This week’s LAYERS brings us Chicago’s own bass heavy production duo CENOB1TE, who specializes in fusing techniques from various sub-genres of EDM to create a sound unto itself. The team consists of Chess and Graham, both of whom have storied musical backgrounds in the Chicago dance scene that span many different genres. Chess was previously one half of the electro-pop duo Moneypenny, while Graham lent his intuition for dubstep production to Chicago mainstays Midnight Conspiracy.
With “Hyperion”, released late last year on Excision’sRottun Recordings imprint, the duo finds success in bringing a fresh drum and bass sound to traditional bass heavy dubstep aesthetics. The synthesis is mind-melting, as the track traverses fast DnB breaks into hard-hitting dub drops. Read below to find out how CENOB1TE’s extensive knowledge and respect for EDM sound design helped them arrive at such a progressive sound.
The song name is “Hyperion” and it came out on Rottun Recordings (Excision’s label) in December and remained in Beatport’s Drum & Bass Top 100 for a month. It is our first ever DnB track. I believe it peaked at number 18. I am not sure if it went any higher since we were in Mexico and weren’t able to check for over a week since we didn’t want to pay for internet. This is our second single on Rottun Recordings, and we have two other singles that are collabs with Midnight Conspiracy available on Ultra Music. In addition to the singles, there are tracks/remixes available for free download through our Soundcloud page. Currently, we are working on an EP and developing a live show outside our DJ sets.
Hyperion is the titan of light from mythology, an irregularly shaped moon of Saturn, and one of the brands of guns in the Borderlands videogame series. We like to think of our song as sounding like an alien space battle, so it is aptly named!
Drums:
The drums on this track are one of our first forays into swing-time programming, which was a huge hassle, but ended up working out well. The drums are a combination of live and synthetic elements blended together, so it is often hard to tell which is which. There is some heavy compression and some big reverb on the main “kit” to help it sound more “live” and “real” along with a good old Amen breakbeat chop as a throwback to the classic drum and bass that helped influence the song.
Sub:
Sub tracks are something you rarely find in non-electronic songs, but are now becoming a necessity for most EDM producers. For those who don’t know, a quick definition: sub refers to the word “subsonic” referring to the frequency range of of about 20Hz to 80Hz, which cannot be produced by most speakers and thus requires a dedicated low-frequency speaker aka a “subwoofer.” Normally, we use pure sine waves for our sub tracks, but this one uses a low pass filtered version of the main bass synth, as well as an almost surgically constructed cut of several gun blasts that creates a stuttering sound and adds low-end content to the gun blasts in the song.
Synths:
There are a fair amount of synthesizers being used in this song, so the first synth track contains several of the outlying synths that don’t make up part of the main bass sound. First, you’ll hear a long, droning pad playing an ascending chord progression that was made in Native Instruments’ Razor. The next sound is a screeching, detuned, panicky synth playing an ascending and descending pattern that follows the gun blasts and provides some high-end content, which was made in Massive. Finally, you’ll hear a very distorted, filtered, detuned saw wave synth known in drum & bass production jargon as a “reese.” Yet again, this is another homage to classic drum & bass, this time made using FM8.
Basses:
This is the meat of the song, the main growling bass synth. Many dubstep and drum & bass producers have been trying to create growling, monster-sounding basses lately (to varying degrees of success), so we developed our own method of making similar sounds. Without giving too much of our secret away, the answer lies in using a vocoder (think Daft Punk vocals) and using your own carrier and modulator signals, in this instance with another very distorted, detuned “reese” synth. We spent quite a bit of time on this synth, and there are several instances with different EQs and distortions on them layered with a few other synths as well. Towards the end of the heavy sections (or “drops”) there are some other bass synths, all from FM8, one of which sounds like a voice saying “EE-YA” that is made using a very simple technique involving a highly resonant low pass filter and a bitcrusher with about 20x downsampling.
If all that sounds like a foreign language to you, don’t worry, it is.
Guns:
This was one of the more fun parts of the track to do. Unfortunately, we haven’t had the time/budget to go record our own gun sounds (something we plan on doing in the future), so this one utilizes sound libraries used in some big-budget Hollywood movies. We cut up lots of different gun loading, cocking and reloading sounds from a number of different guns and combined them in various ways. Toward the beginning, there are some smaller sounds washed in a big reverb, and as the track progresses, a repeating 12th note gunshot filters in, creating tension. As the main part of the song begins, there are three or four different gun sounds EQed and layered to create a huge repeated gunshot that plays against the main bass synth of the song.
Piano:
The orchestral elements of this track are comprised of a piano, some brass instruments and some strings. The piano plays a basic three note part towards the beginning, and then plays an ascending part towards the middle, with the end note of the part being chopped into a repeating glitch that gets layered with a brass part to sort of “mechanize” the human elements of the song.
Brass:
This track was born out of experimentation with effecting brass stabs, including distortion, filtering and reverb. Apparently, Miles Davis was doing these same sort of experiments in the 1960s involving his trumpet played through Marshall guitar amps and wah-wah pedals. The first sound you hear is a distorted trombone sample with a high pass filter sweep with very high resonance. After that, some more distorted stabs with reverbs echo out, and are finally joined by an ominous sounding riff that comprises the main chord progression of the song.
Strings:
The song begins with some pizzicato strings playing a simple riff that is then doubled an octave lower. Another ascending pizzicato string part provides much needed tension by rising farther and farther up, creating a panicky sound often used in horror movies. As the track builds up, the sounds of an orchestra tuning up and playing random ascending scales are added and faded in, creating an enormous crescendo to the “drop” of the song.
Choir:
One of the most amazing aspects of using computers to make music is the access to instruments and recording techniques unavailable to those without thousands of dollars and professional orchestras/choruses at their disposal. We would not have had access to super high-quality choir samples several years ago — now we do, and it sounds simply amazing.
FX:
What begins the song is a series of clicking noises that we created by chopping up a sample of a piece of plastic clicking on a table. We then ran the results through a series of band pass filters and then added a huge reverb. Next are a series of sweeps and impact sounds we created using samples of some Taiko drums, cardboard and pieces of metal colliding. Filtered white noise provides even more tension that is then released by being reversed and time stretched during the orchestral parts, which are layered with more plastic clicking sounds. The final piece of the puzzle is a digital-sounding female voice saying the word “Hyperion,” which is just Chess talking into a Shure SM-58 Microphone and then processed with Audio Ease Speakerphone and Sonic Charge Bitspeek.
Separated, all of these elements don’t sound like they could possibly fit together, but they create something much larger than the sum of their parts; a piece of music with the design elements of a soundscape, the brutality of a metal song, and timeless orchestral elements that tie the whole thing together.
Put it all together and here’s what you get. “Hyperion” by CENOB1TE.
Previously on LAYERS: Daedelus Breaks Down His Collaboration With Austin Peralta In Tribute