Jorge Savoretti

CUBAN DREAMS

I always wondered about FM synthesis, and how was it properly done, so I started reading about it and how it works. I’ve always liked records that have this typical Yamaha DX7 sound on them, so I got FM8 and started experimenting with it. The patches are made from scratch and only with sine modulation. This track was meant to be an interlude, so maybe two minutes was the maximum duration that I planned for it, but then I started jamming with the drums and using a Soundtoys delay as an external effect, trying to give a tape style to it, and I loved the way it came out. When I played it to my girlfriend she said it was boring and I shouldn’t put it on the album, so we had this funny argument because I loved the hypnotic, spacey feel of it. Obviously it came out and it’s also one of my favourites on this album. To me it works great as a ‘middle-path’ track.

REVOLUTION

‘Revolution’ is the result of many influences from the 90s and early 2000s. Some Chicago house mixed with French touch filter house and somehow dubby pads. This track is probably the oldest of the album and wasn’t especially produced for it but fitted in. The bassline, which is the cornerstone of this track, is a legato style one (to make it as funky as possible) and was made with the ARP 2600. I paid special attention to the kick drum rolls on this one, because with the arrangement being so hypnotic and repetitive with those dubby chords, the rolls give the listener that refreshing feel to keep it moving. The vocals were originally all snippets from Daft Punk’s ‘Revolution 909’ but then I thought it was too much to sample Daft Punk so blatantly, so I decided to chop some other random sample and left the “revolution” sample only twice in the whole track, very deep in the mixdown.

SIMPLE ACID

This one is also a reflection of the Chicago house influences but this time more DBX bleepy-oriented sounds. This track was one of the ‘easiest’ to make. I started with a 303 acid arpeggio, then worked on a typical 808/909 groove, then a mega sub bassline and finally added the bleep, which was made with Operator – yes, Ableton Live Operator. Once I had a test loop ready then I starting jamming out of it and made a six-minute edit out of the ten-minute original jam because the bleep was getting obnoxious and boring to me. It’s all about toms and bleeps here.

Mixing down is always a pain in the ass for me because I like my mixdowns to be perfect, so I mixed every track on the album like ten times – for real. In my tracks I always make a rough mix in Live, which is the DAW where I record the tracks. Then I export four subgroups to Logic X – kick, bass, drums and others – and make a final mixdown in there. I fine tune everything with a little bit of compression, EQing and colouring with aural exciters.

DOWN THE WIRES

This one is a plain power chord square played while I was testing the arpeggio feature of Spectrasonics Omnisphere, then I added a lot of convolution reverb to it from Altiverb. Casually while I was playing and recording the arp I also had some noise from the misconnected ground cable of my turntable. I felt it worked with the test it so I also started touching the end of the cable and filtering the sound through my Allen & Heath mixer. This was a really stupid experiment but I think it works as an interlude and I like the fact that you can feel the raw sound of electricity on it, which is so important in the music we like.

SONG FOR KONAMITA

Even though I see this as a DJ-oriented album featuring lot of tools with different ‘colours’ that have a common thread, what would an album be without a love song? This tune is dedicated to my loving girlfriend (almost wife) but somehow also to family, friends and loved ones. Music is all about the experiences you had and have in life, and sometimes techno isn’t the best friend of emotions, so I made this track as a tribute to her, for helping me get through difficult situations and also sharing the nice moments.

TRISKELION

I picked this as the title track of the album because of the meaning of the word ‘triskelion’, which represents the holy trinity of past, present and future. This track reflects the mixture of all my past influences, right here in the present but being probably the most futuristic tune of the album. It’s actually made out of the some project as ‘La Isla’, but it obviously has a different drum programming with a straight 4/4 groove and the tribal thingy is absent this time. The pad is the original melody of the track with the Psychodelay on it and filtered – it’s so processed that it’s almost unrecognisable. Then I added some spacey sounds all over, jammed, edited from 14 minutes to seven minutes and ‘Triskelion’ was ready to go! Another of my favourites – I’ve sure you’ll hear more tracks like this from me in the near future.

AURORA BOREALIS

This is also an old track that wasn’t meant to be for the album but it ended up being the perfect closing track. I’m a big fan of ambient and downtempo music, and even though you’ll see more DJ-oriented productions from me, I have a lot of stuff like this in the vaults which I usually never finish but I like to make. This one was made on a sunny morning. I used to live in a super noisy neighbourhood so I had my morning cup of tea and tried to counterbalance all that noise by making this ambient track. All the pads and dubby sounds are made with my own patches from Omnisphere except a Roland Jupiter pad.

Jorge Savoretti’s Triskelion is out now on Savor Music. Find him on Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud.