Melodic House Lantern

Lantern is written in harmonic minor: the seventh is raised, so the V chord is major and pulls back to the tonic. There are six four-chord progressions, named Afterglow, Horizon, Drift, Nocturne, Lantern, Tide. Each key carries three of them, and in each key every tuned category (bass, stabs, arps, pads and strings) has a loop on each of those three, so the parts you pick in a key and a progression fit chord for chord. The progression is in the file name. The drums are four on the floor with room around it: 10 groove recipes, each with its own kick, clap and hi-hat figure, in eight kits from warm and airy to glassy and metallic. The kick is long and round rather than short and hard. Stabs are electric piano chords in four voicings - close, open, wide and without the root. Arps are a plucked string running the chord in sixteenths, eighths, gates and pairs. The bass rolls between the kick hits, in sixteen characters from a clean sine to bass that talks through a formant filter. Pads and strings loop without a seam by construction. One shots: bass, electric piano and plucks in three registers, kicks in two tones each, snares dry and with a room tail, claps, hats, rides, shakers, crashes, impacts, and riser and downer sweeps. Every sound is synthesised from scratch by our own DSP code, not sampled: nothing to clear, and whatever you build with it is yours. Nothing clips, every file keeps 3 dB of headroom, the DC offset is below -69 dB on every file, and levels are balanced the way a record is balanced, not normalised flat.