOVA :

The full group consists of 12 tracks, but I can chalk that up to disorganization. 10/12 are random, resampled glitches that add a bit of ear candy/color to the bass. For example, on tracks 123/4/6, I’ve made some reverse reverb risers out of pitched down samples from the main bass group; track 123 adds dynamism to this particular break in the track by doubling the main bassline with a pitched up + saturated mirror of its original pattern. The sub mirrors not the bass pattern, but that of the kick, and the sub hits are quite short + sidechained to a silent group of little pops on each beat that I’ve got running throughout the project. Simple enough– the place(s) I really go crazy are:

Automating parameters in my Serum patch
Switching up bass arrangement in surprising, fun ways

Let’s look at #1: AUTOMATING PARAMETERS IN MY SERUM PATCH

Here (shouts out ancient Serum. We love u) is the main bass patch I built for BLOOD SUPERNOVA in Serum, which is the VST I use to make pretty much all my leads and basses (I feel like this is super obvious in my music).

What makes this bass interesting is what I’m doing with automation, which is subtle but impactful:

FM processing on Osc. A to make the main mass of the bass even beefier.
Automating pulse width modulation and effectively “opening up” the Osc. on 4/ at the end of measures, every once in a while, creating movement.
Later in the track, when the triplet section comes in, adjusting the position of Wavetable Osc B to lend movement to an otherwise very simple bass pattern.

Here’s how my FM and PWM automation looks. As you can see, it’s pretty simple. I’ve got two oscillators going, one is a basic square wave that forms the beef of the bass, the other is “Shrats” from Serum’s “digital bank.” This second oscillator gives the bass its squelchy, saturated sound, and b/c of that, the patch doesn’t really need any other fx.

*note: what FM synthesis is doing, here, is having Osc B modulate the pitch of signal A. As such, the bass sounds massive, like I’ve added lots of harmonics to the sound w/out having to use a million different VST effects (at least, this is why I toy with pitch modulation and timbre-shaping as I believe it to be a clean, yet complex sound).

(ง ื▿ ื)ว (ง ื▿ ื)ว (ง ื▿ ื)ว

<< OSC A WARP

(ง ื▿ ื)ว (ง ื▿ ื)ว (ง ื▿ ื)ว

<< OSC B WARP

(ง ื▿ ื)ว (ง ื▿ ื)ว (ง ื▿ ื)ว

As you can see, this automation is constant and steady but very, very subtle. Automating these parameters to too great an extent would create an ugly phase-y effect and we would hate it and cry.

HERE’s how it sounds. The changes produced by automating these parameters are subtle but add so much complexity and (e)motion to my bass.

Here’s how it looks when I adjust the wavetable shape/position of Osc B later on in the track, opening up the sound:

Osc B is effectively moving through a variety of different “shapes,” e.g.:

You can hear this movement very clearly, HERE.

Because I am doing so much processing within the patch, my ultimate effects rack on the Ableton track is really, really basic. Sausage Fattener distortion (literally), couple compressors running, EQ to clean up some of the uglier mids & highs, a filter I turn on & off at various points for dynamism, etc. I’m just using basic Ableton effects, here! I cap it off w/ pro-L (unpictured).

I use a lot of gated fx on this song; I’m creating a gate with the sidechain group and turning on the compressor where the sidechain is controlled by the kick when I want to open up this gate even more. In this way I subtly adjust the extent to which my bass “pumps.”

Inside Serum, in terms of effects, there’s also not a ton going on:

w/ this version of Serum I almost always find myself notching out resonances that seem to occur around 1000Hz. I didn’t do this here, but oftentimes, when I’m applying saturation, I’ll control the intensity of the wet mix w/ an envelope w/ a short attack, fast decay.

And that brings us to #2 : GO CRAZY WITH THE ARRANGEMENT.

BLOOD SUPERNOVA switches between 4 different bass patterns. (Note the kick retains a typical “4 on the floor” pattern.)

These are:

A consistent psy chug
A more complex chug (inspired by Led Zeppelin’s Achilles Last Stand)
A typical psy triplet pattern
An offbeat bass w/4 hits to a measure typical of much club music (donk/happy hardcore/etc.)

