The pipa (琵琶) is a traditional Chinese plucked string instrument with a pear-shaped wooden body and a varying number of frets (typically 24–30). Known for its expressive range and dynamic techniques—such as bending, vibrato, and rapid strumming—the pipa has been a prominent instrument in Chinese music for over 2,000 years. Originating from Central Asia, it became popular in China during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and later evolved into its modern form during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE). The pipa is often used in solo performances, ensembles, and Chinese opera.
Choxolate is one of my musical projects; in this case, the aim is simplicity and creative freedom. Each track is an experiment, using the project as a playground to explore new sounds, instruments, and unconventional composition approaches—whether writing an album during a flight or learning a new instrument and immediately using every skill gained to shape the next album’s riffs and motifs.
After spending time recording “Qin Verb” and exploring the full range of the guqin’s expressive possibilities, I have begun practicing the pipa. Due to its similarities with the guitar, the pipa offers a broader world of musical options—especially since this is my first time playing it. My background as a guitarist gives me a foundational understanding of left- and right-hand coordination, as well as hand shapes that transfer well to this instrument. Though the pipa has only four strings (tuned A-D-E-A from low to high), my years of experience with the guitar and ukulele make it easier to quickly improvise, play riffs, and explore the instrument’s harmonic possibilities in my own way.
Track 1: First Exploration
The opening track (Destello Dream) features the very first arpeggio/riff I played upon picking up the pipa. The recording began with this raw pipa arpeggio, later layered with a rhythmic foundation. As with my previous guqin-centered album, the beat combines a steady kick and drum pattern with a delayed, wobbling bass line—carefully placed to create a dragging, off-kilter groove. Figure 1 illustrates the MIDI roll: red notes represent the drum pattern, while brown denotes the bass line.
In the second section, 808s introduce another late, warped bass line, paired with simple pipa octave motifs. These motifs are played by pressing only the outer strings (both tuned to A, an octave apart), making them accessible yet resonant. The track also incorporates brief guitar-picked phrases, emulating the pipa’s traditional rapid strumming technique. These moments are processed through Logic’s Delay Designer, starting with the “Basic Feedback Rhythm” preset for textured echoes. Though a few Spanish vocal phrases punctuate the initial beat, the piece retains deliberate simplicity—leaving space for the more complex explorations that unfold later in the album.
Figure 1. Drum and bass MIDI roll of the first beat in the opening track of Ray Pipa.
Track 2: Contemplative Asymmetry
This second track (Static Ride) continues the theme of simplicity, built around a repeating five-beat arpeggio figure. The swing emerges subtly through the drum machine’s hi-hat and the deliberately off-grid snare—tiny imperfections that blur the line between mechanical precision and human looseness. A backdrop of Logic’s synth pads (“Night of Avalon” layered with “Cosmic Dust” and “Cosmos”) sustains the harmonic atmosphere, while sparse percussion accentuates the hi-hat’s sway, deepening the groove of the odd-metered structure.
The core arpeggio cycles persistently, creating a meditative anchor. This repetition leans into minimalism, inviting contemplation before the album’s later, more intricate explorations. The track’s restraint serves as a deliberate palate-cleanser—a breath between complexities.
Track 3: Demanding Textures
The third track marks a shift in complexity, opening with a riff that incorporates string bends, slides, and more technically demanding chords. This initial motif is underpinned by a wobbling bass line—first played on a MIDI controller, then manually adjusted to lock into the beat’s idiosyncratic groove. These edits were guided purely by instinct, reflecting my subjective interpretation of the piece’s needs at the time (see Figure 2 for the MIDI roll visualization).
The track’s second section introduces a punchy, swung rhythm built around Logic’s Fizzy Sweeper EDM bass preset, accented by live-recorded tambourine, guiro, and shakers. Here, the pipa riff evolves, signaling a new phase in the composition.
This transitions into the final section: a heavy, rock-inspired line that mimics the aggressive single-string articulation of metal guitar, while retaining the track’s signature delayed, dragging feel. The riff is doubled by synth basses, while fast-picked harmonic embellishments—drenched in a long hall reverb—add spatial contrast to the high-end frequencies. True to the album’s aesthetic, the track concludes with recycled motifs from earlier sections, creating a cyclical sense of cohesion.
