It was initially a one-evening thing, but I spent the rest of the weekend messing with it.

An afternoon well spent. Very nice.

I revised it. Try it again.

Again, very nice! I like the added variation in the beat, especially the more dramatic change at about 4:30.

So are you controlling any parameters on the fly, and/or did you chop up and rearrange things in a DAW (I want to say you mentioned that was your usual approach). If the former, I'd really be curious to know what you were manipulating.

If I could offer one bit of criticism, I would like to hear a big sounding synth at some point near the end. Most of the timbres in the piece have a sort of thin, metallic sound, which is fine and they all work together nicely. But I think near the end, having a bigger, nastier timbre (something along the lines of multiple detuned sawtooths or PWM'ed squares would be enough) would just bring a bit more drama to it.

I wasn't really controlling anything. I set it to stop after a certain amount of time, and I set something to a specific value so that the "intro" sound would be audible. Aside from that I just tried it a few times until I got a "take" that I liked.

@Maelstorm said:

If I could offer one bit of criticism, I would like to hear a big sounding synth at some point near the end. Most of the timbres in the piece have a sort of thin, metallic sound, which is fine and they all work together nicely. But I think near the end, having a bigger, nastier timbre (something along the lines of multiple detuned sawtooths or PWM'ed squares would be enough) would just bring a bit more drama to it.

Point taken. I could overdub something, and probably I'll eventually try something along those lines. I'm no purist or anything. But it was just supposed to be something quick and for now I feel like I've messed with it too much already.

Sounds pretty awesome.