Clockwork Partita
A Baroque partita in A minor that runs out of a game cartridge and into a techno club: harpsichord and BBC strings, then NES and Game Boy chips, then a 909 and a 303.
- Key
- A minor
- Tempo
- 126 BPM
- Length
- 3:11
- Tracks
- 18
- Loudness
- -14.0 LUFS
- True peak
- -2.0 dBTP
The prompt
/wavelength Create a classical sounding, retro mixed with techno.
The track
Clockwork Partita is one piece of Baroque music heard three ways. It opens as chamber music: a harpsichord figure, then a violin aria over violas and a walking cello line. The harpsichord crushes down to 8 bits and the same notes move onto emulated NES and Game Boy chips. Then a techno kick, a reverb rumble and a 303 take over while the strings stay clean on top.
Everything comes from one eight-bar cycle, Am Dm G C F Dm E Am, the Baroque sequence down the circle of fifths, and one lyrical theme. The harpsichord’s sixteenth-note figure becomes the Game Boy arp, the violins’ aria becomes the NES lead, and the cello continuo turns into spiccato octaves under the kick.
Two fixes came from listening. The Game Boy arp sounded wrong because its factory preset tunes a second pulse channel a fifth up, so every note played its fifth too; the spectrum showed F# and D# over an E major chord. And the kick in the builds sounded weak because it shared a high-pass sweep that climbed to 1.4 kHz; it now has its own gentle resonant filter with saturation.
| Time | Section | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 0:01 | Prelude | A sampled harpsichord alone, playing the sixteenth-note figure over the eight-bar cycle (Am Dm G C F Dm E Am, down the circle of fifths). |
| 0:16 | Aria | BBC Symphony Orchestra violins sing the theme over held violas and a walking cello line. In the last two bars the harpsichord crushes down to 8 bits. |
| 0:31 | Cartridge | The same music on game chips: the figure on a Game Boy pulse an octave up, the theme on an NES square, an NES triangle bouncing octaves underneath. From bar 25 chip drums join and the theme breaks into eighths. |
| 1:02 | Build | The kick arrives under a resonant high-pass with saturation, the 303 opens, celli play sixteenths on the roots and a 909 snare roll speeds up under a riser. The last two bars lose the kick and the bass. |
| 1:17 | Drop | Techno: four-on-the-floor kick with a reverb rumble behind it, 909 clap and hats, a rolling 303, a sub, the Game Boy figure and the celli in spiccato octaves. The NES theme returns at bar 49. |
| 1:48 | Breakdown | The drums stop. The violins sing the aria again over the strings and harpsichord, the Game Boy far away. |
| 2:03 | Rise | A violin tremolo swells on the top of each build chord while the filtered kick returns and the snare roll builds again. |
| 2:18 | Finale | Everything at once: the violins carry the theme with the NES square an octave below, the harpsichord plays the figure in the club, double basses under it all, a ride on top. |
| 2:49 | Coda | The groove keeps running, the hats thin out, a snare fill, and the A minor hit rings with the strings and a rolled harpsichord chord. |
How an agent sees it
render --png draws it: sections and bars, the loudness contour, a spectrogram of the mix, and every track's notes over its level.Instruments and patches
Orchestra (BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover)
| Track | Patch | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Violins | Strings: Discover - Violins 1 | The theme in the aria, breakdown and finale; tremolo in the rise |
| Violas | Strings: Discover - Violas | Held chords |
| Celli | Strings: Discover - Celli | Continuo in the aria, sixteenths in the builds, spiccato octaves in the drops |
| Basses | Strings: Discover - Basses | Roots under the breakdown and finale |
Chips (SocaLabs, CLAP)
| Track | Patch | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse | RP2A03 (NES): Square Lead | The theme in the cartridge, drop and finale |
| GBArp | PAPU (Game Boy): Plinky Arp, second pulse in unison | The figure an octave up |
| Tri | RP2A03 (NES): Triangle Bass | Octave-bouncing chip bass |
| Chip drums | RP2A03: Triangle Bass, Drumroll, Noise Hat | Kick, snare and hats in the cartridge |
Club and keys
| Track | Source | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Harpsichord | MuseScore General SoundFont, Harpsichord (built-in sampler) | The figure, bitcrushed into the cartridge |
| Kick | Niner (CLAP) | Four-on-the-floor, sidechain trigger, and the source of the reverb rumble |
| Acid | Serum 2: BA - 303 Punchier (+24 semitones) | Rolling off-beat sixteenths on the chord roots |
| Sub | Built-in synth: BA Sub | Sub under the drops |
| Clap, Hats, Snare | Legend 909 kit (built-in sampler) | Clap, open and closed hats, ride, crashes, build rolls |
| FX | Built-in FX | Impacts, risers, reverse swells, sub drops |
Mix and master
- Faders set from each track's measured loudness against per-track targets, then ridden so the breakdown sits about 6 dB under the drops.
- Techno rumble: the kick through a dark reverb, low-passed at 160 Hz, saturated and ducked by the kick itself.
- Sidechain ducking from the kick: sub 10 dB, 303 7, Game Boy arp 5, harpsichord 3.
- The strings and harpsichord stay clean; the processing lives on the chip and club layers.
- Master: EQ, a three-band compressor, a glue compressor, a soft clip and a true-peak limiter at -2 dB, to -14 LUFS.
- Every track has a level-matched built-in fallback, so the song file renders on a computer without these plugins.
- One second of silence before the song for streaming platforms.
Download the song
The whole song in one file: the job Wavelength renders, the script that wrote it, its notes, every revision and the review comments, in the open song format. Render it, change it, or ask your agent to make it its own:
wavelength render clockwork-partita.wavelength
wavelength unpack clockwork-partita.wavelengthTracks whose plugins you don't have play built-in stand-ins, so it renders on any computer; with the same plugins it sounds as you hear it here.
Download clockwork-partita.wavelength 8.2 MB · Licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: share and remix it, credit the song.