I wanted to give subscribers a more detailed look into how things are made, so here are the way-too-detailed details of what went into this release.

I quickly recorded “Chant Drums” to get a base to work with. I used an old drum loop I had in the iOS app DM-1, run through the “Synth” filter to give it some tone. Using Audiobus I ran that through the Caramel distortion app to add grit. From there it was run into a Big Sky reverb pedal set on “Chorale.” This is what added the chant-like sounds. So that’s the drums.

(Sidenote1: The Strymon Big Sky pedal is absolutely amazing and I cannot recommend it highly enough. My favorite bit of kit by far.)

(Sidenote2: The DM-1 app is the best drum app I've used, but it also seems to be more and more broken in new updates. If you don't have it yet, it might not work for you at all if you get it new. Unfortunate.)

I also used a KORG Volca Bass for the low shrieking sounds. Nothing fancy there, but I did run it through a very old and dying Peavey multi-effects box to add its own distortion and reverb.

Both of these were recorded live into a single track, and that’s what you hear on “Chant Drums.”

For “The Drums of Azathoth” all I added was a run through Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch. PESS is a simple to use but quite deep little program that does just that, stretch sound to extreme lengths. I didn’t go crazy with it, just stretched it from 7 minutes to 12. I also added a few different octave layers.

For “Drums Dissolved” I did the exact same thing in PESS but changed a setting to make the sound much more dispersed, giving it that very “dissolved” feel. You can still hear a little of the original track if you really try, but I wanted to go pretty extreme with this one.

I didn’t make these songs with the intention of them being at all melodic or musical. It was purely an experiment intended as a kind of tutorial/example of just one of the many processes I use to make Dirty Knobs music. I hope you enjoy it.