#25

I like how at times it sounded like a large iron pipe rolling on concrete in a large reverberating space.

3 Likes
#26

I think the annual direction to “Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it” is one of the more challenging Disquiet projects.

The high-pitched transients are difficult to manipulate and it’s usually the hottest day of the year here in the Antipodes.

I’ve made a few percussive rhythms over the years and increasingly looked for ways to make the ice cubes more harmonically interesting.

For a while I wasn’t sure how to approach this assignment in 2020.

I had the drums that I’d recorded last year, when it was cooler — which is why I’m wearing a vest.

On Saturday, when the temperature climbed to a new January record of 46C in Leeton, I got the idea to use the glasses to outline a progression.

So I found snippets that seemed to suggest a key, then added a transient shaping effect to try and soften them, as well as tape-style delay and Eos reverb.

On Sunday I jammed with the bass until I found the notes that seemed to give shape.

Since it was a bit cooler, I put the shirt on that I’d been wearing when I recorded the drums.

I picked a fretless bass because the glasses weren’t really in tune, but afterwards I added pitch-correction to the samples to be sure they were going to mix nicely.

Finally, I switched between drum recordings to give more variety to the song.

You can hear the kick drum comes in after a couple of bars, which was recorded using a bass speaker in front of the kit and then pitched down an octave for a fat thump.

Later on you can hear the drums shift, losing treble as I switched to the audio recorded through the Rode VideoMic on the camera.

Elsewhere the drums were recorded through a Rode NT-4 stereo mic.

That mic was also used to record the ice in the glasses back in 2017, which you can hear in the recordings shared in Marc’s message.

This is the eighth time I’ve made something for the Junto using the sound of ice in a glass.

I almost skipped it this year but am grateful for the distraction from the bushfires.

7 Likes
#27

happy new year everyone

i recorded ice cubes rattling in a coffee mug. then, in ableton, i used the samples to create a drum kit, then ran a beat through various dummy clips which were turning a vocoder and a delay on/off at different rates. another track was used to bring in a corpus plug-in, and a final track introduces a sea-sick delay.

8 Likes
#28

disquiet0418
freeze nine
• Key: E minor BPM: 120 Time signature: 4/4 DAW: Reaper
• Instruments: N/A
• Plug-ins:
• Recorded myself shaking 2 ice cubes inside a 1974 Kentucky Derby commemorative glass
• Recorded into Reaper on an audio track for 1:48 seconds
• Copied this source audio on to 8 other tracks for a total of 9 tracks. One for each year of the Disquiet Junto.
• I set the length of the project at 4: 33 seconds as a tribute to John Cage
• Set the end of the 9th track at 4:33 seconds
• The whole project is 273 seconds long divided by 9 = 30.33…… seconds for each track
• So I ended each track 30 to 31 seconds before the track before the one above it
• The very first track I looped for 4:33 seconds
• Tracks were panned center, left, right, center, left, right, center, left, right
• Did a search for New Years eve on Freesound and used some of those sound on the 10th track
• All were Creative Commons 0

3 Likes
#29

Super-fun ! My first time doing this. Ice cubes with added noise through various filters. And a little melody from a wonky synth.

4 Likes
#30

Another first time participant in the Disquiet Junto here. Really enjoyed working on this and looking forward to future assignments. I’ve found I’ve still got to learn about these processes (even simple things like structuring a track) as I’m still setting out on this journey.

As for this submission - pretty simple, I just recorded some samples of ice into glass on my phone, then transferred these across to two modules in my eurorack system that support sample playback, and took it from there, with some added frosty chords.

4 Likes
#31

Ice is one of my first memories of 2020. I had been at a new years eve party at a friends house, where earlier in the evening a girl had taken an unfortunate tumble and hurt her wrist. At around sunrise we were all still awake and she had her wrist in a DIY splint made with a drumstick and bandana which was resting in her lap on top of a big bag of ice.
So this project is dedicated to her and her fractured wrist…

Last years Ice Breaker was the first ever disquiet I did and for this year I decided to reuse the same samples as last time and work in the exact same way (all in a Digitakt). Every sound you hear here is ice related. No other accompanying sounds.
Its basically just a 1 bar phrase repeated endlessly (endless = 3 minutes 38 seconds) where I introduce different tracks slowly and let them interact for a while. And when I got bored of that I started messing with the ctrl all functionality of the Digitakt to really mess around with things. Then I stopped. Then I uploaded. Then I typed this.

4 Likes
#32

First Junto for a long time. something of a NY resolution maybe… Anyway there was no ice left in the freezer tonight so I used some of Jason’s nice recording. Played it live with a Max/MSP patch that loops / pitchshifts and brassages the sound. It also grabs fragments of the input and puts them into a convolution reverb, so the sounds get convolved with fragments of themselves. By adding feedback you can get beautiful drones or - more often - a glade of glitches as at the end here. No post-processing except cutting a boring bit out of the middle. Happy New Year to all, x GUS

4 Likes
#33

I’m not sure how I feel about how this turned out, but as I feel like I’ve mentioned before I know I have a tendency to get picky and needlessly stressed with music projects and I feel that’s extremely against the spirit of why I like doing these tasks. So, I figured I’d just let it go. Besides after being busy for a while I was excited to get back to doing one of these and I thought the tribute to the very first was a great jumping back point.

