All things drone

[Starthief]

One thing about passive LPGs is it takes a certain minimum amount of voltage to open them. That can mess with slow fades or trying to open them just a little. (That saitd, DPLPG still sounds better than some active LPGs I’ve owned )

[eblomquist]

This is very interesting, as I’ve been dreaming about mutes! The main concern is that opening the VCAs requires 8-10v, whereas the 16n only outputs 5v peak…

Hmmm…

[_VM]

I’ve got one of these. Initially I had no interest in exploring the voltage-sag input, thought it was useless, etc. Then I fed it some attenuated LFOs, and my god…whole new instrument.

The filter is also quite weird, it will completely nuke all your low-end very early on in the response if you’re not careful.

[cour13r5]

thanks for the tips! i really like the idea of a stand-alone (or mostly stand-alone) piece like this. simple & seems sturdy? i could tell from the demos that it would potentially be tricky to dial in for more subtle shifts, but still looks like a lot of fun.

[RMBLRX]

Drone was the thing that really propelled me into music-making (for good or ill) and greatly expanded my sense for what could be accomplished in the field of audio. I’ve long been keen on the history and music of punk, but I feel drone (or at least my experience of drone) had a much more pronounced effect in opening up the world of music for a nonmusician with more esoteric and sometimes transgressive sonic leanings.

What really tipped me over the edge was this track, by Pocahaunted (might take a bit to load, the track is located here):

And I’ve followed Robedoor and Daughters of the Sun for about as long. As far as the former, this is what really grabbed me among their work:

Brave Mysteries has some interesting drone releases, like this:

Lichens is also an interesting drone project that grabbed me many years back and was an early project of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, who’s been pretty heavy into modular synthesis, of late.

For my part, I gravitated toward drums, the occasional woodwind, a variety of free-reed instruments, and nonverbal vocalizations (chiefly throatsinging of a predominantly Tuvan character), but electronics were always an ever an increasingly prominent staple of the process: first, with improvised devices; then, pedals, proper microphones, and cheap combo amps; then finally–perhaps owed somewhat to some of the quirkier electronic devices on hand that worked their way in–proper synths. It was always nice to have competent musicians on hand to bring guitar or more virtuosity to the drumming, but otherwise I’ve really enjoyed the improvisational sonic exploration to which the more droney mode of music-making lends itself.

[jbowman]

The long, lovely envelopes of the Lyra 8, through the integral dual delay, are great for drones. The “organismic” nature of this instrument makes for an interesting playing experience with drones: self-contained, contemplative, like the music is folding in on itself. I have just made an album of drones all on the Lyra 8 so this topic is on my mind

Kali Malone’s latest album using organs for drones is great (The Sacrificial Code).

edit - added links

[RMBLRX]

I’ve been meaning to pick up the Lyra8-FX. Considering most of my drone work typically involves distortion and delay, at least on vocals, it seemed a natural fit.

[slowsounds]

I find the use of the term more and more touchy for me in a way… for a long time I suppose I could have been or still be describes as someone primarily making “drones”, although I never sit down with that as being the sole intention, just was the form work would usually take. increasingly though the term has become more and more useless than it was to begin with as anything that is kinda sloppy or boring or endlessly noodling around with no structure seems to get justified these days as “oh its a drone”. a drone doen’t mean something wandering aimlessly, not does it have to be something that is necessarily easy to listen to. but before I get too far in on a rant, a long list of some favorites… First and foremost everything by Eliane Radigue is essential and wonderful, including her newer acoustic pieces. My favorite might be Psi 847 aside from Songs of Milarepa, but that one is a bit of an outlier with Robert Ashley’s great reading over it. Trilogie De La Mort or Adnos are great introductions to her work I think.

Lucier is someone who again isn’t say a “drone” person, but uses them often to great effect, and is just a compositional genius in general.

My favorite Palestine recording

One of Niblock’s finest with Jim O Rourke on the hurdy gurdy

Obligatory La Monte thing, but we at least get Tony Conrad and Angus Maclise in there too…

Yoshi Wada, another who I can recommend everything, favorites being Rise And Fall… which this comes off of and Earth Horns

A good starting point for CC Hennix. We are really lucky that both older work of hers like this, as well as her newer work is being made available now.

For those who have also been into the alternate/micro tunings thing there are lots of examples on here, including Arkbro, who are particularly interested in just and alternate intonation - Tony Conrad, Hennix, Flynt…

Also highly recommend the new album of Fulman in duo w/Okkyung Lee!

