halfbyte

To make things easier for me, I'll do the logbook for WeeklyBeats 2026 here and not on my main blog where posting just takes much more dedicated time.

Week one starts of on familiar territory, a chill dubtechno bop leaning slightly towards classic dub with that slightly cliché bassline in the middle.

Process notes

I had the idea for that random blippy delay processing for the stab in the morning. Nothing ground breaking, has been done before, but I think it creates a very nice cushion for the rest of the track to sit on. As always, the processing chains for these dub techno stabs can get a bit extreme and I am grateful to live in a time where it's actually not a problem to drop three long reverbs on three separate chains and still have CPU headroom.

I'm quite fond of the drum break that is inserted every now and then – I'm getting much better at drum processing to get from a very dry drum kit (In this case: Klevgrand's One Shot) to something that actually sounds like an old recording. Drowning everything in delay and reverb helps, of course.

The drums themselves are very subdued by design, I didn't want to spend time on them this time and I think they “just work”.

I was wondering if maybe I've overdone the compression on the main stab a bit, but I do like the resulting sound aesthetics too much to not try it.

I'm not super happy with the sparse lead melody and the reason is that I had a completely different melody in mind, that sounded totally fine in my head but as soon as I had programmed it, it sounded super off and was conflicting harmony wise with the stab in ways even I wasn't comfortable with.

You can find the track here.