Demiurge - Meshuggah Deluge Cover

Bugah

I love meshuggah and wanted to figure out how to write songs in their style using my synthesizers.

I began by looking up this video to figure out what they were doing. "Looping asymmetric guitar riff patterns, which phase against quadruple meter backbeats, and are truncated to realign at hypermetric boundaries" is a one sentence description of their style of composition. I got this description from Metal Music Theory's Introduction to Meshuggah's Rhythmic Style youtube video.

I looked up meshuggah synth covers on youtube and found some inspirational covers by TachiGorgoMusic and Lagrange Point. I thought I'd try my hand at Demiurge on the Deluge! It was surprising to see that everything was split into 4/4 type chunks. Often the guitar pattern was longer than the drum pattern, but would reset the sequence every 4 bars approximately to put everything back in "sync". Great learning experience. It took a very long time to get the synth to sound right. It was hard to get an articulate bass sound that wasn't static when playing a note but wasn't excessively an acid style resonant envelope filter type of sound. I tried using square waves at first but it sounded much too "8-bit" with the distortion. I settled on blending a sine and analog saw wave and using a lot of envelopes on the filter and pwm of each oscillator. Also to give it more variation I assigned some slight random values to the filter cutoff and pwm. Then to give it a different flavor of distortion I blended in a quickly decaying noise signal at the start to try and emulate the "pick attack" of the guitar. Ended up with that 8-string "baaoooowww" behavior while still sounding like a cool synth.