Afro Tech Clay Minimal

124 BPM and very little in the way. The kick is straight and full on every beat; congas, bongos, toms, shakers and rimshots move around it in a 3 3 2 pulse on the sixteenth grid, swung from 4 to 10 percent, on six feels (ritual, savanna, drum, totem, ochre and dune) across eight kits. Full, stripped, top, percussion and hi hat loops are separate folders, and the top loops carry no toms, so they sit on a groove without rolling. The harmony is minor, in twelve progressions: Sahara, Oasis, Mirage, Caravan, Dune, Savanna, Baobab, Namib, Marrakesh, Ochre, Lagos, Sirocco. They move through minor sevenths and ninths, major sevenths, add9 and suspended chords, a minor major seventh and a flat nine dominant, and each has its own scale, from phrygian and dorian to natural and harmonic minor. The tuned loops are four bars long and change chord every bar. Every key has three progressions, so any two parts in the same key and progression stack chord for chord. The key and the progression are in every file name. The melodic loops are kept simple. In the pluck, mallet, stab, synth and chord loops every phrase sits on the eighth note grid, a few notes a bar, repeated and answered the way an afro tech record does it: rising and falling arpeggios, off beat figures, a 3 3 2 tresillo, a held pedal note with the high one moving, an octave leap, a call and its answer. The sounds come in families, each with its own voices. The pluck loops are a banjo, a harp, a dulcimer, a wire string, a plucked synth and funk keys. The mallet loops are a steel drum, a gamelan, a mbira, a xylophone and a music box. The stab loops are an ethnic stab and two brass stabs. The synth loops are three soft leads, with and without echo, and the chord loops a polysynth, a bowed string and a harpsichord. The bass loops use six basses: a round one, a disco bass, an FM bass, an electric bass, a slim one and a deep analogue one, rolling on four to seven notes a bar. Every melodic loop has a little room already in the file, with the tail folded back so it repeats without a gap. The sound sits where the minimal and the afro side of house meet: the stripped down, percussive records Aaron Sevilla, Tom Enzy and Make The Girls Dance, and the catalogues of Keinemusik, Innervisions and Defected. One shots: kicks, snares, claps, closed and open hats, shakers, congas, bongos, rimshots and toms, keys on C4 and C5, bass on C2 and G1, impacts, reverse cymbals, plus riser and downer sweeps. How it was made. Every sound in the pack is synthesised, not sampled: the drums, percussion and effects by our own sound design code, and the plucks, mallets, stabs, synths, chords and bass played note by note on synthesizers, with every echo and every tempo synced movement locked to 124 BPM. No sample libraries and no relicensed recordings, nothing to clear: whatever you build with it is yours. Nothing clips anywhere, every file keeps 3 dB of headroom, and the DC offset stays more than 72 dB down on every file. Levels are balanced the way a record is balanced, not normalised flat: load any four files at unity and they already sound like a mix.