#3

This is some music I wrote last night for a poetry class. I really didn’t know how to make music involving tinsel. I looked up the etymology of “tinsel”: late Middle English (denoting fabric either interwoven with metallic thread or spangled). I decided anything metallic would have to do. So, in Ableton Live, I found an audio effect called “Loop Metal Needle” in the “Corpus” group and added it to the melody track.

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#4

“antepenultimate”, “preantepenultimate”, “propreantepenultimate”, “packedapeckofpickledpeppepropreantepenultimate”, source

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#5

Hey All, I have never played an instrument with tinsel strings so I was unsure of tinsel’s tonal qualities. Tinsel did give the the idea of magnetic tape. I used some tape delay fx and slowed a song way down and mixed in some other percussion. I even added some of me playing at being a little drummer boy. Hope all have a happy holiday season.

Peace, Hugh

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#6

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#7

I’m sure @ikjoyce woudn’t mind me saying that he did an excellent album called Tinel a few years ago…

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#8

https://soundcloud.com/user-507251108/very-strange-disquiet0415

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#9

Thanks Neil! :blush: This will have to stand as my contribution to this one, as I’m in the middle of packing up ready to move house in a few weeks. The plus side is: New studio space in 2020!

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#10

Fighting off a weird virus, high on medications I can’t pronounce, I misread the word tinsel as tinfoil and completely wrote my music around the idea of making a craft with tinfoil. That seemed holiday-related enough to lead me to this improvisation. Fingers, acoustic guitar, one take, single mic, minimal post-processing, yayaya. I didn’t realize til posting now how I’d missed the plot of this prompt. If you like sad songs inspired by tinfoil tiaras and crowns, enjoy. Also, I’ll toss in a favorite lyric that led me to buy a bunch of opera cds back when I was a teen: I wore it like a badge of teenage film stars, hash bars, cherry mash and tinfoil tiaras. Dreaming of Maria Callas, whoever she is.

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#11

my first thought about metal was my vibraphone
that a friend’s mum gave me 20+yrs ago
“you’re a musician right - Ive got an old instrument you can have if you like it”
it’s italian and gorgeous

so I improvised a 3 minute piece
split it into 4
then layered it
and tweaked it
it’s a christmas miracle

sityphoxx

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#12

And the playlist is rolling:

#13

As I was composing this track I received sad news. Then I noticed that the final element I had layered in, on kind of a whim, sounded like the end of Eliot’s The Waste Land, whispered, through metal (a contact-mic’d fence). This seemed appropriate for both the turning of the year, and of a life. peace <3

A requiem in tinsel. Shantih shantih shantih

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#14

I used this stereo bell array cascade thing I cooked up to do an ambient shard of “Jingle Bells.” Sparkly! Code is here:

github.com/charliekramer/ChucK…0echo%20cascades.ck

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#15

I took this one literally. I sampled rustled tinsel for the percussion accompaniment to a badly played version of “O Tannenbaum” (sorry to any jazz musicians here) and then got all heavy at the end (sorry to any metal musicians here).

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#16

Conductor of christmas feeling but not of electricity. That was what I was exploring first. Then I used a contact mic and tinsel. Contact mic and envelope follower. The envelope open up a VCA. This is my Tinsel Sound.

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#17

Tinsel is made by sliding large sheets of polyvinyl chloride plastic into a large cutting machine. The film is sliced into long, thin strips before being fed into a threading contraption that spins alongside a galvanized wire lead. The process is complete when the entire ribbon is twisted by centrifugal force and lifted out by hand, ready to be cut and packaged.

Suss Müsik used a similar process for this week’s Disquiet Junto. Guitar loops of different sonic textures were sliced into loops and fed along a Moog arpeggiator “lead.” These slices were then twisted around each other and played conventionally, increasing the reverb from dry to wet. About 90% of the work was in the preparation; the final result was recorded quickly to 8-track.

The piece is titled Tinsellator. The image is a Polaroid photograph of tinsel taken with a cheap Holga camera.

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#18

@SussMusik fabulous process, and a really beautiful piece of music… I wish it were longer!!

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#19

VCV Rack, Tides x2, Befaco Rampage x2, BOGaudio MIX8, Chronoblob, Clouds, Feline, NYSTHI master recorder, Orca’s Heart

Beautiful Tinsel and ornaments were hung from the freshly cut tree. Then George, Lisa, and there two children Darren and Sylvia went off on there holiday vacation to Cancun. The neighbor Jeffrey was supposed to take care of the family dogs and water there freshly cut tree. Jeffrey forgot, the tree got dry, and the tinsel began to burn. The dogs made it out okay though.

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#20

Thank you for that kind remark! :slight_smile:

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#21

I wanted something irritatingly plastic and repetitively layered that could be looped, so my attention turned to my latest keyboard – which cost $3 at my local opportunity shop.

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#22

This week, it was suggested we explore the sonic properties of tinsel.

Funnily, there’s no parts of the holiday music canon which feature tinsel prominently. Had we been asked to think about chestnuts, snow, bells, reindeer, or more recently, you, last or even more recently LA, there might have been a cover in me. But I went to lyrics.com and looked and yup, there’s no tinsel songs.

But there are a lot of lyrics which contain the word tinsel. So I scraped the first and third page of the lyrics.com search for tinsel, extracted just the lines that were lyrics, jammed them together, fed them into the mac speech synthesizer with voice “Fiona” as a tribute to my collaborators with whom we have made Christmas music in a Scottish style, and thought “lets go”. And then I had two false starts. One of them I accidentally re-wrote another song, and another I accidentally wrote something I couldn’t execute and didn’t like.

But third time is a charm and in the end it clicked. Take the turnaround from a favorite Christmas song and record it differently on piano and bass, grab the generated wav file into python and do some silence detection kinda crappily (code all in my GitHub) and use that to generate midi which tracks the turnaround I was going to play, pull that midi into logic and do some modeling with the Surge FM and Vocoder stuff, and voila, music emerges.

This week’s bit is called “Patience My Tinsel Angel (disquiet0415)”. I hope you enjoy it and have a wonderful holiday!

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