Disquiet Junto Project 0329: Extended Version

samarobryn · 2018-04-20T12:33:02.161Z

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 · 2018-04-20T16:49:30.644Z

The playlist is now rolling:

Autogeneric · 2018-04-20T19:36:13.147Z

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 · 2018-04-20T19:37:23.809Z

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 · 2018-04-20T20:50:43.551Z

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 · 2018-04-20T23:46:48.163Z

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 · 2018-04-21T00:03:01.373Z

Two kinds of using instruments in strange ways.

I used (the Abelton instrument) Operator as a drum, mostly by changing the envelope of the oscillators.
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 · 2018-04-21T01:18:04.984Z

“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 · 2018-04-21T02:09:13.985Z

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 · 2018-04-21T02:52:48.783Z

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 · 2018-04-21T03:55:59.526Z

wow
i am swimming in this

hightowersdeepwells · 2018-04-21T10:34:43.575Z

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 · 2018-04-21T12:34:51.429Z

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

morgulbee · 2018-04-21T17:00:17.976Z

The idea of a prepared instrument intrigued me. I thought about simple things I could do with my trumpet, and decided to turn it into a “prepared trumpet”.

All the sounds in this recording were made with my trumpet.

For the percussion sounds, I used a plastic chopstick to tap lightly on various parts of the trumpet.

For the pitched sounds, I built a device I stuck into the bell end of the trumpet that let me play notes through a metal tube submerged in a glass of water.

I call this an etude because it’s a piece for a single instrument. However, it would be somewhat challenging to perform this etude live without using unconventional performance techniques.

You can view photos of my prepared trumpet along with further description of the technique at my blog: composed-bits.org/2018/04/etude-in…repared-trumpet/

halF_unusuaL · 2018-04-21T20:45:08.373Z

Hi All,

Using a bass plectrum to pluck strings on the other side of the bridge and the nut on a jazz bass …

Have a good week!

h u

krakenkraft · 2018-04-22T11:21:04.579Z

Inspired by acoustic wooden experimental instruments on youtube I built my own: It mainly consist of an old metal box, to which I added parts from a cheap “thunder drum” and a set of piezo contact microphones. This gives the spiral of the thunder drum a massive body to resonate.

I also disassembled a Hohner Blues Harp and screwed the metal reeds contained in the mouth organ to the metal box. So, for disquiet0329 this is mainly a “extended harmonica” with some additional preparations.

I used different takes for recording the internal spiral as bass rhythm, the external spiral for some vague drone thunder, some manual scratching and the metal reeds, which are plucked like the teeth inside a music box, for two melodic parts. All sounds are from the The Music Box Of Erika Zann, with the exception of the recorded voice phenomenon – this must be Erikas ghost voice… Mixed in Reaper with a lot of VSTs to filter the immense noise from the mics and to get some ambience.

Obviously I’m a real bad do-it-yourselfer (gaffer tape etc.). And the metal reeds from the harmonica were to thin to pluck, so they broke after a while (you can hear one of the reeds breaking and falling into the box at around 2:28), it was not the only one …

Should there ever be a Disquiet Junto project on the topic of “A musical instrument that gets completely used up by playing it” I’m gonna get The Music Box Of Erika Zann off the shelf again.

krakenkraft · 2018-04-22T11:32:18.048Z

This really makes my day

widdly · 2018-04-22T12:26:03.899Z

I decided to explore the guitar and make a conventional pop song. My thinking was that lathering the guitar in effects was a bit of a cop out so I only used a little bit of compression and reverb. Only one guitar was used so that the timbres used were derived from technique rather than equipment choice.

The melody made use of two handed tapping, a technique that has been out of vogue since the cock rock bands of the 80’s. The chords are played using touch harmonics, which makes them sound a bit like a synth pad. The bass was played with a kind of thumb slapping style similar to funk bass players. The percussion parts were made with palm muted notes as well as banging and brushing the strings. I added a little slide glissando part too. I would have liked to work in some whammy bar parts but unfortunately I didn’t have a suitable equipped guitar on hand.

This project reminded me of how 1980’s guitar magazines that had a little notation guide that showed how they notated all the possible guitar techniques.

I wish I had a bit more time. I feel like the track could do with a bit more polish and I think I could squeeze in some more techniques.

morgulbee · 2018-04-22T14:51:57.728Z

Awesome! Before I settled on trumpet, I was wondering what could be done with a harmonica.

muzikermammoth · 2018-04-22T16:06:48.141Z

I’ve been exploring the expansiveness of ambisonic mixing and using soundstaging as an extension to the musical piece itself. Together with the removal of pitching of any melodic phrasing, the only discernible quality that informs the piece of it’s musicality is the use of rhythmic circularity, which in this instance, is the playing off of various euclidean sequences against each other. Parts of the work were livecoded together in tidalcycles and recorded into ardour. everything is synthesized in supercollider and pure data was used as the environment for higher order ambisonic encoding and decoding into binaural stereo.