Hi I’m often late to things.
@encym and I enjoyed collaborating last year (Triermusic – They-call-me-the-backwoods-debussy-disquiet0316), so we revisited our partnership for this year.
I listened to encym’s short guitar improvisation, and heard a motif a few times that grabbed my ear. I figured out the tones and then used that as the basis of my half.
I improvised my way through it, using MIDI so I could go back and edit my performance as need be. I tried to use some unexpected tonal shifts - moving the outer voices by half-steps and not thinking about the chords. I ended up making a few tweaks to my MIDI performance, mostly for timing.
The next, unsuccessful, step was to try to run the MIDI data through a hardware synth, but I had some weird problematic distortion, so I ended up just layering two different Ableton organ presets.
The final step was to mix - finding the right balance was tough (different instruments at recorded at different times in different places). I ended up using Ableton’s Spectrum plug-in to see where in the frequency spectrum the guitar “lived,” and then use EQ on the droney organ to cut out that space. Also, I set the compressor on the organ to be sidechained to the guitar, which worked well. The mix was rushed, but overall I dig it!