This is all made from a single recording. My ice cube was in a brandy snifter, because I wanted to swirl it around the glass. However, that only really came in use with the background texture, which is made up of a granulized version of that. It was a good excuse to try some of these new plugins that were given out as holiday gifts. The blast made with a buffer freeze and pitch shifter got most of its power from that new Waves distortion that was given away and the other two parts are using that new NI reverb Raum.

A lot of this was done by the seat of my pants, a short splice of the ice cube dropping into the glass became a pitched melody, but I ended up not liking it, so I improvised a little thing as the texture played. I like the sounds and textures I created with the sample, but I’m not sure about the actual use of them. Shrug. Happy to be back to having some time for the Junto nonetheless.

4 Likes
#34

Great atmosphere. Well-manipulated too, I didn’t really recognise the sounds!

1 Like
#35

All sounds, including drums and percussion, created from a recording of two ice cubes rattling in a glass. Granulation courtesy of Quanta and Iris 2.

1 Like
#36

https://soundcloud.com/ohm-research/my3-disquiet0418

1 Like
#37

Groovy! I shouldn’t be surprised, as your stuff is often good for toe-tapping.

1 Like
#38

Using the provided sounds made for a renewal of inspiration…

4 Likes
#39

I believe this is the sixth year I have taken on this assignment - and for me this adds an extra level of effort to go in a at least somewhat new direction. Many of you know I often have detailed structures in mind in these pieces - but not here, this time. I tried to create this as intuitively as is possible using the tools as I do. I built up the sound script starting at the beginning, working forward, then going back and modifying by ear to get things to work. The different sections interrupt and tumble over each other. All are constructed from 3 short recordings of ice dropped into three different glasses. I made use of narrow IIR filters to get the clear, pitched ringing sounds. All sounds move around within a small virtual room, which gives the piece its somewhat claustrophobic
feel. Everything was processed and mixed using the RTcmix software toolkit.

4 Likes
#40

I completely forgot about this until a couple of hours ago so it’s a little rushed. Ignoring that, every sound is from a 10 second clip of ice being shaken in a glass. All sample recording, processing and arrangement was done on an MPC (using an SM58 Beta). The only effects were a delay and reverb (both Boss 500 series). The samples were made into 5 instruments: a bass, a wooshing pad, some percussion, a harpsichordish sound, and a lead. The lead is using a very short loop which I would ordinarily not do (feels a bit like cheating) but I was rushing.

My typical process is relatively fast but ordinarily synth based so the sample processing slowed me down quite a bit. Despite that, I did make something fairly structured that might pass for a composed track. There isn’t anything hugely noteworthy about the approach I took beyond trying to turn the samples into instruments then writing and performing as I might on some synths.

Beyond the general process I was also trying a new approach to recording which proved unsuccessful for two reasons. First of all I was listening on different speakers so the mix is poor, secondly I was recording a different signal path on a different device and ended up clipping but didn’t have time to redo.

In any case, the process was fun; I’ll try and put in a better effort next week!

3 Likes
#41

Happy New Year!

So I took recordings that were provided in a newsletter and tried to make a simple track with just them not using any external samples or instruments. I’m happy that I’ve made it having only few hours during the flight to relatives. Made in GR-16 and later mixed down in Cubasis

5 Likes
#42

I really like the way the sample has been used musically yet remained musical. I had something like this in mind for mine, but I ended up leaving it too late and had to rush. In any case, this is really nice work.

1 Like
#43

I’m really impressed with how tonal you kept this while retaining the timbre and character of ice. I kept hoping some more elements would join the ice sounds. I’d very much like to see this worked into a more extended track.

2 Likes
#44

i’ve only missed one of these - i was computerless for a few months - & i do quite delight in this tradition; thanks Marc, as ever.

I took the opportunity to listen back to my previous submissions - they have been in something like conversation i think; i have tried to make each new one a kind of commentary on the previous years… After listening to last year’s reletively un-filtered, though aggressively edited piece, i got to thinking that i should make something totally anonymised/transformed, ideally unrecognisible. I started in a similar place and made a thing i like quite a lot - a spliced, chaotic, busy thing. I then took tiny sections of that and put 'em through multiple granular delays, trying to keep the sound * clean * - unfiltered/effected, kept at actual pitch - even as it’s blurred, abstracted. I then layered these sections up into this protracted drone thing; i kind of fear the intermediate steps are * better *, but, well, it’s nine o’clock on Monday night & i’ve got a deadline to hit, y’know?

Thanks again Marc - these projects have been a delight these past nine years. ^______^

2 Likes