After discovering the particular aesthetic of resampled synths at the beginning of the album, but finding that creating new synths for each new track made each new composition a little too big a project, I decided to start a sample pack of my own, called MechSounds.
MechSounds includes the synth presets and projects used to make the included samples. This way, I would have the benefit of faster runway to composition through utilizing samples, but there would still be that full-open-source-stack approach that meant listeners could explore how any part of the track was created.
airstream_crater was also one of my first non-chiptune tracks to only use open-source software as well. In this case, LMMS was the DAW.
As a DAW, LMMS has a fantastic piano roll (complete with pitch slides). However, there are also some challenging limitations elsewhere: at time of writing, there is no support for modern VSTs. Later, I had an experience of renaming a project folder, and it broke all internal connections. I realized then that it wasn’t going to suffice for a professional workflow.
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_software: lmms
_download: airstream_crater.wav
_project-files: airstream_crater-SOURCE.zip
_samples-used: MechSounds
_license: public-domain / cc0