Scene: Joel Nicholson – Chasten Hill

“With a bit of MIDI to CV control in my Rack, I find the Tracker makes a great sequencer.”

In this track, I have some basic MIDI sequencing going on where the Tracker provides the main clock to my Winter Modular Eloquencer, also synced with Pam’s New Workout and the Pico Trigg. The Eloquencer controls the voice(s), Pam’s does the modulation, and the Trigg mini-sequences the Squarp Rample for drums outside the Tracker. These go through the 2HP Freez for some glitch fun of their own. MIDI channel 1 was set to my Piston Honda Mk III – that’s the only Eurorack voice here. Then there’s a simple descending bassline on Track 4 using a low-pitched synth sample. Track 2 has a simple descending arpeggio on another synth sample, this time with some delay attached.

Track 3 gives you an idea of how I use the Tracker for drums a lot. I pick out a bunch of ‘normal’ and glitchy drum one-shots (here there are 12) and then I just use the Fill command set as Each-1-Random-From/To so that the Tracker builds the pattern for me. I tend to use one of the FX lanes for some Euclidean or Random Roll effects, and here the other is for randomly re-allocating the Instrument selection so that you end up with something changing over time.

The arrangement was originally in 4/4, but for fun, I thought I’d shift it into something closer to 15/8, which is as simple on the Tracker as just shortening the pattern length from 16 to 15. That ended up giving more a slightly more unreliable feeling to the beat, as it’s still very close to “normal” but just catches you out a bit if you try and tap along!

What you hear as the final mix is the Rack output through my ModDuo X for some extra reverb. The Rack and the Tracker both go into my MC707 which I use to mix the channels, add some compression, and limiting. That then goes into Ableton and I just hit “record”. I add some mastering touches inside Ableton, but nothing too flash or clean – I like to keep things a bit dirty

Get the project of Joel Nicholson – Chasten Hill here.

Joel has been making electronic music on and off over the last 20 years. But has only moved into hardware since lockdown. He’s based in Southampton, UK – home of Craig David and the Titanic. He describes his influences as being a combination of avant-garde classical composers like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, and the late 90s Braindance of artists like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Autechre, and Kid606. He enjoys combining gentle melodies with more frenetic beats – too noisy to be truly ambient, too harmonious to be truly glitch.

Joel prefers making his signature psychedelic visuals to him or his hardware appearing in videos, but we’ve reliably informed the picture on his YouTube channel is a pretty good likeness.