Figure 2. Bass MIDI roll of the first wonky line accompanying the pipa at the start of Static Ride
Track 4: Folk Rhythms & Electronic Textures
The fourth track (Luz Flicker) draws inspiration from the three-beat patterns of Colombian folk traditions like bambucos and pasillos. The rhythm section is built around organic percussion—guiro, tambourine, layered shakers, and deep bombos—creating a tactile, earthy foundation.
The electronic elements are crafted entirely from Logic Pro X’s synth gallery:
Low-end depth: “Alphabet City Boundless Bass” and “Cloud Bass” presets anchor the track with warm, resonant undertones.
High-end sparkle: “Shimmering Harmonics” and “Metallic Fireflies” add ethereal glimmers, contrasting with the pipa’s acoustic timbre.
The closing section reinvents the three-beat pattern with Guitar Rig’s “Funky Duck” preset, imparting a tremolo-like pulse to the percussion. Meanwhile, Sketch Cassette II’s “Wacky” preset warps the pipa’s tone, blending folk roots with surreal electronic processing for a hallucinatory fadeout.
Track 5: Melancholic Swing
The track (Cabo Low) opens with a sparse pipa octave motif, soon mirrored by the bass—an electric ukulele bass, chosen for its punchy, hip-hop-ready tone. The swing emerges subtly, with hi-hats replaced by recorded shakers and tambourine, hovering at a 55–60% swing ratio for an almost subliminal groove. As the arrangement builds, fast-picked pipa motifs stretch into long, lyrical lines, floating above a shifting low end that mutates into a funk-inspired bass riff.
During recording, I improvised Spanish vocal melodies over this foundation, shaping a chorus that leans into the track’s inherent melancholy. The instrumental elements then cycle back, creating continuity while leaving space for the track’s emotional core: a spoken-word passage by Bilbao-based poet and painter Tane Hermosa, a longtime collaborator from my academic years in the UK. Her timbre, cadence, and the thematic weight of her poetry resonated perfectly with the track’s mood—a serendipitous alignment that led me to incorporate her recorded words as the final layer of narrative depth.
Track 6: Odd-Time Tension
This track (Lynda Baila) marks a return to irregular meters, unfolding over a driving seven-beat framework. The pipa functions as a rhythmic guitar, toggling between two chords (Bm– C#m, see Figure 3) while a taut, precision-cut bass line—devoid of earlier “wonky” looseness—carves out deliberate silences. Together, joined by a lead melody, they establish a minimalist i-ii progression that gradually accumulates layers:
A high-register pipa motif, warped through Guitar Rig’s “Moving Harmonics” preset for metallic shimmer.
In the second section, the harmony remains static, but the pipa riff mutates, drenched in experimental reverb and processed through Guitar Rig’s “Headshave Holiday” for jagged textures.
The climax introduces stark contrasts when the bass erupts into sustained, distorted notes via FabFilter’s “Big Moddy Bass” (Twin 3). The pipa’s final motif is fed through Guitar Rig’s “Hit Me on the Filterbank”, its LFO-filtered oscillations lending a synthetic, pulsating edge. Above this chaos, sparse piano notes—drowned in long reverb—trace an off-kilter melody (Figure 4), their acoustic fragility clashing with the electronic abrasion.
Figure 3. See on top the lead melody in the introduction of the song Lynda Baila and its corresponding bass line at the bottom.
Figure 4. Soft Piano played during the climax section of the song Lynda Baila.
Track 7: Contemplative Loops
The seventh track (Freeze Fuerzo), unfolds as a hypnotic meditation built on cyclical pipa patterns. A foundation of simple, repetitive strumming—accompanied by a sparse bass line oscillating between root notes C and A—establishes the core loop. With each repetition, the texture evolves through layered synths from Spectrasonics Trillian, subtly shifting the harmonic landscape.
