Canopy

A song in the manner of Bonobo: four and a quarter minutes of F minor at 116 BPM, on a swung sixteenth. Two little pentatonic loops, a kalimba and a set of bells, run at lengths that don't fit the bar, so the figure they make together is never quite the same twice. Under them come a strummed harp, a Rhodes, a string machine that breathes with the kick, a round sub bass and a broken beat with a real break chopped beneath it. Over them, pitched vocal chops carry the hook and a breathy flute the melody. It starts at dawn with birds and wind, and ends at night the same way.

The patch plays the whole song itself. Three Arrangers are the score, in sixteen sections. Each part is a group with jacks of its own, so the top level reads as a score: harmony, loops, band, forest and desk. Open any group to see its insides.

Load it: choose 📚 Examples → Canopy in the toolbar and press ▶ Play. It needs no keyboard. The patch file is patches/canopy.json, and its singer is patches/samples/canopy-chops.wav.

Or play it here: press ▶ Play in the corner. The full app is a click away under Open in Soba. The score's three Arrangers and the mixing desk run along the top, with a Dancer at the end of the desk. Below them, left to right: the harmony (three Chord Sequencers and the Rhodes, Strings and Harp they play), the two loops, the band, and the forest.

The song

Left running, the song starts again at dawn.

What it teaches

• Loops that don't fit the bar. The kalimba's Step Sequencer has 12 steps of sixteenths, three beats against the bar's four. The bells' has 10 steps of eighths, five beats. Neither is reset by the bar, so they drift against it and against each other, and the three line up again only every fifteen bars. Bonobo builds tracks such as Cirrus from loops layered this way.
• One scale over every chord. Every loop note is from F minor pentatonic (F, A♭, B♭, C, E♭), and every chord in the song contains or colours those notes. So the loops can land anywhere against the harmony and never clash.
• Three voicings of one progression. Three Chord Sequencers play the same sixteen bars: close for the Rhodes, spread and tied for the strings, and open and strummed for the harp, 70 ms between strings, with Strum dir on Alt so it strokes up one bar and down the next.
• Pitched vocal chops from one file. Twelve sung syllables (ah, oh, ya, hey, mah…) sit in twelve slots of one sample. Two Step Sequencers step together: one plays the note through the Sampler's V/Oct, and the other picks the syllable through Start, where note 60 + k starts at k/12 of the file. Played a few semitones either side of the sung C5, the voice moves up and down the way a chopped vocal does.
• A break under a drum machine. The Chopper plays Soba's own two-bar break in time, 20 BPM faster than it was played, with dice on three of its sixteen steps. A high-pass at 380 Hz takes out its kick, so it adds air and ghost notes without fighting the kit.
• Strings that breathe with the kick. The string machine's two sides each run through a Pump from the Library, struck by the kick's gate, so the pad dips on each kick and swells back.
• Birds from a sine. Each chirp is a sine flicked up nearly an octave by a Slope, plus a random offset that a Sample & Hold takes from noise on every chirp, so no two calls match. The drum sequencer's eighth lane plays them, with ratchets for the trills.

Modules

The rest are the voices' own envelopes, VCAs, filters, LFOs and Mixes.

How it's built

The score

Three Arrangers count the Clock's sixteenths through the same sixteen sections, from Dawn to Ring. Every mixer channel's Level knob is at zero, so an Arranger lane is the fader. Faders rides the Kalimba, Bells, Harp, Rhodes, Strings, Bass, Drums and Break. Cues picks the patterns: A to D for the drums, two bass lines and three kinds of comping. Voices rides the vocal chops, the flute, the wind and the birds, and the room, and its Phrase lane picks which way the chops sing the hook.

A one-bar Fill closes each long section, playing the drums' D pattern: a snare roll that ratchets up to fours, over a run of congas.

The room

The four Mixers are one chain, and every channel's send runs down it into the Room Mixer's reverb. So that Mixer's Return is the whole room's fader. Its knob is at 0, and the Voices Arranger's Room lane plays it, a cue a section, on two-bar S-curves:

Listen at 1:39: the beat stops, and the chords and the flute's first phrase bloom into a room that was barely there a bar before. Then at 2:12 the Peak lands close and dry again. On the canvas the Room Mixer's Return knob shows it, its orange arc opening and closing as the lane moves it.

Harmony

Fm9, D♭maj9, B♭m9 and E♭(add9), two bars each. On the second pass the last four bars become G♭maj7 and Cm7, to turn the progression round. The roots are written low, so the Rhodes' Chord Sequencer's Root output moves the bass from F down to B♭ and back. G♭maj7 under the pentatonic loops makes their C a raised eleventh: one bar of brightness in sixteen.

The voice

[Chops Pitch]     ──> [Sampler V/Oct]     (the note: C5 plays the syllable as sung)
[Syllables Pitch] ──> [Sampler Start]     (note 60 + k starts at k/12: syllable k)
[Chops Gate]      ──> [Logic A]
[Phrase Gate]     ──> [Logic B]
[Logic AND]       ──> [Sampler Gate]      (Gated, so each chop is as long as its notes)
[Phrase Pitch]    ──> [Chops Pattern], [Syllables Pattern]

The singer is nobody's recording. Like Held Vowels' singer, it comes from the small formant synthesizer in tools/voice/, this time chops.py, with the formants raised for a lighter voice. The hook is four bars: oh · ah · ya · ah · oh, then mah · hey · ah-oh, then the first bar again, rising to hey · lah, and an ooh to end. Every note is pentatonic, so it sits over all six chords. The chops go to the echo more than anything else, and their repeats fill the gaps between them.

The phrase

The hook's four bars are the chop sequencers' patterns A to D. A third Step Sequencer in the group, the Phrase, steps once a bar on the Faders Arranger's Bar output and picks which of them plays. Its Pitch goes to both chop sequencers' Pattern input, where 0 to 1 is split into four zones, A to D, so a note picks a pattern: C♯4 (1/12 V) is A, E4 is B, G4 is C and A♯4 is D. A Phrase step with its gate off rests that bar: a Logic module lets the chops' gate through only while the Phrase's is high. Its steps are tied, so its gate holds across the barline and each bar's first chop lands on the beat.

The Phrase has four patterns of its own, sixteen bars each, and the Voices Arranger's Phrase lane picks one a section through the Phrase's own Pattern input. The Phrase's sixteen bars line up with the sections, so each pattern covers a section (Canopy is the second half of the line Dawn starts):

Change the Phrase lane's cue in a section, or a Phrase pattern's steps, to rearrange the chops without touching the hook itself.

Variations

• Line them up. Open the Bells group and set its sequencer to 8 steps: a bar of eighths. The bells now repeat every bar, and they and the kalimba meet every three bars instead of fifteen. Put it back to 10 to hear the drift return.
• Your own chops. Open the Vocal Chops group and load any short vocal phrase into the Sampler. Set Root to the note it was sung on and leave Slices off, and the Syllables sequencer picks twelve places in it.
• One part in the room. Patch a free Voices lane into the Top Mixer's Send 4, turn that knob to 0, and cue the lane up for the Clearing only. With a Glide of 1 s on the lane, the flute steps into the echo and the hall alone while the rest stays where it was.
• Swing harder. Turn the Clock's Swing to 62%. The kit, the loops and the chops all lean back with it. The break keeps its own swing, because it's sliced in eighths, which swing doesn't move.