Disquiet Junto Project 0329: Extended Version

[disquiet]

Disquiet Junto Project 0329: Extended Version
Make a piece of music in which you expand the functionality of an instrument — and document your technique.

Step 1: This week’s project is about unintended techniques applied to musical instruments. You can come up with a new idea, but better still to use the opportunity to document a technique you have employed in the past.

Step 2: Think about concepts like “expanded cinema” and “prepared instruments.” Think about how an instrument can be used to do things it wasn’t necessarily designed to do.

Step 3: Record a track employing a technique that arose from your thinking in Steps 1 and 2.

Step 4: When posting the track, be sure to document your technique so that others might try it.

Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0329” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0329” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 4: Please consider posting your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co.

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Other Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, April 23, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, April 19, 2018.

Length: The length is up to you. Around three minutes seems about right.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0329” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 329th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Extended Version / Make a piece of music in which you expand the functionality of an instrument — and document your technique) at:

https://disquiet.com/0329/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0329-extended-version/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is by David Cosand, used via Flickr and a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/9mUv8P

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

[disquiet]

The project is now live. Tracks are due by this Monday, April 23, at 11:59pm.

[logarytmics]

https://soundcloud.com/user-208393504/salome-disquiet0329

[TotalEnergy]

Since my instrument is a midi keyboard and Logic, I approached this Project by challenging myself to attempt to use instrumental voices in unusual ways. Voice samples became rhythms; synth textures became the lead.

After, I thought of one of my favorite movies, A Face in the Crowd, starring Andy Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes, a charismatic and despicable drifter/entertainer who climbs to the heights of power but eventually exposes himself as a lout (on live TV). The audio to that dramatic scene was added, and my Lonesome Rhodes was born.

xo and thanks

[DeDe]

The challenge was to use an instrument in an “unnatural” way.
I created this pure cymbal-soundscape, I used glimpses of this in the past to add some spark to my ambient passages, but this is a full track using only cymbals as a sound source.

Recorded some cymbals, then used many techniques, familiar to me and my workflow, to make an abstract arrhythmic soundscape out of it:
-paulstrech
-pitch-shift and notably pitch-bend(sound forge)
-infinite reverbs with wah-wah pedal
-Pitched delays

[samarobryn]

Beautiful and fascinating!

[euclidian]

piano in vcvrack

[samarobryn]

Last year, I made a tin shaker for an exhibition on DIY instruments - I filled an old tea tin with glass stones, and placed three contact mics inside. The sound it made when just clean was interesting, with its tinkling resonances…then I added some effects and it became this otherworldly beast. I called it the Tin Can From Hell after this exchange with one of the assistants at the gallery:

Her: Can you make that sound nicer?
Me: No.

After the exhibition, I put it on my shelf and it sat for a while - until now, when I was invited to play at a local music festival [next week!] alongside amazing sound artist [and dear friend] Furchick. In anticipation, here is an improvised moment with the Tin Can From Hell.

Amplifier: Marshall DSL-401

Effects:

Boss DD-3 delay pedal
Boss PS-1 pitch shifter
Boss RT-20 rotary ensemble

[disquiet]

The playlist is now rolling:

[Autogeneric]

Here’s mine. This was somewhat of a challenge. I used:

• Mannequin’s Cold Mac Eurorack module - whilst this isn’t intended to create sound there are ways to do this.
• A contact mike on various pieces of electronic music equipment: a modular synth, a monome grid, and a MacBook Pro.
• Recordings of a ukulele, a marimba, and an acoustic guitar, variously banged and scraped in non-conventional ways.

[sevenism]

got some double bass samples in protoplasm had them 6 octaves higher, lots of fast lfos and shaping, lots of reverb in ambience, and high feedback delays in ddly. sounded like a strings/horn section

then in iris 2 had more double bass samples through resonators and high pitched percussive filters for strange pipe/flutelike rhythms

then to really expand the instrument i reduced the volume by 200db. i was interested to see if anything would be preserved.

[Ethan_Hein]

https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/extended-technique-disquiet0329

I drew on samples of extended violin technique by Patti Kilroy (http://www.pattikilroy.com/) and extended upright bass technique by Pat Swoboda (http://patswoboda.com/). The techniques include Bartok pizzicato, col legno, harmonics, and drumming on the body of the bass. I extended these extensions by processing the samples in Ableton with extreme timestretching, beat repeat, and pitch shifting (there is no arco bass in here, it’s all pitched-down violin.) There’s also a 909 drum machine and a sample of Max Roach playing toms, along with an audio-to-MIDI version of same playing AfroDJMac’s Deep Wood kit (http://www.afrodjmac.com/blog/2017/10/24/…on-live-pack-161).

[Justmat]

The prompt this week made me think about one of the first really impactful extended techniques that I remember hearing/experiencing. Though I can’t remember the name of the song, I know it was Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and that they were bowing cymbals to make a drone. I don’t have any cymbals so, I attempted to create something similar with my synth instead.

