Tidal Lock
Pumping techno-trance on three chords: arpeggios that change every phrase and climb into a two-bar melody, driven by filters and sidechain.
- Key
- A minor
- Tempo
- 128 BPM
- Length
- 3:42
- Tracks
- 12
- Loudness
- -13.2 LUFS
- True peak
- -1.5 dBTP
The prompt
/wavelength Make a driving techno song with trance arpeggios and a lush bass, using only 2 or 3 chords. Let filters, ducking and pumping carry it forward, vary the arpeggios, and have them lead into a bar or two of real melody.
The track
Tidal Lock uses only three chords, Am, F and G, in one eight-bar phrase that repeats all the way through. With the harmony fixed, the movement comes from the mix: the kick ducks the pad by up to 15 dB, a resonant filter on the bass opens toward every kick, a trance gate fades in on the pad, and long filter sweeps with slower wobbles on top move the arpeggio.
The arpeggio changes its pattern every eight bars: a straight climb, up and down, a pedal note, a 3-3-2 rhythm with gaps, and broken octaves accented in threes against the four-beat bar. In bar six of a phrase it climbs and gets louder, its last note thrown into an echo, then thins out as a two-bar melody takes over on the G chord and lands back on A minor at the next downbeat.
| Time | Section | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 0:01 | Intro | A 909 kick and a pumping supersaw pad. At bar 5 the bass starts galloping under a filter that opens toward every kick, and at bar 9 the arpeggio climbs in almost shut. |
| 0:31 | Groove | Clap, open hats and a clean sub. The arp switches to an up-and-down pattern, then a pedal note, and at bar 23 it climbs for the first time into the two-bar melody. |
| 1:01 | Drive | Sixteenth hats and a ride. A trance gate fades in on the pad, the pumping deepens, and an echo of the arp an octave up follows three sixteenths behind. |
| 1:31 | Breakdown | The beat stops. The pad and long bass notes hold the three chords while the melody comes round twice, and the arp returns with its filter nearly closed. |
| 2:01 | Build | The arp speeds up from eighths to sixteenths to 32nds and climbs in register over a snare roll, while a high-pass filter drains the low end out of the whole mix. Then one beat of silence. |
| 2:16 | Drop | Everything opens: the deepest pumping of the song, the gated pad, the arp moving through its patterns with the echo layer, and the melody doubled an octave up every eight bars. |
| 3:16 | Outro | The melody and echo drop out, the bass filter closes, and the drums and kick fade away under the pad. |
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
Synths (CLAP factory presets by name, plus the built-in synth)
| Track | Patch | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Bass | Altitude: BA Big Vintage (+12 semitones) | A galloping off-beat line through a resonant low-pass that a quarter-note LFO opens toward each kick |
| Sub | Built-in synth: BA Sub | Clean sine under the bass, ducked hard by the kick |
| Pad | Altitude: PD SuperSaw Dream | The three chords, pumped by the kick and chopped by a trance gate in the drive and drop |
| Arp | Altitude: PL Trance Break 1 | Sixteenth-note arpeggio with a new pattern every phrase, climbing into each melody |
| Arp Echo | Altitude: PL Hyper FM | The arp an octave up and three sixteenths late, auto-panned |
| Lead | Altitude: LD Trance Spectrum (+12 semitones) | The two-bar melody over G at the end of a phrase |
| Lead Octave | Altitude: LD JP Support | The melody an octave up in the drop |
Samples and built-ins
| Track | Source | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Kick | Legend 909 kit (built-in sampler) | Four-on-the-floor, and the trigger for all the ducking |
| Drums | Legend 909 kit (built-in sampler) | Clap, closed and open hats, ride, crashes, tom fills |
| Snare Roll | 909 snare played chromatically (built-in sampler) | The build roll, rising in pitch and speed |
| Noise Sweep | White noise through an automated band-pass filter | Sweeps into and out of each section |
| FX | Built-in FX | Risers, impacts, reverse swells, sub drops |
Mix and master
- Faders set from each track's measured loudness, then ridden so the breakdown and build sit about 4 dB under the drop.
- Sidechain ducking from the kick that deepens through the song: pad 6 to 15 dB, bass 6 to 11, sub 14, arp 3 to 6, and the reverb and echo buses too.
- Filter movement: an LFO on the bass cutoff every beat, a two-bar wobble on the arp, a four-bar swell on the pad, and a trance gate faded in and out on the pad.
- Shared effects: a Hall reverb (3.5 s), a dotted-eighth ping-pong Echo thrown on the last note of every climb, and a short Room.
- Build: a master high-pass rises to 600 Hz, then every track and bus cuts to silence for the last beat.
- Master: a glue compressor (1.8:1) and a true-peak limiter at -1.5 dB.
- 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 tidal-lock.wavelength
wavelength unpack tidal-lock.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 tidal-lock.wavelength 15.1 MB · Licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: share and remix it, credit the song.