I never work this way, so this was a new adventure for me with routing and dummy clips in Ableton Live.
I started with a 10-second sample, a recording of evening insect-life in Delaware
Then, because I knew I would be repeating fx “processes,” I made a new audio channel and routed the audio from the track for samples to this second audio track. On this second audio track, I came up with an effects chain I liked and changed some of the parameters (including an EQ sweep and a tweaking of Ableton’s Beat Repeat glitchifying plug-in). I drew all of these onto a dummy clip that was the same length as the audio samples, which I thought might be useful if I want to re-order things or change the length of anything (both of which happened!)
Here’s a sample of the routing, dummy clip, and envelopes:
I made the fx chain to launch a burst of delay when the starting volume of a sample was above a certain threshold, and used the Resonator plug-in to add some tonal content when the sample crossed a certain threshold.
The instructions said to make the samples unrelated, so I dove into my folder of unlabeled, unsorted samples. I ended up with:
- Evening bugs in DE
- A piano
- A squeaky ceiling fan
- A dripping sink
- A low battery warning from a fire alarm
- A soundcard malfunction that I recorded
- Firestation sirens from Delaware
- A VCV Rack software modular synth patch
- Morning bugs from Delaware
Initially, every sample was 10 seconds like, but as I worked with it, some sounds wanted to linger a bit longer, so I used more of them (repeating the processing/filter, though). This gave me something a little over 3 minutes, which worked well.
This piece is a loose palindrome (a categorical palindrome?). The first and last samples are insects, the second and second to last samples are pitches, and in the middle (roughly at the point of symmetry) are percussive found-sounds.
The quick sequencing of sounds reminded of a more relaxed version of John Cage’s Williams Mix, so I named this one after the capital city of Delaware.
