st@ck_0verflw: eight layers, 128 bars
st@ck_0verflw is a Goa-inspired acid trance track at 117 BPM in F# minor, written and performed as code in Strudel. It runs 128 bars, about 4 minutes 23 seconds. It is not a raga piece. Goa trance is the reference here.
The title is the code
The piece is a stack of eight layers: kick, bass, hats, drone, acid sequence, main lead, secondary lead and transition effects. In Strudel that is one line, stack(kick, bass, hats, drone, acid, mainLead, secondaryLead, transitionFX). The climax is the moment all eight are playing at once. The outro then breaks into a stuck-record glitch, one hit doubling to two, four, eight, and stops. The stack overflows.
One job per layer
Goa trance keeps the bass and the lead apart, so each layer has a single role.
- Kick: a TR-909 four on the floor. The bass, acid line and main lead are sidechained to it, so the pump is real ducking rather than a volume trick.
- Bass: a rolling F# minor riff with the low end filtered at 700 Hz and lightly distorted. It carries the groove and nothing else.
- Hats: TR-808 hats in sixteenths, panned with a slow sine, silent through the intro, breakdown and outro.
- Drone: a sine on F# that moves to C# for the last four bars of every sixteen, its filter opening and closing over 12 bars. It runs almost the whole track and is the floor under the breakdown.
- Acid sequence: a sawtooth 303-style line with the cutoff, resonance, delay feedback, panning and note length all moving on different clocks, so it never repeats exactly. A real octave jump lands for four bars in every sixteen.
- Main lead: eight distinct melodic phrases, one per section, so the tune develops instead of looping.
- Secondary lead: a sparse answering line that enters at bar 41 and answers the main lead rather than doubling it.
- Transition effects: brown noise: a hit before the main lead enters, a four-bar filtered riser into the climax, and another hit before the final climax.
The arc
| Bars | Section |
|---|---|
| 1-16 | Intro: kick, bass and drone only |
| 17-32 | Groove: hats and acid sequence enter |
| 33-48 | Theme A and B: the main lead enters at 33, the second lead at 41 |
| 49-64 | Breakdown: no kick, bass or acid line; a wide, sparse lead over the drone |
| 65-80 | Climax A and B: everything back, both leads |
| 81-96 | Variation A and B: the lead lifts an octave, then syncopates |
| 97-112 | Final climax: all eight layers |
| 113-128 | Outro: strip-down, the stuck-record glitch, silence |
Where the notes come from
Everything sits in F# minor. The bass is an eight-step riff on scale degrees, [0,12] 0 6 [0,12] 5 0 4 0, with the root doubled an octave up on the first and fourth steps. The acid line and the leads are also written as scale degrees rather than fixed notes. The pitch material is minor-scale and raga-informed, but the structure, the layering and the sidechain are trance.
The song is on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music and Amazon Music. It is my first coded track since November 2025.