By the third iteration, the pipa introduces a barre chord at the eighth fret (F-C-Bb-F), its notes plucked individually in descending triplets. This motif becomes its own loop, gradually enriched with higher harmonies using the same fret position. The rhythm section grows more pronounced as shakers, tambourine, and guiro accents interlock with increasingly assertive bass synthesizers.
Through this layering of loops—each pass adding nuance while retaining the original’s simplicity—the track cultivates a trance-like atmosphere. The result is a contemplative, self-referential soundscape where minimal elements coalesce into something greater than their parts.
Track 8: Stormy Descents
The eighth track (For Sol), opens with the haunting “Thunder and Rain” pad from Spitfire Audio’s LABS Organic Textures, setting an immersive, weather-beaten atmosphere. A guitaristic descending motif emerges—initially a unison D (5th fret on the thickest string paired with the open D string)—before sliding down into a melancholic Dm-C-Bb-A progression.
As the arrangement builds a kick drum enters, punctuated by short, punchy bass notes from Trillian’s “French Square” preset. Then, a snare and rapid shakers tighten the rhythm, creating a sense of forward motion.
The track then pivots: A fast bass line drives a Gm-F-Em-D progression (Figure 5), while the pipa accents each change with single strikes. A high-register pipa melody—processed with pitch shifters, delays, and Guitar Rig’s Rhythmic Rotator—floats above, later morphing into a distorted, fast-picked frenzy via the “VS Strangechop Two” preset.
At 1’15”, the pace slows: A filtered Spanish vocal melody intertwines with a simple pipa arpeggio, offering a moment of respite. The track culminates by revisiting earlier motifs, though with a surprise modulation to F major and a subtle rhythmic shift to signal closure—a fleeting glimpse of resolution amid the storm.
Figure 5. Bass line of the second section of the song For Sol.
Track 9: Odd-Time Fractures
The ninth track leans into the tension of nine-beat measures, drawing rhythmic inspiration from the unconventional grooves of projects like Sarype and Crabyata. A jagged, guitar-inspired pipa riff anchors the opening section, interlocking with a bass line that accentuates the meter’s off-kilter pulse (see Figure 6 for notation). The bass texture merges two Logic Pro X synth presets:
“Deep Sub Bass for subterranean weight” and “Auten Road Interaction Bass for mid-range grit”.
The track’s midpoint fractures into abstraction: A distorted, gated vocal line—processed through Audiomodern’s Gatelab—blurs into the periphery. Then, three improvised pipa solos are warped with Audiomodern’s Filterstep and Sixth Sample’s Deelay, their fragments scattered like glitches across the rhythm.
At 1’20”, the chaos recedes: A high-register pipa line, drenched in reverb and pedal effects, floats momentarily before the initial riff resurfaces. As with prior tracks, closure arrives through contrast as a brief, harmonically distinct pipa passage—unrelated to the main motifs—severs the loop, leaving the listener liberated.
Track 10: Intimate Epilogue
The album’s final track strips away the production techniques that defined earlier compositions—particularly the doubled pipa recordings panned hard left and right—to reveal something far more vulnerable. Here, a solitary pipa arpeggio resonates at the center of the mix, its monophonic texture creating an almost confessional intimacy. This bare foundation supports a tender vocal melody that drifts between verse and chorus, the latter blooming with a melancholic warmth that feels both fragile and cathartic. The vocal line later reappears as a ghostly brass echo, rendered through LABS’ Trumpet Fields kit using the “Coast Is Clear 1” preset, its muted tones hovering like a distant memory.
When the verse returns, it carries new weight: the Waves Elements “Slick Bass” preset threads through the low end with understated precision, while the chorus swells anew with the square-wave thrust of Elements’ “Betawat (MW)”—a synthetic counterpoint to the organic pipa and voice. The track’s final moments pivot unexpectedly toward resolution, as major chords emerge like sunlight through cracks. Textural details blur this transition—the metallic whisper of a fretboard scrape, the granular rasp of a drumstick drawn across a guiro’s ridges—all stretched into abstraction by delay and filtering. These gestures, half-erased yet vivid, dissolve the album’s journey into silence.
References
Gao, Hong. Chinese Music and Musical Instruments. Shanghai Press, 2011.