Disquiet Junto Project 0395: Acoustic Expanse

Disquiet Junto
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Major thanks to @bassling for having proposed this, and made the source recordings.

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Disquiet Junto Project 0395: Acoustic Expanse
The Assignment: Make music with (samples of) the biggest guitar in the southern hemisphere.

This project was proposed by Jason Richarson. There’s just one step:

Step 1: The biggest guitar in the southern hemisphere is in Narrandera, Australia. Junto member Jason Richardson recorded a wide range of samples of the guitar and made them available under a Creative Commons license. Now it’s time for you to play this guitar. Get the samples at big-guitar.com/download.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0395” (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 “disquiet0395” (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: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0395-acoustic-expanse/

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

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, July 29, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, July 25, 2019.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0395” 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: Consider setting your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 395th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Acoustic Expanse / The Assignment: Make music with (samples of) the biggest guitar in the southern hemisphere — at:

https://disquiet.com/0395/

Thanks to Jason Richardson for having proposed this project.

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-0395-acoustic-expanse/

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

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Today I’m like the parent who knows exactly what’s under the Christmas tree :slight_smile:

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And the project is now live.

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Here’s mine! I used the Ableton project, which unfortunately had a few glitches, but I sorted it out pretty quickly. Played a few notes and recorded some loops, which I then passed through various effects (Izotope Trash features heavily). Then I played those loops live, tweaking volumes and filters.

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all iOS construction

#bigguitar individual samples
5 tracks in AUM
4 with Enzo looper inserts
1 with FAC envolver insert controlling some parameters in the other ones (Enzo)
live mix to an AUM mixbus track, with FAC máxima insert

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noisy one this.
i ran 6 samples through protoplasm and guitar fx in podfarm
played around recorded the midi, then had some randomization on the notes on one of the tracks, and slowed it down

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Hello everyone, I hope you are all well. I’m in England for a month, without my gear, so I’ll be exploring Audacity during the next few Junto projects. Major thanks to @bassling for all his hard work sampling BIG GUITAR. I used two samples:

S1F6-mic 3.wav
S6F22-mic 3.wav

and pushed them multiple times and in multiple orders through various delay, reverb, pitch and paul-stretch settings. Played with volume and panning and compression before discovering a new trick right near the end - using “sliding stretch” at different rates in the left and right channels. The intro is from my android phone recording of a thunderstorm that rolled over us on the very evening that this project was announced.

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The inspiration for this piece comes from my childhood/teenage observation of my dad’s guitars hanging in the living room and how human voices, impulse-like sounds and other musical instruments would - depending on their loudness and/or proximity - ocassionally cause these stationary instruments to resonate sympathetically and sound.

I started by selecting a few nice resonant tones from the Narrandera big guitar. Looping these in Ableton so that they drifted in and out of phase with each other, I removed the attacks from each of the notes to create a continous drone that pulsated periodically. I sent the output from Ableton - via a 20w amp - to a Digitech exciter (i.e. transducer) which I placed on the soundboard ‘sweet spot’ of one of my dad’s old guitars. This guitar has been in my possession for over 20 years - a 1976 Tama acoustic.

The surface of the Tama in effect becomes a resonater for the Narrandera guitar tones as they are ‘transplanted’ into the acoustic body of the Tama. Throughout the recording I occasionally strum the strings of the Tama - slack tuned and in approximate harmony with the Narrandera guitar tones. I also physically move the transducer from the Tama’s sweet spot to other areas of the soundboard surface; which in effect, articulate different resonant qualities of the Narrandera guitar tones, and also makes audible some of the discrete artefacts of the Narrandera recordings.

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what a beautiful story and accompanying recording process… fantastic work!!

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Thank you! Yes, it’s one of those enduring early memories/observations, which eventually dovetailed with the later discovery of those sound/acoustic poets such as Alvin Lucier and others. :slight_smile:

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Ah, this is fantastic! Love those deep resonances and a wonderful spatial impressions too!

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cool sounds :slight_smile:

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Fantastic concept!

You might want to do a search on here for Garlands or Vulneraries to hear something else vaguely related exploring the body of a guitar as resonator. It’s also father and son duets, so there’s some background layer there…

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All sound is but textures to form a pallet

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https://soundcloud.com/matthewh538/acoustic-expanse-disquiet0395

Really great concept this week.

I downloaded the Ableton project and worked solely within that. I duplicated the track a couple of times:

  • Some “chords” which kind of set the rhythm of the track
  • A twangy melody playing over the top
  • A simpler version of the melody with some auto filter plugins applied
  • A long sustained single C note with a bit of frequency shifted echo applied towards the end

Reverb, delay, frequency echo and filter return tracks

There is what sounds like a bum note at some point. I couldn’t quite figure out where it was coming from since all of the tracks are built up of very simple (4 bar!) loops. I think it must be something on one of the effects tracks because it only happens when I listen straight through rather than if I go directly to the timestamp where the problem happens. In the end I decided to leave it in because its kind of unexpected so the brain suddenly becomes alert again and it gives it a more natural feel.

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lovely drone, i really like this

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The biggest guitar in the southern hemisphere is in Narrandera, Australia… also some of the biggest waves can be found in Australia. So I had to do surf music with the samples. I just took the individual samples and arranged them into a surf riff based on based on string and fret numbers. Add drums and reverb. It came out really strange :slight_smile:

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The playlist is now rolling:

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Thanks Marc for the prompt, and thanks @bassling for the great samples!

I downloaded the individual samples from big-guitar.com/download, dropped a couple into Ableton Live Simpler along with a percussion loop, then set up my Casio MIDI guitar to play the samples. “S1F12-mic3” comes in first, on the bass-- eerily reminiscent of a DX-7 FM bass, with a nice percussive edge. “S1F4-mic3” then comes in on the rhythm, sounding a bit like a subdued Hammond B-3. Last comes another copy of “S1F4-mic3” on the solo. I added a bit of chorus and reverb to make it stand out a little.

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I used the first three “BENDS-mic…”-WAVs, because they contained voices and I liked them. I granulated these sounds with different tools and joined the results of 10 different sessions together again. I added some very subtile live sequencing accompaniment just to connect me to the guitar players.

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