Today I spent some time trying to recreate a section of a track I really love, “Circuit Reflex” by Niqh and Hypna. This was a task suggested a few weeks ago in class, and I thought it could be a good way for me to understand composition in general more deeply, not just as a listener but as someone engaging with the sound design and structure directly. I thought it’d be a good way to test my mixing skills, improve my critical listening, and also work within some limitations I usually find frustrating.
I approached the project as a kind of reverse-engineering exercise. I loaded up Ableton and started by listening to the track in small sections. My aim wasn’t to copy it perfectly but to understand why it sounds the way it does. I sound-designed mose elements from scratch, but allowed myself to use some clap and kick samples as i was having a hard time synthesising those accurately. I didn’t let myself look at a spectrogram because I wanted to rely entirely on my ears, which I think helped me train my perception of space and layering.
What stood out to me was how carefully the original track is mixed. There’s this really tight glue between layers, but everything still feels wide and precise. The ‘bass’ sound in the section I was working on was tough to get right, as it had specific harmonics distorted, but I think I got relatively close. I kept adjusting things like EQ, compression, lfo shape, envelope length, and transient shaping to get the right balance. There’s a trippy spectral quality in the original that I found really hard to recreate.
One of the main frustrations was that I simply don’t have access to some of the tools I know were used. I got the oppurtunity to speak to Niqh on the phone a few months ago and he told me he uses Michael Norris’ Spectral Filter Bank quite a lot, but that plugin is Mac exclusive and I’m using a Windows laptop. It was a bit disheartening knowing that I couldn’t fully replicate some of the spectral effects I was hearing, but it also forced me to be more inventive with the tools I do have. I ended up using the tilt function in spectral time, experimenting with pitch envelopes, and using grain delays in weird ways to try and imitate some sounds.
Below I’ll include some screenshots of my process of recreating one sound, it’s less than half a second long but it gave me a lot of trouble.




In the end, my version sounds much more stripped back. It’s missing some of the textural complexity and fluid transitions that Niqh and Hypna are so good at. But I still feel like I learned a lot, especially about how much space can be carved out through subtle automation and how important dynamics and restraint is in this kind of music. I think I often try to do too much, and I regularly end up making pieces that are more of a wall of sound than dynamically varied, but this exercise reminded me that placement and relative volume can carry more weight than overdesigning every detail and having them all equally loud.
I’d definitely try this exercise again, it gave me a new appreciation for one of my favourite songs. More than anything, it helped shift my mindset from thinking “I can’t make that it’s above my skill level” to “I can get close and learn something in the process.”
Leave a Reply