It goes without saying that the bass sound I am working with would become grating were I to keep the same pattern going throughout the track. It’s about finding balance, here, and that’s a thing that I am to this day still working on in my arrangements. Whereas in other tracks on the EP I’ve got 4-5 different basses going on, it works because I’ve kept my melody a lot simpler (see: PERFECT CHERRY BLOSSOM). Because I wrote a more intricate melody on BLOOD SUPERNOVA, I knew I had to maintain a steady bass + kick sound. However, in switching up the arrangement at different sections in the track, I keep my momentum going, keep things surprising and open. (*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)*.ﾟ

SLUDGE GOA LEADS

Here are two subsections of my [main] leads group when squished. As you can see, it’s a lot – many of the tiny little audio stubs you see within, however, are patches of resampling/glitches, and the plug-ins I use most to do that are stuff like Glitch1 and Tantra, though I play around with a lot of different effects. /I know, I need to be able to make groups of groups, buy my EP so I can afford a new laptop *blushes*/. Pretty much every lead in this project is built w/ Serum.

It’s fairly plain to see that I have never been one for labeling things. I’ve gotten so used to doing everything on impulse & “in the moment” (first thought best thought, as I think Jack Kerouac said?) I sort of… intuitively know where things go. But I’m gonna be real with you, it’s absolutely hell when someone wants to do a remix and I’ve got to start packing things down.

A different subsection in the track is dedicated to a lead accompaniment which consists of a pitched down and hella processed rave stab from a Dimatik sample pack, white noise stabs, and a tiny “d00t” to add both crunch and space to the “main” lead.

Here’s how this lead accompaniment sounds in isolation.

And here’s the d00t patch:

I processed this one with Ableton’s amp & overdrive plugins + ping pong delay for movement while the Dimatik stabs are a bit flatter and lower in the mix.

For brevity’s sake, I’m going to dive deeper into the “main” leads, with a focus on what’s going on in the lattermost section of BLOOD SUPERNOVA.

The main leads in this particular section, which you can listen to HERE, consist of a myriad of layers:

A violin + piano accompaniment
An assortment of reverse reverb risers made from resampled lead tracks
Trance stabs operating at two different octaves, one low, one high (baritone/soprano)
A synth sitting very wide in the stereo space consisting of a saw osc & a sine osc
Reverb-heavy saw stabs that have a very fast attack, short decay
An obnoxious, constantly moving patch that looks like this: (img 1)
Another obnoxious, constantly automated patch that looks like this: (img 2)

IMAGE 1 ABOVE, IMAGE 2 BELOW

The body of these “moving patches” is simple, & the magic comes in (lol) via automation. W/R/T the patch to the left, I am automating:

A low pass filter on osc A, B, and the noise osc, which I turn on / off throughout the lead pattern.
Attack, hold, and decay time of envelope controlling the sound’s shape.
The extent to which osc A modulates osc B.
(not pictured) the decay time of a series of reverbs processing the lead.

Movement is everything to me.

My goal is always to create melodies that feel like they are constantly shifting, growing, changing, and mutating. Working in a DAW means we’re working w/in a set of limitations; the closest, I think, we can get

to replicating a human feel in a digital production space is to constantly be automating parameters, albeit subtly (VELOCITY TOO!).

IN THE GAME OF SLUDGE, THE DAW IS AN ORCHESTRA

Rather than seeing the DAW as this unshifting, inhuman immutable &c&c piece of software, I like to see it as an orchestra where the chairs are differently arranged. I grew up playing violin, so perhaps this is merely my best point of reference, but this metaphor helps me, immeasurably, when I’m conceiving melodies and arrangements. For example, let’s look at the strings section in a traditional baroque orchestra, which usually carry the bulk of the melody in an orchestral piece.

First violin: The “sopranos” in the strings section. Lion’s share of the melody.
Second violin: Plays a supporting role to the first violins.
Violas/Cello: The “baritones,” middle voices, supporting the 1st & second violins.
(Bass: Self-explanatory)

When writing leads in sludge goa, you have to have each part of your strings section accounted for. It goes without saying that cellos can access notes well into the “soprano” range carried by the first violins; even a classical stringed bass can play rather high and creatively. But for simplicity’s sake, having a patch for each hypothetical “layer” in your DAW orchestra means a fuller, richer sound.