Extended description;

• The cymbal/wash is Plaits -> Rings -> ER-301.
• The clickity clackity part is Mangroves/ Noise -> 3 Sisters > Natural Gate.
• Kick drum is Just Friends -> Natural Gate. All sequencing by Ansible.

[Don_Stanley]

Two kinds of using instruments in strange ways.

1. I used (the Abelton instrument) Operator as a drum, mostly by changing the envelope of the oscillators.

2. I use (the Abelton instrument) Sampler is an unusual way (but I guess for some maybe this is standard?). I took the first four bar piano loop and broke it into 4 pieces. I recorded each piece and then put those into sampler. I only allowed a few notes (F3,G3,C4,F4,G4,C5,F5,G5,C6… 9 notes) to be played. So that gave an instrument with 36 notes (4 pieces x 9 notes= 36). Then composed a piece with those notes.

[SussMusik]

“Wood turns electric,” wrote the late Grant McLennan, co-leader of the under-appreciated Go-Betweens. McLennan at first wanted to write and direct movies. In fact, it was a shared attraction to cinema that caused him and Robert Forster to meet and form one of Australia’s best-loved bands.

A semi-hollow body guitar offers a number of ways to create sound, the perfect meld of wood and electricity. It can be strummed or picked conventionally. It can be turned over and played like a percussion instrument. The strings are thick enough to make a satisfying scrape with a piece of metal, and the mere touch of an e-bow results in a wonderfully dissonant effect. All of this is possible even before plugging it in.

For this weird (and probably unlistenable) piece, Suss Müsik explored the hidden nuances of the semi-hollow body guitar. Each part was recorded live to 8-track through a Boss RV-3 pedal and then mixed dry, minus a bit of EQ and compression to fatten the sound a bit. No other instruments were used or abused.

Here’s how the sausage was made:

The opening drones were created by raising the strings with an aluminum tube and lightly tapping them with rubber mallets. The extended buzz-drones were made by loosening the strings while moving an e-bow up and down the guitar body. (Note: the effect is better with double-coil pickups, perhaps because there is more electromagnetic surface area).

That nonsense out of the way, the instrument was plugged into a Vox amp and randomly strummed through a Red Panda Tensor pedal. It’s at this point Suss Müsik remembered that the guitar had yet to be properly tuned, so attention was placed on the lowest string while randomly twisting the peg in both directions.

The percussive bits came about by slapping and pounding the back of the instrument. Those who have studied African drumming might recognize the rhythmic pattern as a warm-up exercise from the Babtunde Olatunji songbook.

The piece is titled Ifamọra, the Yoruba word meaning “attraction.” Yoruba is an official language spoken in the southwestern part of Nigeria.

[ninjadru]

I have always loved a nice 303ish bassline. I decided to return to a process I have used in the past. I wrote an aciiiiiid bassline with a nice two note ARP. I recorded it really fast 170 BPM. Then I severely stretched the short loop with paulstretch. I layered a couple of different versions with minimal edits and added effects. The result is a nice drone that in no way resembles the bassline I started with. The length is a little over indulgent but hey we are trying to extend…

[headlessacrobat]

I wanted to play with extended guitar for this one. I’ve always enjoyed feedback and resonance with the guitar and I wanted to find a new way to let the guitar “play itself.” So, I set up a box fan directly in front of the guitar which was plugged into a mic’d up amp a few feet away. This bit is from the last few minutes of about 12 minutes of recording. The fan very, very slowly got the guitar resonating (tuned to an open chord). There’s a lot of noise as the amp gain was turned way up to amplify the relatively weak string vibration, but it was a cool experiment to play around with for an evening.

[krzyzis]

wow
i am swimming in this

[hightowersdeepwells]

I’m really starting to find the Junto something I look forward to each week, so I’m very pleased to participate again & have been hugely enjoying the past submissions of others.

This week’s piece involved the use of a bowed Bass VI - I have never tried bowing this particular instrument before & the shape of it doesn’t really lend itself to using it in this way. However, bowing it on the fretboard itself, around the 10th fret eventually achieved results.

The other elements are a treated electric guitar, which I played with a paintbrush & then processed both using Logic’s “Chroma” reverb & a Mutable Instruments Clouds.

As with the other weeks I have participated, I’ve held off on listening to the other submissions until I finished my own. I’m now looking forward to hearing others.

[Noimspartacus]

I wanted to abuse my TR-8 for this, in the past I’ve used the built in delays and maxed out bpms to create noisy drones and filter sweeps.
I also employed one of my go to tools, Numerology, to generate an evolving drum track but instead of routing it to a drum machine I fed it into Sculpture synth and tweaked the settings. Headphones recommended if you want to disappear into a trance hole