Others that may or may not have come up before but maybe warrant a seconding- Tony Conrad, Jim O Rourke’s Long Night, pretty much all of what Kevin Drumm is doing these days, Born Of Six (another Hennix group), Craig Kupka’s record Crystals, Catherine Lamb, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, Giusto Pio’s Motore Immobile, Folke Raabe, might be a little on the edge but lots of sustained pitches in Harley Gaber’s Winds Rise In The North, Herman Nitsch’s harmonium and organ recordings can be a bit of a mixed bag but there are some gems in there, Mary Jane Leach, JLIAT, Minoru Sato, Pythagoron, Roberto Donnini, Richard Lainhart, Terry Fox… on and on…

[ansgaria]

Most of what I could contribute with has already been mentioned. Drumm, Radigue, O’Rourke, Rabe, Niblock, Lucier, etc. “Music on a long thin wire” is just fantastic. One of my absolute favourites.
What slowsounds says resonates quite heavily. I seem to gravitate towards anything that evolves slowly, anything that doesn’t need to hurry, doesn’t need to go anywhere very quickly. Drone, films of, say, Tarkovsky and Bergman, monolithic paintings of few colour nuances but very rich in texture. I don’t need to call it drone, just anything that operates in that area of experiencing time. Raga music also has this.
I think a more concrete talk about what drone is and isn’t sounds both interesting and infuriatingly boring.

[vals]

you can check these writings (pdf):

la monte young & marian zazeela - Selected Writings
la monte young - Notes on The Theatre of Eternal Music

straebel - Technological implications of Phill Niblock’s drone music

[pelang]

accustic drone maschine

[kbit]

A lot to say that has already been touched on by others, so I’ll add this - listening to Yellow Swans At All Ends really loud in my bedroom as a teenager was a defining musical moment for me. I had listened to droney music before but the psychological effects of that recording in particular was a revelation. I felt like I was on drugs, not euphoric at all but deeply shifted somehow. Eventually that led me to Going Places, an album I could ramble about forever… suffice to say both records occupy a unique place for me amongst the mass of music that could be considered drone.

---

As far as technical things are concerned, I think one of the most important things is being able to freely tune whatever frequencies are used. There’s so much to explore in the realm outside standard tuning conventions.

[eblomquist]

Not specific to any artist or traditional, but I have been drawn to music with repetitive trance-inducing aspects for most of my life…

I find these deeply spiritual even though often these musics are not overtly connected with any particular “religious” tradition…

Spiritual to me is more about the effect whereas religious is more about the surrounding belief system…

[ansgaria]

Speaking of drones, I just got the Impo function generator last week. Bought it for the fm modulation input. Pairs well with my other function generator. Lovely tones. I’m about to try and put in various other sources.

[shh]

Thanks

I have used Elements for feedback and self-patching and it can be really nice! I used it in another piece that I may or may not finish editing and upload (not sure if I like it). The mannequins modules also tend to be really interesting for self-patching–you can get some really interesting drone-y stuff with the 3 Sisters. The Piston Honda can also do some really interesting stuff with self-patching because of how it can be used as a sound processor.

[jbushnell]

both interesting and infuriatingly boring

Drone in a nutshell

[jbushnell]

Great thread, thanks to @fbusche for setting it up. I just released an EP of drone-ish / drone-adjacent stuff today and @cour13r5 asked me to talk about the process here (so thanks to them as well).

I’m a big fan of AudioMulch as drone generation software–I’ve used it for basically two decades now and it still has a remarkable amount of versatility even though it’s beginning to show signs of age (and given that it’s 32-bit I don’t think it’ll work on any machine that has upgraded to Catalina). With this particular collaboration (Doubtful Forms, with David Wade Evans), Dave set up a bunch of Volca units and set them to produce tones with relatively long sustain, which I then fed into a bunch of delay and looper units webbed together in AudioMulch. I could grab fragments of whatever he was playing on the synths and then loop them on the fly, creating a wall of sound effect–turning it from drone-adjacent analog textures into something that’s more “drone proper.” And once that was going, I could process the resulting torrent of sound further with additional plug-in units, or fade loops in and out, all while still allowing a “dry” channel for Dave’s improvisation to come through into the mix. I can post a screenshot network of the Mulch contraptions if anyone is interested.

[fbusche]

Please do post a screenshot. I am very intrigued.

[jbushnell]

Here’s an AudioMulch rig I used for that EP. I have a lot of different ones but this should give you an idea.

SoundIn is Dave–if you trace the path you can see it drops through a simple gain and EQ, then out through the first channel in a mixer (it hits OrilRiver on the way out, which is a bit of reverb). But it also shoots off to the left and goes into a maze of delay units (the left channel and right channel take different paths for some panning craziness). And on the right side I have my loop-grabber (and a little texture plugin called the Driftmaker). I can throw other things in there too. S4Mixer_1 is kind of the hub that compiles everything and I can tweak the mix pretty effectively from there.

[ElectricaNada]

Embed your album link, j. I’ve heard it; it’s a knockout.