Where the aforementioned “moving leads” might be akin to cello and second violins, here, the patch which provides your first violin sound is the patch which you want to be a bit more static, less stacked, consisting of fewer voices. For example, in BLOOD SUPERNOVA, I’ve produced these short, fast saw wave stabs that carry the melody.

These short, fast stabs are composed of two patches. Number one looks like this:

Patch two is effectively the same patch but dry, with only one voice, thus contrasting with the polyphony and spacious reverb of the first. Together, the lead sounds both wide and tight, and you can listen to that HERE.

The fact of the matter is, there’s no right or wrong way to stack, create, or process leads, and there’s a lot I’m leaving out here, from additional VST effects to the long, arduous process it usually takes for me to find the sound that best fits. With that said, the main principle can be boiled down to: As in an orchestra, ostensibly simple parts combine to form a powerful & coherent whole.

I’m ending on a bit of a cutesy note, but I think the two most distinctive parts of BLOOD SUPERNOVA are:

The use of my own voice
A paean to Bach (at 2:02)

Where the paean was my rework of a Bach fugue played out on my trusty, cheap IMPACT GX61 then quantized (the instrument is a harpsichord from a standard Kontakt library), I found it most difficult, in fact, to record my own voice and fit it into the track. In the first conception of the song, I’d written these lyrics:

Slit neck/fat check/there’s a bounty on his head/bye bye/your head//roguelike/first strike/cold touch/warm knife//closed fist/like a gun/and I’m having so much fun//kill fast/do it rough/blood supernova stuff…

They were corny, sure, but they were epic, and the idea was to heavily process them, pitch them up, and have them sort of bouncing along with the kick a la vocaloid in a S3RL tune. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t make them work. My voice, even with effects processing, was sitting in the mix smack dab where all these floating, tinny melodies sat, and I had to make a choice (“kill my darling”) between voice + synth. I chose the former.

Even so, I wanted to have a vocal part somewhere, so I settled for an outro, where a new lyric:

oh/ I didn’t mean to hurt you/ I’m so clumsy/ are you ok?

Sits on top of the same kick but processed with a low pass filter, as well as some synth bits from earlier in the song, but drenched in reverb (I always use Valhalla’s) and as such pushed further back in the mix. When I create space in the outro, I’m being a bit utilitarian. My tracks are rife w/ stuff, but I want people to play them in a club, so I like to write simple outros that DJs can loop and mess with as they mix into another song.

Because I created this space in the outro, I was able to keep the vocal quite simple, in terms of processing. Here’s what the effects chain looks like (s/o Camel Crush, still the best distortion plug-in of all time, don’t @ me):

Some parallel processing w/ a big reverb, with the autopan effect acting as a gate:

CONCLUSION

This last tip might just be the most important “rule for sludge life”, as it speaks to something I am (admittedly) only now learning to do: subtract.

Recently, a friend of mine tweeted something hilarious. “It’s giving Swan Meat,” she said, RTing an image of an FL Project file that seemed to be labyrinthine and full of effects. Cutting as her observation was *love you Stasya*, the more I grow as a producer, the more I realize that keeping it simple can have better results. I had to make a choice between a vocal and a lead. The old me would have tried to mash both together, resulting in an obscure, foggy mix.

Lately, I’ve been working with a lot of beginner producers, and they have amazing, bombastic, cool ideas, but their biggest pitfall is going overboard: effects chains with a million VSTs, stacks of distortion, unnecessary choruses and phasers and delays.

They’re often surprised when I start removing things and say: actually, you just need this one, clean saw sound, a pinch of distortion, and maybe some parallel processing with reverb. Or when it comes to kicks: pick a good sample, maybe EQ out those super lows, and roll with it. Was it deadmau5 who said you don’t need to tune your kick, just find (or make) a good one? I think so.

Swan Meat is a producer and sound artist based in Germany. Her recent EP, 'BLOOD SUPERNOVA' is out now on all platforms..

You can follow her on Twitter @swan_meat and Instagram @swan.meat

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